You've learned how to wear a mask. You've learned how to estimate six feet. You learned how to Zoom and how to wash your hands and how to disinfect a door handle. You might even have, perish the thought, learned how to cook. You didn't do any of these things because you wanted to, but because that's just the way things are these days, and it's what you have to do to, if not survive, than at least to keep going. It's either that, or just sit in a chair and stare at your screen all day. Oh yeah: you learned how to do that too.
They say that any day you learn something new it's a good day. By that metric there have been a lot of good days in the midst of the bad, even if what we're learning is stuff we'd rather not be dealing with. But in addition to these practical skills, there's another area where you've also gained some IQ points even if you haven't been trying. That's because just by virtue of dealing with the current situation your vocabulary has expanded. Even if you aren't a word nerd, you've had to add to your lexicon just to be able understand what all the chatter is about. It may not be the same as studying Shakespeare, but verily, 'tis more useful.
For example, before this all started, when had you heard the phrase "social distancing?" Likely never. And if someone had said it, you would have stated the obvious: it's an oxymoron. After all, how can you be social, yet distant? Yet here we are. Doesn't matter who you are talking to or what you are talking about, you can't swing a cat (a six-foot feline to be safe) without hitting that construct.
Then there are words that you likely used sporadically, but which now pepper your sentences like salt. Before you might have gone a day or more without saying the words "virtual" or "essential" or "curve." And if you did say one of them it was in reference to reality, ingredients or a ball, not a meeting, a worker or an infection rate. Likewise, you used to think of a bubble as something that was caused by soap, and a pod as something contained a pea. But now I defy you to hear the word "mask" and not think surgical before you think Halloween.
From a medical perspective, most of us get tongue tied saying anything other than "it hurts." But now I can say "asymptomatic" as easily as I can say "baseball". I also know that an N95 is not the part of my gas grill that connects the tank to the burners but a very specific type of PPE, yet another term I had never heard of before March. And drugs? Personally, I have problem saying aceta – acetamen – you know, Tylenol. Now Hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir roll off my tongue as easily as aspirin and band-aid.
Even slang has been added and adapted. Those breakouts you get on your skin under your mask is maskne, while the drink you mix to take the edge off of the day is a quarantini. You don't' want to get zoombombed and have an outsider interrupt your video call, and if you took time off but couldn't go anywhere you hopefully enjoyed your coronacation. And on the pejorative side of the ledger those who won't wear a mask are maskholes, while those who basically treat this whole thing as a hoax are covidiots.
While estimates are that native speakers have a vocabulary of 20,000 to 35,000 words, most folks get through their day with just a thousand. As needed, you can reach into your memory banks and retrieve others, be it the specialized vocabulary needed for a tennis game, baking a cake or installing a new faucet. Well, now you have a whole new subset of a subset, that of "words useful in a health emergency, specifically a worldwide pandemic." Like many things, odds are that just when you get a firm grasp on the full suite, like ventilators and super-spreader and contact tracing, it'll all be over and you can let all of it slip to the background, at least for a while.
On that last point, we can only hope.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes language and its intricacies. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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