RONA LINGO SPREADS QUICKER THAN VIRUS
I’VE been spending my quarantime doom-scrolling and chugging quarantinis. It’s been locktail hour on the hour, giving me plenty of time to perfect my zoom mullet and videofurb my living room.*
If you’re up with the latest virus vocab, you’ll know what that all means.
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to shake things up and produce some new words to confuse and confound us all.
When we’re WFH (working from home), every day of the week is Blursday, thanks to endless zooming with our quaranteams (co-workers).
We’re giving each other corona cuts (haircuts by family members rather than hairdressers) and spending our time doing ronavations (doing up our house while in isolation).
Out in public, we give friends an elbump, do the corona-dodge on footpaths so we comply with social distancing and endlessly debate the era of the cornonapocolypse.
If you’re like me, you’re sick of all the caremongering (organised acts of kindness by do-gooders) and coronaboasting on social media.
Got all that? Good. UK linguist Tony Thorne has compiled a terrific list of
corona words to help us talk about what’s going on at this crazy time.
The nice clothes you wear only on the top half during video conferencing? Thorne says they’re called “upperwear”. And those items we wear that are not quite clothes, not quite pyjamas? They’re not outfits we go out in, they’re “infits” we stay home in.
Even the virus is known by names such as Miss Rona, Miley Cyrus (rhyming slang), and even the Boomer Remover because of its deadly impact on the older generation.
You can make Rona Sweet and Sour Chicken, sing songs such as When the Rona’s Over and My Corona and work at a home-station dubbed a “rona
rig”. My, how things have changed.
Back in December we weren’t talking about social distancing, self-isolating or superspreaders.
And we certainly weren’t boring others senseless by banging on about this era of “radical uncertainty”, requiring “digital vigilance” and “bio-surveillance”.
Ask the least educated person and chances are they’ll wax lyrical about the difference between a pathogen and an antigen, a pandemic and an epidemic and the importance of psychoneuroimmunity.
We don’t know what this means, but a lack of technical knowledge has never stopped us from throwing around big words to impress others.
And I’m also getting sick of endless discussions about restrictions easing.
The Germans call this “öffnungsdiskussionsorgien”. It is translated as “orgies of discussion”.
That’s the only type of orgy we’re allowed to have right now.
* I’ve been spending my time in quarantine looking up morbid disease statistics on the internet and drinking. It’s always drink o’ clock, giving me plenty of time to fashion my lockdown hairstyle which looks good at the front on sides and dishevelled at the back and refurbishing my house so it looks good on video conferences.