Too many words are being invented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for me to pick just one this week. Thus this update of my March 16 post, which covered quarantini, coronials, coronadouche, and other coinages, some of which have already slipped out of usage.
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What could be more timely, more fitting, more historic, and more folkloric* than a post about disease-curses? They’re very much a thing in Dutch—where kanker (cancer) is just about the worst thing you could wish upon an enemy—and in Yiddish, where you might say about someone you despise, “He should have Pharaoh’s plagues and Job’s scabies.”
I write about those curses and many others in my latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about all kinds of swearing. Take a break from coronavirus coverage and those maddening Rose Garden briefings to learn a thing or two about imprecations with some real bite.
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* Thank you, Car Guys.
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In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus I look at some new words—thoughtful, creative, even playful—that have been coined in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve written about some of these words here on the blog; the column updates the list to include additional terms, from acronyms like CARES to new compounds like Zoom-bombing.
Access to my column is restricted to subscribers for three months (and if you want to read more articles like this one, please subscribe). Here’s an excerpt:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: New virus, new words" »
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I was out on my government-sanctioned neighborhood walk during Sunday’s Rose Garden COVID-19 briefing. When I returned I noticed this tweet from writer and podcaster Bob Cesca.
The president doesn’t know how to pronounce “scourge” yet he keeps repeating it.
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) March 29, 2020
How does he pronounce scourge? I couldn’t find audio, but I did find other comments indicating that he rhymes it with gorge instead of with urge (the standard pronunciation).
It’s a favorite word of his (or, more likely, of one of his speechwriters), and [skohrj] is his preferred, irregular pronunciation. In his March 23, 2020, COVID-19 briefing he referred to COVID-19 twice as “the invisible scourge”; he’s also called it “this hidden scourge.” (At least he’s stopped calling it the “Chinese coronavirus.”) He talked about “the scourge [skohrj] of anti-Semitism” after the 2018 mass shooting in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, and “the scourge [skohrj] of drug addiction in America” in a March 2018 speech in New Hampshire. He also mentioned “the scourge [skohrj] of drug addiction” in his 2018 State of the Union address. (See comment from “Dagwood” on this Language Log post.)
With all this repetition, you’d think someone would have coached him on the correct pronunciation. On the other hand, this is a man who pronounces “plasma” as “plozma.” (And more: Here’s The Daily Show’s 2019 reel of Trumpian mispronunciations.)
The original meaning of scourge: a whip or lash
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This month’s book recommendation is I Like to Watch (2019), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Emily Nussbaum. The book collects a decade’s worth of Nussbaum’s reviews and essays for the New Yorker and other publications, including one written especially for the book. Nussbaum is such a good writer that she made me care about shows that hadn’t appealed to me (I’ve watched exactly one episode each, for example, of “The Sopranos,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Lost”). And she made me care even more deeply about subjects I was already drawn to, like the complicated career of Joan Rivers and the way the 2016 presidential election made “jokes” unfunny. (You can read the jokes essay—one of the best pieces of writing to come out of that twisted season—here.)
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Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve been under a shelter-in-place directive in response to the COVID-19 health crisis since Tuesday, March 18. On March 20, California Governor Gavin Newsom expanded shelter-in-place to all of the state’s 40 million residents, with no set end date. We’re hunkering down indoors, dashing out only for essential activities (including fresh-air exercise that observes safe physical distancing from other humans).
Shelter-in-place has been borrowed for this unprecedented crisis from earlier applications in emergency management. In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombings, Ben Zimmer traced the phrase’s origins to “Cold War scenarios of nuclear fallout.” The earliest usage he found was in a 1976 congressional hearing on civil defense: the general idea is to encourage people to stay at home, indoors, rather than evacuate to a central gathering spot. Shelter-in-place has since been pressed into service for weather emergencies such as hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes as well as for the all-too-familiar-by-now active-shooter situations. (In ordering New York State’s version of shelter-in-place, which went into effect at 8 p.m. March 22, Governor Andrew Cuomo eschewed “shelter-in-place” because the term “evoked active shooter situations and nuclear war,” according to a New York Times story. Instead, the order is called PAUSE—the acronym awkwardly stands for “Policies Assure Uniform Safety for Everyone.”)
So much for the whole phrase. But what about the verb—where does shelter come from, and what has it signified over the years?
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Like the rest of the Bay Area, I’m sheltering in place, waiting out the coronavirus crisis. But I’m still open for business: in fact, I’ve had a couple of small naming jobs this week. Under SIP, we’re still allowed to go outside for essential errands and exercise, and I’ve been taking full advantage (and taking photos). I intend to continue publishing here once or twice a week, and would be interested to know what you’d like to read about.
In the meantime, here are some things I found interesting.
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How’s everyone doing? Self-quarantining? Social distancing? Catching up on podcasts/the New Yorker/housecleaning? Drinking quarantinis and coronaritas while awaiting the #Coronapocalypse?
One option for a quarantini, via Marilyn Starkloff. Coronarita recipes using Corona brand beer have been around for several years; the 2020 pandemic version is here. This Podcast Will Kill You tweeted about quarantini and placeborita cocktails even earlier, on February 4.
Another option.
Me? I’m fine; thanks for asking. I’m happy to live in California, where we have a mensch for a governor. (Compare and contrast.) And I’m cheered by the inventive linguistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, examples of which I bring you today.
(Thanks to Ben Zimmer for coining #coronacoinages. I’m winging it with some of the definitions; I welcome refinements and additions in the comments.)
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I’ve published a new story on Medium about how the names we give diseases—COVID-19, “Wuhan virus,” “Chinese coronavirus”—affect the way we think about illness and populations.
It’s timely but not completely grim: I included some fun stuff about syphilis. Yes, syphilis!
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Another March, another health-care crisis, another chance to look at debacle, a French import with connections to spring, medicine, and failure.
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