“Everyone has noticed that Skype meetings take less time than regular meetings. Board meetings which would normally have taken eight to nine hours we can suddenly do in two to three hours. That has been quite an interesting statement on the inefficiency perhaps of meetings in the past.”
Lexicographers observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to come overwhelmingly to dominate global discourse, even to the exclusion of most other topics. Covid-19 short for corona virus 2019, has done just that. As the spread of the disease has altered the lives of billions of people, it has correspondingly ushered in a new vocabulary to the general populace encompassing specialist terms from the fields of epidemiology and medicine, new acronyms, and words to express the societal imperatives of imposed isolation and distancing. It is a consistent theme of lexicography that great social change brings great linguistic change, and that has never been truer than in this current global crisis. Lexicographers are tracking the development of the languages of the pandemic and offer a linguistic and historical context to their usage.
Some of the terms with which we have become so familiar over the past few weeks through the news, social media, and government briefings and edicts have been around for years (many date from the nineteenth century), but they have achieved new and much wider usage to describe the situation in which we currently find ourselves. Self-isolation (recorded from 1834) and self-isolating (1841), now used to describe self-imposed isolation to prevent catching or transmitting an infectious disease, were in the 1800’s more often applied to countries which chose to detach themselves politically and economically from the rest of the world. New phrases, combinations, and abbreviations which were not necessarily coined for the coronavirus epidemic, but have seen far wider usage since it began. Infodemic (a portmanteau word from information and epidemic) is the outpouring of often unsubstantiated media and online information relating to a crisis. The term was coined in 2003 for the SARS epidemic, but has also been used to describe the current proliferation of news around coronavirus. Social distancing, first used in 1957, was originally an attitude rather than a physical term, referring to an aloofness or deliberate attempt to distance oneself from others socially—now we all understand it as keeping a physical distance between ourselves and others to avoid infection. Elbow bump, along with a hand slap and high five, was in its earliest manifestation (1981) a way of conveying celebratory pleasure to a teammate, rather than a means of avoiding hand-touching when greeting a friend, colleague, or stranger. WFH (working from home) dates from 1995. PPE (personal protective equipment) an abbreviation dates from as far back as 1934.
Our forebears grappled linguistically with the epidemics they witnessed and experienced. The earliest of these appeared in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the great plague of 1347-50 and its follow-ups, which killed an estimated 40-60 per cent of the population of Europe, must surely have been an ever-present memory and fear. Pestilence, ‘a fatal epidemic or disease’, was borrowed from French and Latin, and first appears in Wycliffe’s bible of a 1382, not long after this first great devastation. The related term pest (from French or Portuguese peste) appeared shortly afterwards. Our weakened uses of pest—an insect that infects crops, an annoying person—stem from this original plague usage. Pox (from the plural of pock, denoting a pustule or the mark it leaves) appeared in 1476 as a term applied to a number of virulently contagious diseases, most especially the dreaded smallpox (first recorded in the 1560’s). It was the great plagues of the seventeenth century, however, that opened the floodgates for the entry into English of words to describe the experience of epidemic disease. Epidemic and pandemic both appeared in the seventeenth century; the Black Plague (so called from the black pustules that appeared on the skin of the victims) was first used in the early 1600’s (although its more familiar synonym Black Death, surprisingly, did not appear until 1755). It was the seventeenth-century plague that saw a whole village in Derbyshire choose to self-isolate or self-quarantine; the adjective self-quarantine was first applied, in a historical description from 1878, to the story of the heroic population of Eyam, which isolated itself in 1665-6 to avoid infecting the surrounding villages, and lost around a third of its population as a consequence. As the world expanded, so too did the spread of diseases and their vocabulary. Yellow fever appeared in 1738, and the so-called Spanish influenza in 1890 (reduced to Spanish flu during the great epidemic of 1918). Poliomyelitis appeared in 1878 (shortened to polio in 1911), although the epidemic that attacked children especially and struck fear into the heart of parents was at its worst just after WWII. Recent decades have also seen their share of linguistic coinages for epidemics and pandemics. AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) appeared in 1982, and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003. The CORONAVIRUS themselves (so-called because they resemble the solar corona) were first described as long ago as 1968 in a paper in Nature, but before 2020 few people had heard of the term beyond the scientists studying them.
