The vocabulary of a global pandemic - copy
Writers are word watchers.
After all, they’re the basic tools of our trade. We track their development like carpenters and plumbers monitor improvements in hammers and pipe wrenches.
We're tradesmen.
They don’t call us wordsmiths for nothing.
New words and phrases are coined constantly. Some have incredibly long shelf lives, others the life-expectancy of a spring flower bloom.
I mean, why is cool still, well, cool, and groovy not so much?
Not long ago, I was on a rural drive with my Chinese-born wife. We spotted two yokels perched on a sagging porch.
My wife turned to me. She wanted to use a phrase she’d heard somewhere: country bumpkin.
Merriam-Webster defines bumpkin as an “awkward and unsophisticated rustic.” Its first usage was in 1570, from the Dutch boomken, a diminutive of boom tree. The word assumed its present meaning in 1613.
To my mind, it needed to be retired, or updated.
And my wife did just that.
She pointed out the window.
“Look at those two country pumpkins.”
That day, in my personal vocabulary, one phrase died and another was born.
It was a thing of beauty.
These days, COVID-19 is changing the language of social health.
New words and phrases come at us every day.
Sometimes old ones assume a stark new urgency.
Little of it has been pretty.
How comparatively innocent we were when, just weeks ago, we first heard that word:
Coronavirus.
Most of us knew what a virus was, but this was a new spin on an old microscopic nightmare. The social media jokes were immediate. There were ad nauseam jokes about our favorite Mexican beer.
But this new threat was nothing you drank with a lime.
It was a virus that had jumped from animals to humans, named for its menacing sun-like halo we all saw rendered in cartoon renderings.
Most of us already knew the phrase SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome.)
We knew about disease clusters and outbreaks, incubation and person-to-person disease spread.
But this thing was newer, crazier, more lethal.
We whispered the word coronavirus for, like, a few days.
And then it became the novel coronavirus because, the experts reasoned, it had never been detected in humans before
Then we really got schooled.
Scientists gave it another name, SARS-CoV2, which in public usage quickly morphed to COVID-19 — the respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV2, the new coronavirus.
Confused yet?
Scared yet?
Funny thing was, if you used the old version of the scourge that was good up to, say, ten minutes before, people corrected you.
People adjusted, and quickly.
Nobody wanted to be considered any kind of corona pumpkin.
Soon, there were more technical words and phrases — that might be used at the latest World Health Organization conference.
As we watched the virus spread from China to Europe, we learned the difference between and epidemic and pandemic and how the second was worse than the first.
We learned about self-isolation — from neighbors, even housemates. About using separate towels and sleeping alone and foregoing hugs and kisses.
The came social distancing, avoiding face-to-face contact at the park or grocery store.
That concept was quickly tweaked to physical distancing.
Because while we minded the physical distances between us, we had to remain social.
Newspaper readers were quickly able to distinguish between a quarantine (restricting people exposed to a disease) and a lockdown (a widespread government-imposed version of the former.)
The phrase cruise ship became associated with isolation and death.
We began bandying about phrases like symptomatic and public health crisis like we would last night’s baseball scores.
We were reminded all too quickly how a vaccine — something given to a healthy person to keep them from getting infected — differed from an anti-viral, a medicine given to a person already infected with a virus.
The initial drip of scary new words turned into a flood.
There was the index case — the first documented case of an infectious disease.
And there was patient zero, the moniker for the first person to become sick and community spread, the passing of a contagious disease to individuals in a particular geographic location who have no known contact with other infected individuals.
And, by all means, beware of the super-spreader, who unknowingly transmits a communicable disease to others.
Along with the new words came old ones that were given a new context.
Words like hoarding and selfish and panic-buying.
Now people who never worked in construction or in a hospital knew the phrase N95 respirator.
We paid attention to fatality rates and the sinister-sounding R-naught, or Ro, a virus’s reproductive number, a metric used to describe the contagiousness of infectious agents.
We developed several new disease-fighting battle cries.
We know that flattening the curve means doing what we can to slow the spread of an outbreak and crush the rise of a line on a chart.
In recent days, we’ve heard of contract tracing, our newest weapon in this viral World War III — the practice of identifying and monitoring individuals who may have had contact with an infectious person as a way of halting the spread of COVID-19.
That’s a phrase unknown to most of the world just a few months ago.
Now we know it all too well, and we use it daily.
We can survive this if we put into practice words we’ve known all our lives.
Words like compassion, caring and hope.
Whatever happens, there will be a new definition for the word bravery and it will be applied to places that might have seemed unlikely not so long ago.
Places like hospital acute-care centers, grocery stores and package delivery trucks.
To describe all those people who have helped maintain the comforting rhythms of everyday life, amid all the ugliness.
But may the rest of those phrases die quickly. Like groovy.
Now, that, my friends, is truly something beautiful.