New words flower in pandemic. ‘Covidiot’ is just one

From time immemorial, challenging circumstances have given rise to new ways of expressing those challenges. It is not an exception when it comes to a language and people have experienced speedy linguistic changes happening in extraordinary circumstances.

As BBC reports, recently Brexit led to a flowering of new words, including the inevitable ‘Bremain’ and ‘Bregret’, and a repurposing of existing words, such as ‘backstop’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown an unprecedented speed in linguistic change, says Robert Lawson, a sociolinguist at Birmingham City University.

The spread of the virus, its dominance in the media at a time when social media and remote contact are widely used, have led to the rapid change, he says.

Many of the newly popular terms relate to the socially distanced nature of human contact these days, such as ‘virtual happy hour’, ‘covideo party’ and ‘quarantine and chill’.

Many use ‘corona’ as a prefix, whether Polish speakers convert ‘coronavirus’ into a verb or English speakers wonder how ‘coronababies,’ that is the children born or conceived during the pandemic will fare.

And, of course, there are abbreviations, like the ubiquitous ‘WFH’ and the life-saving ‘PPE’, sometimes needing an extra effort to internalise the meaning.

“Initially, I was at a loss while reading an email from my son’s school on what to do if my child is served with SHN. It took me further reading to comprehend that it’s a ‘stay home notice,” said an expat mother living in Singapore.

While the coinage of most of the coronavirus related words and terms like ‘infodemic’ or 'elbow bump’ are still underlined red or found for mundane colloquial use only, some of them managed to make an entry to the dictionaries.

The Oxford English Dictionary has included the word ‘covidiot’ in an unscheduled update. The word meaning “a person who annoys other people by refusing to obey the social distancing rules designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19” is being widely used.

They have made an unscheduled update in March 2020 for words connected with the disease and responses to it, as  the COVID-19 crisis has developed at a rapid pace and some of the words and ideas associated with the crisis are themselves new, writes Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Merriam-Webster has categorised the new words and phrases under naming the disease, important abbreviations, diagnosis and prevention. Some of the new entries include COVID-19, nCOV, index case, index patient, patient zero and contact tracing.

“Although a lot of the words we’re using just now and a lot of the terminology is actually older, a lot of it seems fairly new,” said Fiona McPherson, the senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

What McPherson calls the “nuancing of already existing words” can in some cases be subtly harmful. War metaphors invoking ‘battles’ and ‘front-lines’ are being widely applied to the pandemic, yet thinking only in terms of a wartime emergency can detract from longer-term structural changes needed. This has given rise to the project #ReframeCovid, in which linguists collect crowdsourced examples of alternatives to war language.

A sustained use of war metaphor and abuse of it, and the lack of alternative frames, might generate anxiety and might distort things about the pandemic, fears Inés Olza, a linguist at the University of Navarra in Spain.

As well, terms such as ‘natural disaster’ and ‘perfect storm’ can create the impression that the pandemic was inevitable and unavoidable, neglecting the political, economic and environmental contexts that make certain people more exposed.

Overall, the wealth of linguistic creativity that has not yet entered the dictionary, reflects the role of novel language as a coping mechanism. It just gives people a shared vocabulary that they can all use as a bit of a shorthand. Ultimately if one can name it, they can talk about it; and if they can talk about it, then it can help people cope and get a handle on really difficult situations”.

Writer Karen Russell has found the newly ubiquitous term ‘flatten the curve’ to be reassuring – a reminder of the importance of both individual and collective action, which “alchemises fear into action”.  And both the practice and the terminology of ‘caremongering’, used for instance in Canadian and Indian English, allow for an alternative to scaremongering. 

Beyond earnest words like these, a kind of slightly anxious humour is central to many of the ‘coronacoinages’. The German ‘coronaspeck’, like the English ‘Covid 19’, playfully refers to stress eating amid stay-at-home orders.

The Spanish ‘covidiota’ and ‘coronaburro’ (a play on ‘burro’, the word for donkey) poke fun at the people disregarding public health advice. ‘Doomscrolling’ describes the hypnotic state of endlessly reading grim internet news. Lawson’s favourite, ‘Blursday’, captures the weakening sense of time when so many days bleed into each other.

Ingenuity with vocabulary can also communicate that the current hardships, like many of the coronacoinages, won’t last forever. Olza has taken to referring to the tasks on her ‘corona-agenda’, which can be a subtle way of asking for people’s patience with her temporarily disrupted schedule. Eventually “I will get my usual agenda back,” she is hopeful. 

Until then, bring on the quarantinis, she says.

With details from an article written by Christine Ro for BBC