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H.How do we get new words and how do old words get a new twist? In normal times, it is a weary process, language affairs as usual. There will be a new invention or a thing to buy, like “wifi” (1999) or an “iPod” (2001). People will pick up on trends or changes in behavior and label them as “crowdfund” (2008) or “catfish” (2012). Last year, the Guardian identified “femtech” and “canceled” as among the words that embodied 2019. This year, you may have noticed, was a little different, the verbal equivalent of a dawn raid: some persistent vocabulary elements broke down the front door and pointed guns at us as we snuggled under the duvet. And while it’s fitting that virus-induced changes dominate this year’s list, there have been other developments. As the big dictionaries reveal their wotys (words of the year), we ask which ones – for better or for worse – best capture the spirit of 2020.
Pandemic
The boss. Yes, there is the coronavirus, Covid-19, Sars-CoV-2, ‘rona, all the various forms that this hideous pathogen has taken, with their particular emphases, technical meanings and so on. But the word that best describes the situation in which we find ourselves, its vastness, the impossibility of thinking about anything else is “pandemic”.
It is built on two words from ancient Greek: cooking pan, which means “everything” and demo, “People” – and has been used in the sense of “influencing everyone” since the 17th century. Interestingly, the Greek derivation means that it resonates menacingly with two other English words, “pandemonium” (a word coined by Milton, the “abode of all demons” in his Paradise Lost) and “panic” (which has its own etymology interesting, but that’s another story). The first major pandemic of the 21st century actually created panic and pandemonium – and there appears to be no panacea (“panacea”) in sight.
Herd immunity
Yes, I know it’s two words, but I’ll take a cue from Oxford Dictionaries’ woty 2019, “climate emergency”, and name this powerful combination for 2020. Anything else aside, it shows how scientific concepts can acquire political connotations and how each new problem seems to be fed into a social media sausage machine, emerging with familiar contours of “culture warfare”. At the start of the crisis, it wasn’t clear that the blockade was somehow more leftist or that going unmasked was a “Maga” gesture, for example.
Herd immunity is a case in point: a non-controversial concept in epidemiology has entered 2020, the state of protection from a disease that results from vaccination or from most people who have had it. It acquired a bad reputation in part because of Boris Johnson’s comments during an interview in March: “One of the theories is that maybe you could take it on the chin, take it all at once and allow the disease, as it were, to move through. the population. “Suspicions that the government might volunteer us for the task were not dispelled by rumors of Dominic Cummings’ position, summed up in a report as” herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some retirees die, sin”.
Confinement
Like a pandemic, the blockade – which Collins declared the winner – was already reasonably familiar. But the specific meaning it has taken on – legal restrictions including home confinement to hinder the spread of the virus – means it will forever be linked to disease control. It was originally used to describe keeping prisoners in their cells as a safety measure after a disturbance – hence the “lock” element. By analogy, it has also been used to talk about terrorist attacks or school shootings. That type of lockdown would last a few hours until the area in question was secured. Now, it feels more like hard work, a long, boring staycation in which many pleasures we took completely for granted – parties, concerts, drinks with friends – are denied us.
Enlarge
Zoom is the most popular eponym of 2020: a word derived from a proper name, in this case, the name of a videoconferencing company. As such, it’s part of the great tradition of Hoover, Portaloo, Kleenex and Google, products so successful that they enter common parlance and keep their companies’ trademark protection officers busy (if we hear from any of them, we’ll try to invoke linguistic exemption). However, they may waste time. Once a word escapes popular culture like this, it takes on a life of its own. “Zoom” became a verb – “are we zooming in tonight?” – and is applied to virtually any platform that supports live video, regardless of who made the software: “Can we zoom through Google Meet?” At this point perhaps we should give a thought to Skype, which seems, at least from a branding point of view, to have had a very bad pandemic.
Megxit
Let’s leave the virus behind for a moment and bring our minds back to simpler times, when real gossip could dominate the news cycle for days at a time. In early January, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, announced that they would step back as “senior” members of the royal family. Although Harry had every reason to want to escape the constant scrutiny of the British press, the event was called “Megxit”, perhaps playing on the sexist trope of the new woman breaking in and turning a man against her friends. But it may have boiled down to the fact that his name contains a velar consonant, allowing him to blend seamlessly with the “-xit” suffix, which, as the Brexit saga ran out, was in desperate need of a new job.
Antifa
Donald Trump’s relentless fueling of tensions helped ensure 2020 was a year of continued political and social upheaval in the United States. May 31st he tweeted: “The United States of America will designate ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization”. The protests had followed the police killing of George Floyd, an African American from Minneapolis, and Trump’s response was to blame the radical left (needless to say, his threat against what is a free coalition rather than a ‘ organization, was never completed).
This wasn’t Antifa’s first rodeo, though. In 2017, after the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, he entered the Oxford shortlist, with the dictionary pointing out that he was borrowed from the German Anti-fascist action, after a network of anti-fascist groups established before the Second World War. If you are still wondering about pronunciation, you can say it as you like: an accent on the first syllable (ANtifa) and the second (AnTIfa) both seem common. Trump, for what it’s worth, says AnTIfa.
BLM
In fact, the shockwaves of Floyd’s death have spread far beyond a few dedicated activist groups. Black Lives Matter, a movement that started in 2013, has once again become emblematic of the struggle for racial justice and has been used so often that its initials no longer need further explanation. The slogan has been adopted not only in the United States, but around the world, with demonstrations in Canada, Australia, and across Europe. In Britain, it spurred a new showdown with our past and led to the most dramatic protest images for a generation: the overthrow of a statue of slave owner Edward Colston and its jubilant unloading in the harbor.
Karen
The US racial summer also popularized “Karen,” the caricature of a condescending middle-class white woman who is gleefully unaware of her racial privilege or is willing to use it to punish or humiliate people of color. “Central park Karen,” for example, was the label given to a woman who called the police for a black birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, who asked her to put her dog on a leash. African American commentator Karen Grigsby Bates (she should know, right?) Places “Karen” in a set of punched terms that include “Becky” and “Miss Ann”. Others point out that the word has been used as a weapon by misogynists to abuse and denigrate women in evil ways. Both are true, but that’s the problem with words: they can mean different things in different mouths.
Simp
From the depths of Generation Z’s troubled psyche comes another gender insult (yes, I realize how depressing it is that so many of our wotys are disease-related or pejorative, but I am simply the messenger). A “nice” is a guy who tries to get in with a woman by flattering her. It is desperate and humiliating. One might think of “simp” as this year’s “incel”. And if you haven’t found it yet, maybe it’s because you’re not on TikTok, where the “simp nation” meme has been circulating since December 2019. There are various explanations for the word’s origin, with some claiming it’s a rather nasty acronym, but it seems more likely to be a shortening of “simpleton”.
Doomscrolling
Sorry again for the lack of slight relief. Maybe that’s all the doomscrolling I’ve done. But who can blame me if I find myself compulsively refreshing social media to reassure myself that the news may not be that bad, only to find more bad news and then again. For many of us, the first days of the pandemic catastrophe were an unstoppable tic. Maybe we were looking for evidence of treatment advances, sure, but what we found was a report of a possible reinfection or bubonic plague outbreak. For what it’s worth, I think we may be on the verge of a turn, as far as the bad news is concerned. While we undoubtedly face a grueling winter, those virologists appear to be making progress. For the next year, I will write “vaccine” and “post-pandemic”. Fingers crossed.
David Shariatmadari is the author of Don’t Believe a Word: From Myths to Misunderstandings – How Language Really Works (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £ 9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees May to apply
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