Category: infectious diseases
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From stigma to sigma? The covid variant naming conundrum continues
On 31 May the World Health Organisation tweeted: “Today WHO has announced a new naming system for key #COVID19 variants. The labels are based on the Greek alphabet (i.e. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc), making them simple, easy to say and remember.” In her retweet of that tweet Alice Roberts said “…delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta,…
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Walls, wars and waves: Some more thoughts on covid metaphors
The vaccination of the UK population has gone extremely well. There is still a race though between vaccinating against the covid virus and the emergence or introduction of new virus variants. However, fears of hospitals being overwhelmed by covid patients are dwindling. While this is going on, I noticed a metaphor that I had not…
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The coronavirus: A global metaphor
In cognitive linguistics there is a long-running debate about whether some metaphors are universal or near-universal or whether metaphors are more culture specific. I don’t really want to get into that controversy here, but recent work by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem made me think about it again. In this post I argue that it might be good for…
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How the pandemic is shaping worldviews
This is a guest post by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem. Ahmed is a postdoc in linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany, and former Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He is the author of Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-Based Experimental Study (Routledge, 2019). *** It is…
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A new variant in covid speak
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Reynolds alerted me to an interesting new variant in covid speak, a metaphor used by the Canadian Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam in the context of talking about vaccines and variants (a variant is a virus with one or two mutations). As reported by CBC on March…
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From covidiots to vaxxies: How our pandemic language changed over a year
When the pandemic started in early 2020, I began to record some of the changes in our language that this global upheaval brought with it. The language of war was everywhere, a type of language that we are quite used to from other health emergencies. But a new language also began to emerge. We started…
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Naming without shaming: A virus communication conundrum
We have all heard about the Kent strain of the coronavirus, or the UK or English strain for that matter, or the South African strain, or the Brazilian strain, not to forget the despicable references to the China or Wuhan virus by a former president of the United States. It’s good that we know about…
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Mutation, vaccination, communication
It is extremely difficult to keep up with pandemic news at the moment. We are now a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and instead of just running away from the virus through social distancing, we are now engaging in a race with it through vaccination. Whether we will win the race depends on how many…
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Vaccines: Between hope and hesitancy
I was listening to the BBC Today programme on Saturday morning (30 January, 2020), becoming rather depressed about the current vaccine row, when I heard Nick Robinson talk about something I had wondered about: the absence of happy vaccination cards – a real gap in the greeting cards market. I had used an online card…
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Lockdown fatigue: A tale of two discourses
A while ago I wrote a brief post on ‘lockdown words’, amongst them ‘lockdown fatigue’. At the time I hadn’t noticed all the other quasi-synonyms, apart from ‘lockdown lethargy’. Over time more words crept past my horizon: behavioural fatigue, pandemic fatigue, isolation fatigue, quarantine fatigue and so on. In the UK, we are now in…
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