disease

Hemophilia (or haemophilia) B, a blood-clotting disorder in which a mutation of the Factor IX gene leads to a deficiency of Factor IX (or Christmas factor), a serine protease of the coagulation system. Both the factor and the disease are named for Stephen Christmas (not the holiday), the first patient discovered to have the condition in 1952. We haven't let our daughter participate in any more physical sports since she was diagnosed with Christmas disease last year.

Prov. If you have a seemingly insurmountable problem, you must do things you ordinarily would not do in order to solve it. Fred: All my employees have been surly and morose for months. How can I improve their morale? Alan: Why not give everyone a raise? Fred: That's a pretty extreme suggestion. Alan: Yes, but desperate diseases must have desperate remedies.

an obsessive need to please people. I, like so many, am afflicted with the disease to please. I am just too nice for my own good.

ill; sick at home. (Can be said about many diseases. *Typically: be ~; Come ~; get~.) Tom isn't here. He's down with a cold. Sally is down with the flu.

the tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I suffer a lot from foot-in-mouth disease. Well, Ralph has foot-in-mouth disease again.

Fig. [for the body] to fight off a disease or illness. I thought I was catching a cold, but I guess I shook it off. I hope I can shake off this flu pretty soon.

Say something foolish, embarrassing, or tactless. For example, Jane put her foot in her mouth when she called him by her first husband's name. This notion is sometimes put as having foot-in-mouth disease, as in He has a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease, always making some tactless remark. The first expression dates from about 1900. The variant, dating from the mid-1900s, is a play on the foot-and-mouth (sometimes called hoof-and-mouth) disease that afflicts cattle, causing eruptions to break out around the mouth and hoofs.