“Flatten the curve” is likely one of the many new phrases launched into the lexicon this 12 months that will’ve made little sense in 2019.
Al Bello/Getty Photos
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Al Bello/Getty Photos
“Flatten the curve” is likely one of the many new phrases launched into the lexicon this 12 months that will’ve made little sense in 2019.
Al Bello/Getty Photos
Only a 12 months in the past, a sentence like “I used to be in self-quarantine so I had nothing to do however doomscroll and located an article about an anti-mask rally that appears like a superspreader occasion” would’ve gotten you pinged as a weirdo, nevertheless it’s be utterly regular for 2020.
That is why the Oxford English Dictionary — which normally pronounces a single phrase of the 12 months — has as a substitute launched the Oxford Languages Words of an Unprecedented Year report, wanting on the many phrases now in our shared vocabulary.
“The English language is studded with phrases from earlier plagues and pandemics, mass social disruption, and an abundance of expressions that fulfil humanity’s perennial want to explain an usually inhospitable world,” the OED report reads. “Although what was genuinely unprecedented this 12 months was the hyper-speed at which the English-speaking world amassed a brand new collective vocabulary referring to the coronavirus, and the way shortly it turned, in lots of cases, a core a part of the language.”
The report notes that by April, the phrase “coronavirus” was extra incessantly used than the phrase “time,” some of the incessantly used nouns within the English language.
Our vocabulary additionally mirrored how we responded to the coronavirus pandemic, in addition to its results on the economic system so phrases reminiscent of “distant,” “Zoom-ready” and “furlough” noticed a pointy rise in utilization.
Not all the phrases on the OED checklist are immediately tied to the coronavirus pandemic. “Black Lives Matter,” “defund,” and “systemic racism” noticed an increase this summer season, coinciding with the protests over racism and police violence.
Final 12 months’s Phrase of the 12 months was “local weather emergency,” however in response to the OED, the utilization of climate-related phrases plummeted earlier this 12 months, and now present indicators of ticking again up once more slowly.
If language is a residing factor, then 2020 qualifies as a progress spurt.
