The coronavirus is, as of this writing (28th June 2020), the hottest topic on social media and the Internet at large: with the world in the throes of the pandemic, an English-only Google search today nets 17,290 million hits for COVID-19 and 5,800 million for coronavirus (cf. This somewhat inevitably leads to the proliferation and accretion of synonyms and near-synonyms in those areas that are of particular interest to us, a phenomenon that is sometimes termed “overlexicalisation” (Halliday 1976:571 cf. In the global village we live in, where what we say on these media can reach half the world’s population within seconds, our main concerns and topics of conversation tend to be the same almost everywhere. One of the things they do more often than we think is to create new words and new meanings for old ones. It enables people to communicate freely and openly, thus allowing the researcher to observe what they do when they feel they cannot be identified. Although the toxic effects of online disinhibition are not to be overlooked (see Lapidot-Lefler/Barak 2012 Rösner/Krämer 2016), there is no doubt that the anonymity of social networks is a boon to slang lexicologists and lexicographers. Partly because of its dazzling speed, partly because of its anonymous or semi-anonymous nature, social media interaction fuels creativity and speeds up the birth of new words and phrases. Besides helping to take the edge off reality, ingenious lexical innovations also serve to build a sense of bonding in the midst of adversity.įrom a linguistic viewpoint, the COVID-19 pandemic would be no different from any other crisis were it not for the fact that, at least during the lockdown period, much of our daily communication has taken place online, often via social media. In times of crisis, creating words is “a ‘sick’ (in the good sense) way of pulling through” (Burridge/Manns 2020), and slang, wordplay and verbal humour are the best coping mechanisms for the fear and anxiety we all feel, as has been demonstrated in the context of war, the crisis par excellence (see Dickson 2011 Doyle/Walker 2012 Dalzell 2014). All this comes as no surprise to the student of slang. Added to that, a flurry of informal synonyms for COVID-19, itself a reduced version of coronavirus disease 2019, have sprung up. These include not only existing specialist terms from the fields of medicine, epidemiology and sociology, such as PCR test, community spread and flatten the curve, but also new words and phrases like covidiot, an epithet for someone who behaves with blatant disregard for the safety of others, infit, a clever coinage for the outfit we wear during lockdown (see Thorne 2020), and squash the sombrero, Boris Johnson’s spur-of-the-moment riff on flatten the curve. With the outbreak of the coronavirus in late December 2019 and the ensuing pandemic in early March 2020, a whole host of scientific terms and formal and semantic innovations have become part of our everyday conversations. (Twitter user from Texas, 15th March 2020) 1 Introduction ![]() These names: the only things thriving in this economy. (Twitter user from Johannesburgh, 5th March 2020)īoomer Remover. The Rona, Coronareezy, The Corone, Corones, The coros. Guys these names i’m seeing for this disease. In these dark times, it is also a sad testimony to how some of our primitive fears have come to be reflected in our pandemic lexicon. In a different context, this study might be deemed just a celebration of the creative levity and wit of English speakers when faced with adversity. ![]() The author identifies and discusses a set of categories that help to better understand the attitudes behind these words, some of which bespeak a desire to confront the grim reality of disease, while others – the majority, in fact – seek to denigrate and stigmatise its “ideal victims” (the baby boomers) or its “evil perpetrators” (the Chinese). This study is based on a personally compiled corpus of tweets covering the period from late January to late May 2020 and aims to work out what mechanisms underpin the creation and use of some two hundred and seventy synonyms, paying particular attention to the role of slang, wordplay, verbal humour, bigotry and xenophobia. The myriad unofficial synonyms for COVID-19 that we currently have at our disposal provide an extreme example of overlexicalisation, and it is not so much the number that is impressive as the sheer speed at which they have been coined. Since the coronavirus outbreak began to spread worldwide in the early months of 2020, English speakers have been coming up with new names for the disease at a rate of knots.
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