The Sportsman's Corner

As an enthusiastic reader and former English teacher, I like to think I have a solid vocabulary. I can often decipher sesquipedalian terms (long words) from the context clues in the sentences where I find them.

In a recent issue of "National Wildlife" magazine, I encountered two words I had not previously run into. The first of these was "zoonotic." Zoonotic refers to a disease that humans contract that was caused by a pathogen that originally lived in animals. Examples of these include MERS, SARS, Ebola and other deadly Ebola problems, AIDS, Zika, pandemic flu, Lyme disease, rabies, and the n...