From viral loads to herd immunity, the pandemic has forced us to learn phrases we’ve never uttered before. At the same time, what an opportunity it has been to create new words!
While we’ve been masked, vaxxed and socially distanced, a whole new vocabulary has arisen. Did you know, for example, that at 4 p.m. during a public-health lockdown, you can have a quarantini? And what would you have said two years ago if a restaurant asked you to choose among a pick-up, drive-thru or trunk-dump?
I recall when our daily vocabulary began to morph. It was February 2020, and the virus had started its run around the globe. For the first time, a strange and unwieldy phrase was spoken aloud: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2019.
In no time, the term was shortened to SARS-CoV-19. Eventually, we got it down to COVID, or covid, or simply “it.” As in, “Have you had it?” “Yeah, I had it bad.”
By the summer of 2020, the virus had introduced us to a bewildering set of public-health terms: contact-tracing, socialdistancing, flattening the curve.
In our businesses, we had to learn the di.erence between PPE and PPP. (Otherwise, we got confused between protecting our payrolls or our face-holes.) We also found there was such a thing as a non-essential worker. And too many of us learned the di.erence between a furlough and a firing.
Then, finally, the vaccine. Giddy while waiting our turn for the shot, we made up names for our new hairstyles (coronacuts), the new era of online buying (spendemic), and our enemies, right or left (covidiots).
But the vaccine didn’t stop the pandemic — nor the continuing evolution of our language. A fresh new family of terms emerged: There were pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers; there were the vax-hesitant, vaxphobic and vaxoholic. Eventually, people got mad and called each other mask-holes.
I’m ready for it all to be over. And by it, I mean COVID. Take me back to a time when a longhauler referred to a truck driver; when a mask was something we wore only on Halloween; when a super-spreader event was you spinning grass seed on the front lawn. Take me back to “the before times.”
Neil Chethik, aka the Grammar Gourmet, is executive director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (www.carnegiecenterlex.org) and author of “FatherLoss” and “VoiceMale.” The Carnegie Center offers writing classes and seminars for businesses and individuals. Contact Chethik at neil@carnegiecenterlex.org or (859) 254-4175.