The list of things that have changed because of the pandemic is long. It's changed how we work. No more do most workers commute to offices on a 9 to 5 schedule: remote work and variable hours are the norm rather than the exception. It's changed how we educate students from kindergarten to college: remote classes and distance learning, formerly reserved for a small subset of students, are being integrated into schoolrooms in a way as to make snow days obsolete. It's changed how we furnish our homes, what we eat, even how we dress. And it seems that it has also changed what we say and what we hear.
At the most basic level we've added a whole raft of words and phrases to our everyday lexicon. Strictly speaking, the terms are not new. But while we might have heard them before, we would be hard pressed to recall the last time we used them in a sentence. Now, hardly a day goes by without one of them leaving our lips. The very words themselves - pandemic, epidemic, outbreak - were the stuff of Hollywood movies. Likewise, quarantine, super-spreader and contact tracing were only to be found in dystopian novels. Beyond those there was social and there was distance, but the oxymoronic thought of putting the two together never occurred to us. Now you can hardly go a day without putting the compound phrase into play. (In truth, it's not a new construct: it was first quoted in 1824, but was used to describe the separation between different races, classes or ethnicities.) And the use of the "Z" word - as in Zoom - as a verb was not used as a mechanism for meeting face-to-face, but more likely a person quoting "The Honeymooners" as Ralph laid into Alice: "Bang! Zoom! You're going to the moon!"
On the other side of the coin, the way we hear words and process them has also changed. According to a study in PLOS ONE, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific journal from the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the pandemic presented an opportunity too good to pass up to do some research on speech and hearing. Prior similar research had looked at how major events like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination had affected cognitive areas, such as memory and recall. But these were quick incidents, and the research focused on the effect and retention of so called "flashbulb memories." The pandemic offered a unique chance to look at a sustained event as experienced by a large sample size, namely every living person.
The researchers looked at how our common experience affected what we were hearing. They took speech samples and asked test subjects to repeat back what they heard. But in certain spots they added an obscuring sound, in this case a coughing sound effect. That forced people to "fill in the blanks" to make sense of what they thought they were hearing.
Unsurprisingly, given our now common experiences and shared perspectives, the test subjects heard pandemic-related words as opposed to other possibilities, and indeed, what was actually said. For instance, when the sample word was "injection" but mixed with and slightly obscured by a cough, a statistically significant number heard not "injection" but "infection." Likewise they heard "isolation" instead of "oscillation," "sheltering" rather than "sweltering" and, hardly surprising, "mask" in place of "task."
While context could, of course, make the word selection more apparent, the research does indicate how our biases shift in favor of what's on our mind. It's a reversal of Abraham Maslow quote how if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. In this case, if everything looks like COVID (every sniffle, every cough, every fever), then everything we hear and every response we have is in relation to that.
In the classic definition, a Freudian slip is when we mean to say one thing but say something else, revealing something that weighs on our unconscious. (Or as one wag put it, it's when you say one thing and mean your mother.) In this case, it's as if that construct has been flipped. Our COVID experience has meant that whatever we hear we associate with the disease, regardless of what was actually said. So, thanks for reading, stay safe, and stay on mask. Er, task.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford has returned to sort-of-normal, whatever that means. 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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