WHILE visual imagery is often the most obvious signifier of a time in history, words are also an incredibly important symbol of impactful moments, unifying nations worldwide.
Over the years, the Oxford English Dictionary has released the ‘Oxford Word of the Year’, which is a word or expression that has garnered significant attention, or captured the zeitgeist of the people.
This year has proved unsurprisingly difficult in selecting only one word, so for 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary released a series of words that, as the New York Times put it, highlighted ‘the coronavirus pandemic’s swift and sudden linguistic impact on English’.
According to the New York Times article, the year started trending with ‘impeachment’ in reference to the soon-to-be-former American president Donald Trump, but by April this was quick overtaken by ‘coronavirus’ as the most commonly used noun in English.
Although the word was first coined in 1968, it was generally limited to medical contexts, but soon became a common term in households the world over as the pandemic struck.
‘Pandemic’, too, increased substantially, shooting up by more than 5 7000% on the previous year.
Also connected with the ongoing pandemic were interesting new phrases such as:
* Covidiots – Deniers of the virus and those who think wearing a mask makes them look weak
* Doomscrolling – Constantly seeking end-of-days information related to the virus
* Blursday – The blending together of weekdays amid lockdown measures
Other words and phrases that made their appearance in our lexicon included:
* Social distancing
* Flatten the curve
* Lockdown
* Remote / remotely
* Stay-at-home
Zoom parties
Another source, Dictionary.com, has included a number of other commonly-used terms for 2020, among them ‘quarantine’, ‘Zoom parties’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘entanglement’, ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘hellacious’ (which means astonishing).
No doubt, in South Africa, we could add a few ourselves, such as ‘booze ban’, ‘tobacco ban’, ‘lockdown levels’ and ‘curfew’.
So, how does 2020 compare to previous years in terms of ‘Oxford Word of the Year’? Well here’s a look at the past decade summed up in just one word…
* 2019: Climate Emergency (runners-up included ‘climate crisis’, ‘climate denial’, ‘eco-anxiety’, ‘ecocide’, ‘extinction’, ‘flight shame’, ‘global heating’, ‘net zero’ and ‘plant-based’)
* 2018: Toxic (some runners-up included ‘gaslighting’, ‘incel’, ‘techlash’, ‘gammon’, ‘cakeism’, ‘overtourism’ and ‘orbiting’.)
* 2017: Youthquake
* 2016: Post-truth
* 2015: [Crying with laughter emoji]. Yes, an emoji actually made the Word of the Year!
* 2014: Vape
* 2013: Selfie
* 2012: Omnishambles (UK) and GIF (US)
* 2011: Squeezed middle
* 2010: Big society (UK) and refudiate (US)
There’s definitely been a trend towards more life-threatening phrases and terminologies as the years have gone by.
All we can hope is that there is a much more positive shift as we head on to 2021!
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