Were you one of the thousands of people who, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, decided to learn a new language? Well, congratulations: You’re now learning Greek! Or at least the Greek alphabet.
The highly contagious Delta variant, named after the fourth letter of that alphabet, was first identified in India in October 2020 and quickly spread around the globe. And we learned last week that yet another troubling Covid variant had emerged in South Africa. It was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet: Omicron.
What is Phexxi? According to the product website, Phexxi is a nonhormonal vaginal gel that “works to prevent pregnancy by altering the pH of your vagina, which is different from hormonal birth control.” Its primary ingredients are lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate (the last ingredient is better known, at least to cooks, as “cream of tartar”). In May 2020, Phexxi filed for trademark protection and received FDA approval; the product went on sale in the US in September 2020. An ad campaign—notably a 60-second video that urges women to “get past your compromises and get Phexxi”—launched in early February 2021.
Screen grab from the 60-second ad
Does Phexxi work? Its parent company, Evofem Biosciences (“Science with a Soul”), says that in clinical trials “with perfect use,” the gel is 93 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. As for the Phexxi name—well, let’s talk about it.
Yes, 2020 was the year in which Donald J. Trump was impeached by the US Senate House of Representatives. It was also the year in which he was soundly defeated at the polls by Joe Biden, although as of this writing his legal shenanigans and email grifting continue unabated, as I expect they will until Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021.
But the impeachment took place in January and February, and in March everything changed thanks to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has influenced our behavior and our language in ways we couldn’t have anticipated in early 2020. My list this year reflects many of those new COVID-inspired terms, but it also makes room for fashion and politics. Like the American Dialect Society, I give preference to words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2020. I’m also interested in words that were linguistically productive: capable of generating creative coinages.
By the way, this is my twelfth consecutive year of posting words of the year. I’m kind of shocked myself.
Cleo Levin wrote for Slate about “ridiculously surreal” made-for-Amazon brand names: “Here were a series of names that were not only unknown to me, but also quite perplexing: Artfish, Wishpig, Sweatyrocks, Demonlick, and Pukemark.”
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Ben Zimmer wrote for Beyond Wordplay about Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, which opened via virtual ribbon-cutting—with President Obama as a surprise guest—on October 22.
Yes, I am aware that hygiene theater is two words. Bite me.
Am I cranky? Yep. It’s been a long four and a half months. I’m sick of the pandemic, the closures, the conspiracy theories. (I am not, however, sick-sick.) I miss libraries. I miss film festivals. I miss the sauna at the Dolphin Club after a cold bay swim.
I keep hearing in my head the voice of a woman who was a regular at a gym I used to belong to. (I miss gyms.) She was a naturalized US citizen, originally from Ukraine: a large, cheerful, middle-aged woman who always had a friendly word for everyone. But after Sarah Palin* was nominated as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, my gym-mate came into the locker room sounding glum.
“America,” she said in her Slavically accented English, sighing loudly enough to be overheard in the next row of lockers. “Such a beautiful country—withso many idiots.”
It’s been almost four months—four months—since I first wrote about the new words emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through surges and spikes and reopenings and retreats, the indomitable spirit of wordy invention soldiers on. Here are some coronacoinages I’ve noticed recently. Let me know if I’ve overlooked any of your favorites.
“Survival is not recovery”—a phrase with roots in the language of sexual-abuse counseling—is turning out to have grim relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the World Health Organization reports that 80 percent of COVID infections are “mild or asymptomatic,” and most patients recover after one or two weeks, thousands of people now say they’ve been coping with serious symptoms for a month or longer. In online support groups, these people call themselves “long-haulers.”
My new column for the Visual Thesauruslooks at slogans for public-health campaigns. Their use (or misuse) has played an important in role during the COVID-19 pandemic (“Stay Home/Save Lives,” “We’re All in This Together,” “Six Feet Apart or Six Feet Under”), and, arguably, an even larger role in past public-health crises such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.
Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers. Here’s an excerpt:
Rhyme is a proven mnemonic device — for examples, see my column on ads that rhyme — and one of the most durable public-health slogans was a short verse: “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases.” It was first used in the United States during the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic.
But it was in the UK, where it was popularized during World War II, that the slogan became … well, infectious. Cartoons by H.M. Bateman leavened the message without diminishing the warning.
The slogan was also used in short public-service films, first by the Ministry of Health and, after the war, by the National Health Service. Decades later, the World Health Organization included it in a short animated film. And the slogan returned to the US in a 1986 episode of the “Thomas the Tank Engine” children's television show, in which two characters mishear “diesel” as “diseasel” and insist that “coughs and sneezles spread diseasels.”
Blog bonus #1: Listen to Bob L’Heureux and the All Mighty Cowboys singing “The C-19 Blues,” with the refrain: “Six feet apart or six feet under.”
Blog bonus #2: Watch Remedy PAC’s “29 Days: America’s Lost Month,” whose slogan/hashtag, #VoteForYourLife, links the COVID-19 pandemic with the November US election.
This month’s book recommendation is The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker staff writer best known for his deeply researched nonfiction (The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda and 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). This new book, however, is a novel, although you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it for journalism.
It’s set in a time very much like the present (the US president is “self-conscious about his girth” and keeps a tanning bed in the White House Cosmetology Room—an actual room in the actual White House), in which a viral pandemic spreads from Indonesia to the hajj in Mecca to a submarine under the Atlantic to North America and beyond. Our hero, epidemiologist Henry Parsons, scrambles to decode the virus and prevent its spread while civilization’s institutions crumble on every continent. If the plot is a little overstuffed and the dialogue speech-y, you’re unlikely to care, because the story is so eerily prescient and timely. (Wright began writing the book in 2015 and turned in the manuscript in 2017, long before COVID-19 broke out.) Wright’s journalistic background serves him well: you’ll learn a lot—painlessly—about viral reproduction, cytokine storms, and the workings of submarines. I listened to the audiobook, which is well narrated by Mark Bramhall: it’s the audio equivalent of a page-turner.
When I was a journalist writing about healthcare and medicine I picked up a lot of medical terminology. Last week, though, I encountered a word I’d somehow never learned: fomites.
Even if parents feel comfortable sending their kids back to school as early as July/August (and many do not), my sense is that teachers are freaking out about the idea of spending all day with our adorable fomites. #schoolsreopening
— Rebecca Bird Grigsby (@danceswithkids) May 4, 2020
The Online Etymology Dictionary definesfomites as “inanimate objects that, when contaminated with or exposed to infectious agents, can retain and transfer the disease,” so technically speaking Rebecca’s usage is inaccurate. (When you’re referring to children, vectors or carriers is a better choice.) Still, I thank Rebecca for the opportunity to chase down the history and etymology of this interesting and pertinent word.
