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Comment by jamespwilliams | Hacker News Reader

The word "prion" is actually a contraction of the words "protein" and "infection". (edit: although I agree it's not what one might conventionally think of as an "infection")

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Contraction or portmanteau?

Contraction :

A portmanteau word is similar to a contraction, but contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a single concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau

"Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog" in sentences that accept the accretions, whereas you could swap "prion" for "protein infection".

typo -

    "Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you 
    wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog"

s/b

    "Motel" and "smog" are portmanteaus, because you 
    wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog"

What things are named and what they are don't necessarily coincide. E.g.: native americans are called "indians".

A better etymological example would be that Stonehenge, after which the category “henge” is named, isn’t a henge.

(Aside from actual domain experts in this thread saying it is an infection, that is).

But typically they do, and this is one of that vast majority of cases.

I know, but it's a poor choice of word since it's nothing like viruses or bacteria.

Viruses are nothing like bacteria, so it doesn’t make any sense to restrict the term of “infection” to those two.

It is interesting though that we don't consider things like lead and radiation to be "infections".

Is the difference between an infection and poisoning replication?

I'd say so.

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