Year of the covidiot
Towards the year’s end, dictionary publishers reveal their word of the year. Most of 2020’s words will raise few eyebrows in surprise. For Collins, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com it was pandemic. Oxford University Press, however, ran a different Word of the Year campaign from usual. Acknowledging that 2020 has required rapid change and adaptation, in language as well as in other aspects of our lives, Oxford’s lexicographers prepared a 38-page report called ‘‘Words of an Unprecedented Year’’.
Based on data from the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts including novels, newspapers, blogs and social media), they selected the most frequently used words and phrases. These escort us through 2020, reminding us of pre-Covid
bushfires and highlighting momentous social and political experiences of the year with conspiracy theory, cancel culture, and
Black Lives Matter.
Half of the 16 words or phrases relate to the pandemic (though, interestingly, these do not include the word pandemic itself), including mail-in and superspreader, both of which also relate to US politics and events around the presidential election.
Recently ascending in the popularity stakes is moonshot (the UK Government’s mass Covid testing programme).
Statistics on language use reflect patterns of societal adaptations and also of how these differ from group to group, or country to country. They provide a useful window on what occupies us. So we see that, as the year progressed, the label Covid-19 was replaced by coronavirus, and more recently by Covid (without the 19).
The Oxford report points out that the most popular words that followed the word remote in 2019 were village, island, control, location and monitoring. While monitoring remains on the list for 2020, the others have been replaced by learning, working, workforce, and instruction .In 2019, zoom typically co-occurred with words relating to photography. In 2020, the list of zoom-related words includes via, meetings and conferencing.
These lists provide plenty of fascinating material for those interested in language. Many of the examples listed above involve changes in the frequency with which words or word combinations are used. Another form of linguistic innovation is the repurposing of existing words – think of what, if anything, the following meant to you a year ago, and what they might mean now: bubble, flatten the curve, lockdown, furlough, frontline.
A further form of change is the creation of new words and phrases that become commonplace, such as managed isolation and isolation voucher, you’re on mute and
unmute yourself. One of my favourite types of linguistic creativity is blending, where two words or phrases are squished together to form a new one.
Consider examples such as covidiot, coronials (a blend of coronavirus and
millennials to denote babies born during Covid) and anthropause (from anthropology and pause, referring to the slowing down in travel and other forms of human activity during 2020). Or Blursday, for when your remote working means you no longer know what day it is, and
workcation, when work and vacation time become less easy to keep apart. An interesting case is mask-shaming (presumably by analogy with bodyshaming), because it has been attested with opposite meanings, with a shift as the pandemic spread – shaming someone for wearing or for not wearing a mask.
Closer to home, the Australian National Dictionary Centre picked iso as their word of the year, an abbreviated form of isolation, used in phrases such as
in iso, iso baking, iso cut (for home haircuts carried out during lockdown). Now, let me just squirt some handsanitiser and brew another iso latte.
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