Shit I didn't know until today. The word quarantine comes from the Venetian word quarantena, meaning 40. It referred to how long ships had to be isolated at Dubrovnik (Ragusa) during the Black Death. Earlier, the isolation period had been specified as 30 days, and was referred to as "trentino."
The Ragusa part is new to me. Is that what Croatia was formerly known as?
That's what Dubrovnik was formerly known as. It's a long, complicated story, much of which is speculative. It was originally an Ostragothic town, and likely called Dubron in Gaulish. Tangentially, "dubron" is the Celtic word upon which the name Dover is based.
Anyway, when the Ostragothic kingdom fell, the Byzantines took over. They "officially" named it "Rhaousin," which is latinized as Ragusa. But you know how people are when they live in a place that gets "officially" named. The Ostragothic name stuck around, and when the Slavs started moving in in waves in the 7th century, they associated the old name Dubron with their word for "oakwood," which is "dubrovnik." The names Ragusa and Dubrovnik competed for centuries, until 1808, when the name Dubrovnik was officially adopted.
And THAT was very interesting and educational. How can you not love this website? Dollar for dollar, best site out there.
It's just that I am fascinated by the "real" history of things, especially when it comes to Western Civilization. People get this idea that the Greeks and Romans shit marble, that in Columbus' time people thought the world was flat, that the Celts were a monolithic civilization, and that we are Italian, or Scot, or Irish, or French, or that the Jews and the Arabs are two different peoples, yadda, yadda, yadda.
The realities of history are much more fascinating. Like how Hadrian's wall had engravings of erect penises on the outside at regularly spaced intervals. That the Lupanar brothel in Pompeii featured a pictorial "menu" of their services that clients could point to. That Rome had flushing toilets. That Arabs and Jews have been fighting over the same goddam geography since Old Testament times, and NOT since 1948, or 1967, and the fight is not over the borders we see on our maps. It's a battle over advantageous highlands and lowlands, and the maps are a Western conceit. That the Indus valley civilization produced engineers that made the Romans look like amateurs. That Alexander the Great quickly saw that there was nothing in Afghanistan worth fighting for, and instead went to India. That Cleopatra was not Egyptian, and William Wallace was not Scottish (As much as "Braveheart" entertained me, I hooted all through it. It was a load of horseshit). That a bunch of Vikings established a city called Galatia in the Roman empire, to which St. Paul not only famously wrote one of his epistles, but in it he slyly referenced superstitions related to their Viking ancestry.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. The real history is vastly more entertaining.
But it can be inconvenient at times... 
Tell me. A friend and I have a mutual friend in Kabul. He's heard rumors that he is marked for death by the Taliban because he worked for a human-rights organization that was supported by various European governments and organizations. So my friend is lamenting Mohammed's situation, and asserted that "Biden should never have withdrawn troops during fighting season."
And I'm, like, "Jodi, the US should never have stayed in Afghanistan as long as it did. When you invade a country, you either depopulate and annex it or you get the hell out as soon as possible, and anything short of these extremes is a persistent bloodletting and makes no one happy. People seem to be wondering why we could successfully rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II but can't replicate that success. The answer is simple, between the Germans, the Russians, and the Allies, a large percentage of the population of both Europe and Japan had been eliminated, and we were executing anyone who resisted us. It wasn't a polite war, like what we seem to want to fight now. So...since we don't want to depopulate Afghanistan until it completely loses the will to fight us, we should have gotten out as soon as possible, and told the Taliban then they could have the country back, but assured them that if we found them harboring terrorists again, we'd come back and decimate them as many times as necessary. We could afford to keep killing Talibs as often as necessary, especially if we have zero interest in dumping $100B into the little shithole they make of their country.
The problem for Mohammed is that he's a Pashtun, as is most of the population of Afghanistan, as is most of the Taliban, as was most of the ANDF. The Pashtuns have been running Afghanistan for centuries. To subdue Afghanistan, we'd have to wipe out the Pashtun, and Mohammed wouldn't like that. So, it's his problem to work out with his countrymen."
I don't think she's going to be happy with my answer.
