On March 13, 2020, Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski noticed that all of the dictionary’s lookups were pandemic related: coronavirus, quarantine, draconian, lockdown, cancel. For the somber one-year anniversary this month, WGBH looked at how the pandemic has transformed the English language, and whether its impact will endure:
Will people five years from now still say they are “zooming” when they conduct a video meeting online? Will slang terms like “doomscrolling” and “covidiot” make their way into wider use or be little-known relics from a brief moment in time? Will “COVID-19,” in all-caps, be the preferred styling? Or will it be overtaken by “Covid-19,” in lowercase, a styling many news organizations have started using?
(My most recent #coronacoinages post is here.)
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Speaking of name changes for medical conditions, Orin Hargraves writes about when we stopped talking about “purging melancholy” and started talking about “treating depression.” I was surprised to learn how recently that change had occurred. (A reminder: If you “clap” for a Medium article, be sure to award the maximum 50 “claps” so the writer can actually earn a few bucks.)
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I hadn’t known that it took more than 20 years for “Civil War” to become the accepted term for America’s bloody fight to save the Union, or that “‘War of Northern Aggression’ was rarely used until it was adopted by neo-Confederates and others opposed to racial integration in the mid-twentieth century.” (Language Hat)
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How well do you know tech-company logos? I scored 11 out of 15, which is why I’m a word person, not a picture person.
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Dan Heath’s video about how to write a mission statement that doesn’t suck is 10 years old and still as funny—and, alas, relevant—as ever.
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It’s brackets season! Planet Word Museum is running a weekly #MarchWordness bracket with contestants in four categories: Charming (effervescent or bedazzled?), Disarming (hornswoggle or bamboozle?), The Best of Times (zenith or phoenix?), and The Worst of Times (cataclysm or beleaguered?). By the way, if you’re in Washington, D.C., the museum will reopen April 1 on a Thursday-through-Saturday schedule. Wish I could join you!
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The Namerology blog is challenging you to guess the most popular baby names in the U.S. and in Britain. I am hopelessly bad at this game, and yet I can’t stop playing.
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Also highly addictive: Mapologies’ maps of national names for, among other things, Donald Duck’s nephews (in Italy: Qui, Quo, Qua); the Smurfs (Pottokiak in Basque); and coronavirus (the big divide is gender: the word is feminine in Irish, neuter in Swedish and Norwegian, and genderless in Russian.) Hat tip: Language Hat.
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From the How Brands Are Built blog: five of the best recent books on branding.
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If you hate bureaucratic jargon, you’ll love this Los Angeles Times story (which may be paywalled) by Evan Halper about the “word cops” fighting for clarity, concision, and correct communication in government documents and signs. One group, the Center for Plain Language, hands out WTF awards. (The initials stand for Work That Failed.) These folks know how to have a good time:
Just before the pandemic, the most fervent plain language evangelists from across the globe gathered in Oslo, where they devoured the content of panels with titles like “oh sh*t, digitalization means we need flawless written communication” and “plain language and interaction design — a magical combination!”
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Fun etymology of the month: coach—“a large kind of four-wheeled, covered carriage”—came into English in the 1550s from French coche. But the French got it from a Hungarian word, kocsi, meaning “from Kocs,” the village where the vehicle was first made. (Other eponymous horse-drawn carriages include the surrey and the landau.) The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that the coach sense of “instructor/trainer” dates back to 1830 or so: It was Oxford University slang “for a private tutor who ‘carries’ a student through an exam (compare pony in the student slang sense ‘translation’).”
The Coach leather-goods brand was founded in New York City in 1941 by Lillian and Miles Cahn. At one point, in the 1980s, it was owned by the Sara Lee Corporation—remember “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”?—which went defunct in 2012. Coach, however, soldiers on.
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