Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Clip and save! Your COVID-19 crisis glossary




     Every prolonged crisis creates its own vocabulary. A special set of new words that linger. World War II (which lasted five years longer than the current crisis, so quit yer griping) is 75 years in the past. But many can reel off the terms it gave us: atom bomb, bazooka, commando, D-Day. And that’s just A-B-C-D.
     So what are the words our grandchildren will use regarding the current calamity? No doubt it will be covered in their “C29: Early 21st Century America, Decline and Disaster” class. A primer:

Coronavirus (kə-ˈrō-nə-ˌvī-rəs) n. Single-strand RNA virus studded with knobby projections (corona is Latin for crown). There are many coronaviruses — MERS, SARS, etc. — so the one causing trouble now was at first called the “new” or “novel” coronavirus, prefixes now typically dropped as superfluous. Usage: “More than a month since he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about this once-in-a-generation crisis.” — The Atlantic
COVID-19 (koh-vid naine-TEEN) n. Abbr. of “Coronavirus disease 2019,” the illness caused by a strain of coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Some news outlets, such as the New York Times, use lowercase (“Covid-19”), but that looks like the name of a South Korean boy band. Usage: “Rupert Murdoch, Fox News’ Covid-19 misinformation is a danger to public health.” — The Guardian
Covidiot (koh-vid-ee-et) n. The Urban Dictionary defines this as “someone who ignores the warnings regarding public health or safety.” Also used to describe someone hoarding goods, selfishly denying them to others. Usage: “Q: What do you call an armed member of a radical group of lockdown protestors? A: A Branch Covidiot.” — George Takei

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6 comments:

  1. Covidiot = Donald Trump! Much shorter definition than yours.

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  2. Who said we don't have baseball? Steinberg just hit it outta the park!

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  3. "Comorbitity." although certainly not unknown in the medical community, it seems to be comming into general use "I have two forms of comorbidity, cardiomyopathy and diabetes. but not high blood pressure." Me.

    Tom

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  4. Mike Pence won't wear a mask because it "blocks his eyes"...and his boss behaves like a deranged and power-mad "not-see"...so that makes them "co-vidiots."

    Terrible pun? Yeah...but too good (or bad) to resist.

    Overdosing on too many TV newscasts with your partner also creates a pair of co-vidiots. There's now a vaccine for that, which saves both eyeballs and heads: No live TV before 6 p.m. We tried it. It works.

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  5. Reminds me of the Devil’s Dictionary, which Bierce put together from pieces he had published over the years. Maybe we can look forward to something of that sort from Neil one of these days.

    John

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