San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
EVEN WITH NEW VOCABULARY, 2020 HARD TO PUT INTO WORDS
Under lockdown, feeling Zoom fatigue, San Diegans ready to put year in the past
They used to mean something different, those four numbers strung together — 2020 — and pronounced as two: Twenty-twenty.
As in 2020 vision, or 2020 hindsight. As in perfect.
The only thing perfect about the year 2020 was its chaos.
A deadly pandemic, the worst in a century. A racial reckoning fueled by scores of protest marches. A divisive presidential election that rocked the foundations of democracy. In a normal year, any one of those might be the thing historians study decades later as a key turning point in the story of America.
All three at the same time? Choose your own adjective.
The Washington Post queried its readers and the top choice was “exhausting.” Second place: “lost.”
Maybe you can’t pick just one. Neither could the folks at Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Its team of lexicographers usually selects a single word or phrase that reflects “the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year,” and is deemed likely “to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.” Last year it was “climate emergency,” which probably seemed apocalyptic at the time.
This year, they threw up their hands.
Instead of one word, they highlighted the “words of an unprecedented year” in a 38-page report that marvels in particular at “the hyper-speed at
which the English-speaking world amassed a new collective vocabulary relating to the coronavirus, and how quickly it became, in many instances, a core part of the language.”
Words such as COVID-19 and lockdown and superspreader, and phrases like social distancing, remote learning and self-quarantine.
“The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year,” the Oxford report says.
Did we ever.
Life upended
In March, San Diego County’s first resident tested positive for the coronavirus — a word that dates to the 1960s, but was confined mostly to medical journals until this year.
It quickly became one of the most frequently used nouns in the English language, according to the Oxford researchers, who collect about 150 million words from news sites and other Internet publications every month to track usage.
Other words and phrases quickly joined it in the vernacular, a sign of how much the pandemic was altering life here and around the globe, affecting everyone. Looking at the vocabulary list now is like clicking through a slideshow, the snapshots triggering memories of how the social and economic upheaval unfolded.
There was the rapid emergence of “COVID-19,” a new word that first appeared in a World Health Organization report in February and by summer had become more commonplace than “coronavirus.” It slowly began showing up in obituaries as the death toll mounted. San Diego’s first fatality was reported March 22. By Christmas, the total had reached 1,350.
Then came a variation, “covidiots,” used initially to disparage hoarders who cleared market shelves of toilet paper and other goods in the early, bewildering days of the pandemic.
“When people feel uncertain, they tend to focus on things that bring them certainty,” Uma Karmarkar, a neuroeconomist at UC San Diego, told the Union-tribune in March. “Most of us don’t have the ability to make new vaccines or enact new policies, but the one action that we can control, that feels like we are doing something, is to stock up on supplies.”
That loss of control surfaced in other ways, and in other words, and by August the Centers for Disease Control had found a tripling of anxiety symptoms and a quadrupling of depression among 5,400 adults surveyed. Kids struggled, too, in the forced isolation.
People who spent their seemingly endless hours stuck at home addictively checking their social media feeds were said to be “doomscrolling.” The way it became hard to tell one locked-down day from the next led to the term “Blursday.”
Face coverings went from optional to recommended to mandatory, and so “mask-shaming” entered the lexicon. It was a weapon adopted by both sides — those who supported masks and those who resisted them — and it got wielded amid the bigger political and cultural wars rattling the country.
One Starbucks customer in San Diego, unhappy about being asked to wear a mask, went on Facebook to complain about the barista. The post caught the attention of an Orange County marketing consultant, who organized a Gofundme campaign for the barista that raised $100,000.
Zoom turned into a noun, instead of a verb, with people using the online meeting platform for work, school and other gatherings. There were Zoom weddings, Zoom concerts, Zoom funerals. Participants learned to “unmute.” And there were virtual social hours, sometimes with cocktails newly known as “quarantinis.”
As the coronavirus restrictions shuttered stores, schools, workplaces, sporting events, churches and live arts performances, “inperson” became a necessary and almost wistful qualifier in the language, a reminder of what used to be.
Taking it to the streets
By June, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” had taken hold, chanted during street demonstrations and written on signs carried by people in San Diego and other U.S. cities protesting the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died on Memorial Day after a White police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.
Although some of the demonstrations turned destructive — buildings were burned and stores looted in La Mesa — most were peaceful and led to an ongoing reckoning with the nation’s history of racial discrimination, economic inequality and other social-justice problems.
The coronavirus and its disproportionate ravaging of minorities — Blacks have died at 3.6 times the rate of Whites, and Latinos at 2.5 times, according to the Brookings Institution — further spotlighted the inequities.
“We can’t stop protesting until we make true institutional changes that can bring us true peace and safety,” Amir Harrison Jr. told the Union-tribune after organizing an early-june march in San Diego that drew hundreds of people downtown.
Law-enforcement agencies in the county quickly banned the carotid restraint, a controversial neck hold used by officers, and voters in San Diego approved a new independent police oversight board. Law-enforcement reforms gained traction across the nation.
Statues and flags with ties to the Confederate Army during the Civil War came down, and legislation was passed instructing military leaders to change the names of bases and ships that honor people and places rooted in White supremacy.
Oxford’s word-trackers captured some of that activism against institutional racism with the rise in the use of “wokeness” and “allyship” and “take a knee,” the last one a holdover from Colin Kaepernick and other pro football players who protested during the national anthem.
Similarly, efforts to increase the participation of marginalized groups in organizations and institutions spawned acronyms that surfaced more often as the year went on: “D&I,” for diversity and inclusion, and “BIPOC,” for Black, Indigenous and other people of color.
Not all of the changes arrived without backlash. Oxford’s report noted a rise in the use of “counterprotesters,” who showed up at some of the demonstrations. Critics bemoaned a “cancel culture” that boycotts people whose words or actions are deemed unacceptable.
It all added up to months of unrest, another word that saw its usage spike in 2020.
‘Annus horribilis’
The year staggers to a close with Trump, defeated at the polls by Joe Biden, refusing to accept the results of the Nov. 3 election.
Oxford Languages did its study before unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud became the central focus of the president’s attention, so it’s not clear how deeply the efforts to upend the vote — and those to preserve it — penetrated our everyday vocabulary.
But as summer moved toward fall, the lexicographers tracked a surge in certain words that spoke to the nation’s fierce interest in the election.
“Mail-in,” for example, went up in usage 3,000 percent over a year ago — a reflection of Trump’s preoccupation with that kind of ballot, and of its increased adoption by election officials around the country as a way to keep people from polling places where the virus might spread.
In the end, voter participation set or came close to records in San Diego, the state and nationwide. San Diego got a new mayor, Todd Gloria, the first person of color elected to the position, and the first who is openly gay. A race for a school board seat in Warner Springs wound up tied, forcing a coin flip to determine the winner.
Vaccines started arriving after the election, bright lights at the end of a dark tunnel. “I feel like healing is coming,” said Sandra Lindsay, a Long Island nurse, the first person inoculated in the U.S.
Now, as 2021 beckons, another phrase has been appearing occasionally in written roundups: annus horribilis. Latin for horrible year.
The phrase first made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1985 as a play on the much older (and cheerier) annus mirabilis, or wonderful year.
In 1992, England’s Queen Elizabeth II used annus horribilis in her annual Christmas message to describe a year of lowlights that included a massive fire at Windsor Castle, the collapse of several royal marriages, and a toe-sucking scandal involving the Duchess of York.
How pedestrian those seem now.