WE would like to comment on the recent article with this title by Harris1 in which he reproves our group for an alleged incorrect usage of the term “dislocation”. In none of our papers do we write that the helical form of TMV is “dislocated or contains a dislocation”, but rather that a disk will have to undergo a dislocation to be transformed into a short helical segment. As we have found that it is the disk which is the precursor for the assembly of the helix, it is natural to take the disk as the reference state for the subsequent rearrangements. In this case Dr Harris would presumably concede that our usage is quite normal, although he would prefer to describe the result with his newly-coined term “dispiration”.