Alert The word “alert” comes from the Italian “all’erta”, literally “at a high place”, describing a military watch or guard duty. The UK government’s advice to “stay alert” in order to “control the virus” implied that it would be easier to spot an invisible microbe if one were standing on a hill.
Infodemic
Perhaps one good thing to come out of this time will be a reluctance to continue using “viral” as a term of admiration, as in viral tweet or viral marketing
- There might be an increasing medicalisation of political rhetoric, as with the revival of the scary term “infodemic”
- At first glance the portmanteau word looks like nonsense etymologically, since the “-demic” part of pandemic means simply “the people” or “peoples” but perhaps it carries a dark implication that allowing everyone to act as spreaders of information on Twitter, Facebook and the like, has at best had mixed consequences
Coronavirus
Coined 1968 by virologists to describe a family of viruses that look like balls under a microscope
- Looks like petals with a “fringe of projections”
- Also known as the sun’s corona, it has given rise to a variety of portmanteaus
Zoom
To zoom means to move very quickly, particularly while making a humming or buzzing sound.
- Zoom is a videoconferencing corporation founded in 2011 that has a catchphrase: shall I Zoom you? Can we Zoom?
- It has also recently announced that people who use it for free will not benefit from encryption to prevent others from snooping.
New wave
The phrase passed into English in 1960s as “new wave”, and was enthusiastically applied thereafter to various novel clusters of cultural production, particularly in 1970s rock and punk music.
- A “second wave” of COVID-19 infections, if the R (qv) goes up over 1 again, will not feel so hip.
R In epidemiology, R0 is the “basic reproduction rate” of a disease, where “R” is the number of other people a carrier will on average infect, and “0” indicates that no one in the population is immune.
R does not imply that R is a single monolithic number applying to the whole country, whereas it varies by region
Capacity
If you can’t actually do something, it might help to claim that you have the “capacity” to do it at some undefined point in the future
- Capacity strictly means the ability to take in a certain quantity of things (so, the capacity of a theatre or a vessel)
- In modern times, it’s used to speak to the potential ability to put out a certain number of things, like widgets or Covid-19 tests
Covid-secure
The UK government promised workers that their workplaces would be made “covid-secured” so that it would be safe to return, as all are now expected to do by August.
- This is bilge, at least if “secure” means “protected from or not exposed to danger; certain to remain safe and unthreatened” (OED).
- Perhaps this piece of paramilitary rhetoric is really aimed at warding off lawsuits under the Health and Safety at Work Act, which requires places of employment to be “safe”.
- If the government has said they are “secure”, how could they be unsafe?
Heroes
In classical Latin, a “hero” is someone with unheard-of strength or other abilities, favoured by the gods or semi-divine.
- The word arrives in English in retellings of such mythologies, and then also comes to be applied to soldiers who exhibit particular bravery, or civilians of notable excellence.
Shielding
People with compromised immunity and other conditions were from early on advised to “shield”, and were referred to as “shielding”
- An unusual intransitive use of the verb that normally requires a shielder and a shieldee
- The very old Germanic word “shield” originated as the term for an armoured plate carried in a soldier’s hand
The science
The science can mean “the particular scientific viewpoints that I find convenient”.
- Unfortunately, while it is appropriate to speak of “the science” with regard to settled matters such as the theories of gravity that enable spaceflight, it is misleading while there remain many unanswered questions about a pathogen that was discovered only at the end of last year.
Plague
The word comes from the Latin “plaga” meaning “wound” and later “illness”, and in time was applied to any pestilential thing or person
- To avoid something like the plague, we should give thanks that we have only incompetent bad men leading us
Underlying (conditions)
In the early days, news reports noted that those dying from COVID-19 had “underlying health conditions”, implying that these were more profound and causally relevant.
- This gave succour to a strand of performatively tough-minded opinion that argued such victims had it coming anyway, and it was unfair to stop them from going to castles.
World-beating
Boris Johnson declared that the UK would have a “world beating” test-and-trace system by early June
- The UK has one of the highest numbers of deaths per capita from COVID-19
- But the prime minister’s vacuous promise betrayed a more profound poverty in outlook
- Why, after all, do we have to beat the world? Why would we wish that more people die in other countries than in ours?
Game-changer
In 1962, the term was first used in reference to an American football player, Bob Sheflo
- Since then, it has been anything that thoroughly disrupts the current way of thinking or doing things, as well as anything that does nothing of the sort except in the hopeful minds of marketers
