If we can look on the bright side, 2020 brought and taught us many new words.
Just one year ago, covidiots didn’t exist. We had never experienced a blursday or drunk a quarantini, and superspreader had an entirely different connotation. Back in 2019, many of us may have been doomscrolling, but who knew it had a name?
Time magazine featured all of these neologisms and more in a Year in Language feature in the Dec.14/28 issue.
In brief, a covidiot is somebody who refuses to wear a mask and social-distance (another new term) during a pandemic. Blursday is confusion over the day of the week because the world has basically been on modified house arrest since March. Or maybe the uncertainty about whether it’s Saturday or Wednesday comes from drinking too many quarantine martinis.
Superspreader refers to events where a bunch of covidiots get together and ignore public-health guidelines, leading to increased coronavirus spread. And doomscrolling is flipping through social media to see what fresh hell has been unleashed today.
This is the year when all fortune tellers should have been put out of business, because nobody peered into our palms in 2019 and prognosticated anything like the past 10 months. It’s also the year when students and teachers received crash courses in hitherto unknown educational models like hybrid schedules and remote learning.
Last December, Zoom was a sound effect in comic books and cartoons, not a platform to host everything from a huge gathering of executives to little Timmy’s 6th birthday party. Among other things, 2020 recontextualized the opening of “The Brady Bunch,” so housekeeper Alice will now always look like the last person to show up for a meeting where nobody else has turned off their cameras, despite everybody knowing how to mute their microphones.
I’ll never think of “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” in the same way again.
The past year also took personification to new levels. The practice of portraying an incoming year as a baby dates back to ancient times, according to “Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things,” when new harvest cycles were celebrated with images of infants, a visual shorthand that became wedded to the new year by Germans in the 14th century and traveled with them to the New World.
But I’m hard pressed to think of any other year so often addressed as a living, sentient being. As in, “Oh, 2020, how I despise you!” Or, “That’s just so 2020!,” referring to anything from a windshield crack to the shuttering of the family business. The calendar itself has become the ultimate scapegoat, a living, breathing embodiment of bad luck.
It wouldn’t surprise me if people started burning and burying the year in effigy over the next several days, just to make sure it’s good and gone.
Not to sound like the voice of doom and gloom here, but despite good news on the vaccine front, the first few months of 2021 could very well be touted as “the sequel to 2020 nobody asked for” regarding public health, mortality, the economy and education.
Let’s hope not.
I prefer to look on the positive. In a few more weeks, the tweeting disinformation disseminator in the White House will either leave willingly or be evicted forcibly. We can look forward to a more unified federal and state response to the pandemic, coupled with a straightforward message about vaccine safety.
With luck and hard work, we should be able to resume more if not all of our day-to-day activities by late spring and early summer, with a resultant uptick in the public mood and the economy.
Heck, my threshold for the new year is set so low that just having mail delivered in a timely way again would satisfy me.
Not needing to learn any more new words for a virus-ravaged world? That would be, to quote a credit-card company, priceless.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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