Unprecedented sham-demic! Coronavirus language cliches are spreading and there’s no flattening the curve

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CHICAGO — My daughter and I were walking through a cemetery on Chicago’s North Side the other day when she asked me to tell her a dream, and since I couldn’t remember a dream, I told her the plot of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” She had never heard of it. She’s 3. But she likes her stories a little spooky. To answer your first question: No, I don’t know what I was thinking. But as for your second: We walk in the neighborhood cemetery because, during a pandemic, it’s green and peaceful, with wide paths ideal for tricycling.

The drawback is, she wants to know about the headstones, and why she can’t lick them. I tell her they’re for people who died a long time ago, don’t touch, don’t touch anything. Why, she asks. I tell her people are getting sick, so don’t lick any graves, OK?

I’m handing down more wisdom when I notice an elderly couple headed in our direction.

I tell my daughter to peddle onto a new lane. Why, she asks, and I say we’re avoiding people, because some are sick. Because they’re bad guys like Frankenstein, she adds.

No, I say, Frankenstein’s monster is not bad, he’s misunderstood, and if people are sick, it doesn’t mean they’re bad. I say it just like Dr. Fauci said we should when explaining this to kids.

But then she wants to know if her friends are going to a different school now.

I try explaining that too, and yet this is an unprecedented moment, in an uncertain time, and though we are all in this together, attempting to flatten the curve, not planning any dream cruises in the future, and not trying to go viral for once, I seem to lack the words.

My wife told me later that our daughter watched the new episode of “Sesame Street” in which Elmo talked to his Muppet pals on a video conference and when it was over our daughter said everyone on Sesame Street was talking on the computer because they were sick. My wife tried explaining that being on a video call doesn’t mean you’re sick.

But she lacked the language.

Words are failing us.

Which is ironic, because as recently as just a few months ago, many of the words we now say and hear all day long, every day, over and over, we had never even heard. We have acquired a large new toolbox of linguistic neologisms, a fresh vocabulary for talking about the way we live now. Science gets explained with epidemiological mashes, while sociological jargon takes flight overnight, throughout the world, at the zip of Zoom.

Yet we sound like we’re stunned.

When Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker describes the pandemic as “an unprecedented public health challenge” requiring “an unprecedented solution,” he comes across like every other email I seem to be receiving from businesses these days, all of them explaining that, “despite these unprecedented times,” our world will endure. If the sender is being wry, they make it “interesting times”; if they’re feeling grim, it becomes “amid troubling times.” But “unprecedented” always makes an appearance. Then washes past my eyes.

However accurate it may be, “unprecedented” never sings, it always feels lazy. It’s not that unlike those protest signs in the Loop recently, the ones angrily insisting that the State of Illinois reopen immediately. They adopted the language of protests past (“My Body, My Choice,” “End the Police State”), if not the ideologies, and turned the imprecise language of bureaucracies on its head: The pandemic became a “SHAM-demic,” the governor himself was not “ESSENTIAL,” and rather than a herd mentality towards staying at home, they want “HERD IMMUNITY.” None of which sings either.

So we settle on the language of horror movies, the unnerving evocativeness of John Carpenter classics, which nicely dovetails with the language of hospitals and medicine, whose terms swing from ominous — pathogen, incubation, N95, isolation — to tender: A droplet sounds like a spunky snot, asymptomatic is much nicer than cheerfully oblivious.

Peter Sokolowski, editor-in-chief of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (which is owned by Chicago-based Encyclopedia Britannica), said that “big events have the power to change our language itself.” Because we are bursting with anxiety over how to explain a clearly monumental situation “for which there really aren’t appropriate words yet.” Lurching toward comprehension, we overreach, pontificate, crack jokes — who needs a quarantini? — or adopt the status quo. “Language is extremely utilitarian and extremely emotional,” he said, “and we’re ping-ponging from hyper-utilitarian to hyper-emotional.”

He said that as most of the country went into quarantine, he watched our concerns ebb and flow by simply paying attention to the words trending on Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. We started out doe-eyed, looking up “pandemic” and “coronavirus”; became scared and looked up “draconian” and “martial law”; then, being good Americans, we noticed opportunity and sought the definitions of “hoarding” and “force majeure” (a contractual loophole that can get you off the hook in the event of unforeseen calamity).

But the word we haven’t found yet is the one word or phrase to encapsulate the moment. “Unprecedented” could be the winner, although it’s questionable and stiff. According to Sokolowski, we’ve been looking up “Kafkaesque” and “surreal.” (“It’s like we’re looking for a word to capture what is scientifically defined yet vague, something that gets across ‘Do I have toilet paper?’ and ‘What happens if I touch that doorknob?’,” he said.) British linguist Tony Thorne has been compiling a running online list (language-and-innovation.com) of our pandemic language and only “radical uncertainty” and “viral anxiety” gets anywhere near reality.

Mary Laur, the editor at University of Chicago Press who oversees reference and language books (including its venerable “Chicago Manual of Style”), said that she’s reminded of the way “digital age” became a catch-all for a new time. “But will this be our ‘pandemic age,’ or a ‘pandemic era’ — or something we just haven’t come up with yet?”

Pritzker himself seemed to grasp at this elusive word during an April press conference.

“Feel all of it,” he said.

Luckily, calamity has a way of cementing thoughts, and coining terms: World War II gave us “radar,” and World War I gave us “cooties.” How often did you say “TSA” before Sept. 11? I wouldn’t be surprised if those watchful, go-home Mayor Lori Lightfoot memes helped explain to a lot of people what “meme” finally meant. “Livestreaming” has moved similarly into your grandparent’s lexicon, while “social distancing” has gone from sociological term to everyday concept lightning fast. Pandemic language has been evolving so quickly “PPE” moved from the health-care industry to the general population only slightly faster than “zoonosis” (a disease transmitted from animals to humans).

“Zoom” went from brand to verb, while “essential” and “non-essential” were adopted so smoothly as a way of sorting us, we haven’t started to deal with the social ramifications.

In a flurry to comprehend, we invented language, some of which will stick — “blursday” (the feeling of not separating days anymore) is snappy and smart — some of which sounds trendy — “covidiot” (a person acting irresponsibly and denying the pandemic) doesn’t flow quite as well as “idiot” itself, “stupid” or a good ole’ “moron.” But then the editors of authoritative sources, like the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries — who typically take years to vet words before including — formally recognized “COVID-19” within weeks of the World Health Organization announcing it.

The most elegant addition to our language might be “flattening the curve,” which is actually an old epidemiological idea. It tells us clearly we are not in this ourselves, that even ourselves are a threat — it is the MacGuffin in this movie, the thing we don’t fully understand, but it could lead us from point A to point B, putting us “behind the curve.”

Mostly though, to fill that narrative, we’ve reached for the same phrases and words. It’s good to know we are all in this together, and that there are heroes out there in uncertain times. But am I the only one gets grossed out by “community spread” and pictures a small-town production of “Hair,” one in which the cast gets just a little too carried away?

By now I would have guessed politicians would be describing the virus in sports metaphors, but duh, it’s war metaphors. The president, who spent weeks downplaying the threat, now describes himself as a “wartime president.” Joe Biden says we are “at war” with a virus. “Except war metaphors have no value here,” said David Quammen, who started as a community organizer on the West Side and became a revered science journalist, a model writer when it comes to explaining complexity with clarity and grace. (“Spillover,” his 2012 pandemic book, is routinely cited now as an early warning.)

“What we are dealing with is actually routine,” he said. “It is something that happens in the natural world, and it is ecology and it is evolutionary biology and you can’t don’t clear it with anti-aircraft guns. But you can’t say that at a White House podium. Not even Tony Fauci can say this from an official podium, that those metaphors don’t explain it.”

Political language, George Orwell famously said, tends to give “an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.” For example, however unprecedented the crisis may be, the repeated use of “unprecedented” can serve as a nice way of deflecting accountability.

“What?! Who knew this would happen? It’s unprecedented!”

Just like referring to the information presented as “the science” — as in “we are following the science” — may ease the burden of a politician faced with hard, unpopular decisions.

Similarly, the president’s use of “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” does the trick of suggesting an adversary started it, while also playing into age-old stereotypes of Asians bringing filth and disease. Trump, a master marketer, was basically rebranding. In fact, predictably, a quick search of United States Patent and Trademark applications show dozens of attempts at the moment to lock down “COVID-19 Baby” bibs, “COVID-19 Compliant” signs for real estate companies and “Coronavirus Survivor” novelty T-shirts.

Whether weaponing, capitalizing or simply reaching for the overused word, there is an inevitability about the use of those familiar phrases in times of crisis that can sound to linguists like a kind of self-soothing, a way of getting a handle on the incomprehensible.

“It sounds like people trying to take control of their world, which is what happens in big moments,” said Annette D’Onofrio, a Northwestern University sociolinguist. She studies how we use language in interaction and social identity, and been noticing “the way people who had no understanding of epidemiology are now talking about the definition of ‘pandemic,” much the way those “who didn’t know the definition of ‘fascism’ before the 2016 presidential election were all of a sudden discussing it with authority.”

Having the language can be empowering, but also revealing and alarming.

Paradoxes and contradictions leap out, suspicions and resentments fester: Why does the WHO prefer “physical distancing” to “social distancing”? (Do they fear that people won’t remain social? Or is it just easier that way to divide and conquer? If this is war, why am I asked to be complacent?) “Learning from home” has become, to many parents and students, closer to a paragon than a reality. Why does the media keep saying “coronacation” and describing all the fun stuff we’re doing with free time when I am working harder than ever? If we’re “all in this together,” why are so many less secure than ever?

“We know scientists, for example, withhold some information when they are speaking next to the president,” said Salikoko Mufwene, a longtime linguist at the University of Chicago. “We know they say another thing to interviewers. Which can make it hard to know what to understand. I think it’s a good thing we have TV for this. Because it makes you wonder if what we need to be paying more attention to is their body language.”

We are together in this but not speaking with one voice.

We see something down the road but can’t describe it. We don’t have the words.

So, take care, stay safe.

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