Contaminate | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

Careful wordsmiths, mind where you step. This word's been contaminated. Yes, contaminate! It's a verb; it means to make something dirty or unsafe. You can think of it as another word for “pollute,” but it can also mean something's been added that shouldn't be there. Like if you have a peanut allergy and there's some peanut butter on a piece of bread, that bread has been contaminated with peanut. It's been compromised. Toss it! Get it into containment.

The derivation for this word is relatively straightforward, I think. So, there's "con," meaning with or together, "Tang" or "tacted," meaning touching. "Tam," right? In "contaminate," is a modified form of "Tang," which is Latin for "to touch." No, Liang, don't touch me! And "ate," which turns other words into verbs, into action words.

So when we talk about contamination, things touching together that shouldn't be touching, I want you to imagine a person who doesn't like it when different foods touch on their plate. Maybe that's you; maybe you're that person and you don't like it when the rice touches the sag paneer, or the mashed potato touches the peas, or the plantains touch the beans. Whatever it may be, now there's bean essence on my plantains. They've been contaminated by beans; they've touched the beans!

This is not a problem for me, noted bean lover David Rystrom. But "contaminate" has a negative meaning; it's not just touching, right? It has this connotation of ruining something or messing it up. Let's come up with some words that use those word parts "con" and "tang" and "tacted." I'll give you 10 seconds; we'll put on some music, and then we'll come back and discuss. Ready? [Music]

Okay, "contact," which is almost exactly the same as "contaminate," but without that negative meaning. This just means to touch, right? You can reach out to someone and contact them by talking to them, or you can literally touch them, shake their hands, get skin-to-skin contact.

"Tangible," which is an adjective meaning touchable or real. What are the tangible effects of a plan? What are its real-world impacts? It's the opposite of abstract; it's another way of saying concrete. A tangible thing is physical, real, and crucially touchable.

"Intact," which means unharmed, literally untouched—not touched. If a box full of ceramic mugs falls from a shelf and none of them break, they are miraculously intact. They were not affected, not touched by the fall.

But let's get back to "contaminate," though, because I want to use it in a few sentences. So follow me to the next screen. We've got the verb form, right? And there's the use where it's polluted or wrong or bad: the oil spill contaminated the waters for miles in every direction. Right? That's that's obvious. The oil is bad for the ocean; the ocean is now contaminated by the oil spill. The oil shouldn't be there, right? That's the straightforward use.

But we can also use it jokingly or in an exaggerated way. Let me demonstrate with the noun form of this word: "contamination." I cannot abide this contamination! Someone has put mint in my lemonade, and I must tell you, wordsmiths, that is, in my mind, a fabulous combination. Most people would not consider that to be a contamination, but there you go; that's "contaminate."

Think of an oil spill. Wow, that's a sentence I hate saying. Okay, let me get out of here before I do any more damage, even to a theoretical ocean. You can learn anything. David out.