Comment by sph
4 days ago
In many languages, like Italian which I am a native speaker of, to "spread like a cancer" doesn't have the negative subtext of the English idiom. It just means it spreads, wildly, uncontrollable. In English it gets muddled with the very negative idiom of "being a cancer", i.e. being very bad if not fatal.
I think it's because in English-speaking places (I'll say "The US and some rounding errors" to be explicit) the fact is that for a long time, cancer was a death sentence. This led to anything that is hard to kill as being called cancerous and the avoidance of such things is important (yes, this is where you chuckle and mime smoking a cigarette. There's still a population of the US that believes "smoking causes cancer" is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to push more cancer treatments or some bullshit like that.)
Calling something "cancerous" is to say it was an incurable disease that unless stamped out with some amount of precision will continue to cause rot and decay. Be it correct or not, saying "The cancer that is killing HN" is pointing a finger at a problem and scapegoating all the other problems onto it.
Like how "going viral" is not really the negative connotation that one might expect?