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OPINION: Towards the end of the year, the major dictionary publishers reveal their word of the year. Most of the 2020 words will raise some surprised eyebrows.
For Collins, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com it was pandemic. Oxford University Press, however, ran a different Word of the Year campaign than usual. Recognizing that 2020 has required rapid change and adaptation, both in language and in other aspects of our lives, the Oxford lexicographers prepared a 38-page report called “Words from an Unprecedented Year.”
Based on data from the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts that includes novels, newspapers, blogs and social networks), they selected the most used words and phrases. These accompany us through the 2020 calendar, reminding us of the pre-Covid forest fires and highlighting momentous social and political experiences of the year with conspiracy theory, cancel cropand Black lives matter.
James Brickwood / Sydney Morning Herald
It seems difficult to remember now that, in early 2020, “forest fires” was a widely used word. (File photo)
Half of the 16 words or phrases in the 2020 Oxford timeline relate to the pandemic (although, interestingly, these do not include the word pandemic himself), including incoming mail and superspreader, which also relate to US politics and events related to the presidential elections. Recently, moving up the popularity stakes is moonshot (UK Government Covid Mass Testing Program).
READ MORE:
* Merriam-Webster’s 2020 word of the year is one you definitely know
* Coronavirus: Covid-19 words added to the Oxford Dictionary
* Coronavirus: the new words and phrases that accompany it
Statistics on language use reflect patterns of social adaptations and also how they differ from one group to another, or from one country to another. They provide a useful window on what we are dealing with. So we see that, as the year progressed, the label COVID-19 was replaced by coronavirus, and more recently by COVID-19 (without 19).
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Less than a year ago, “zoom” typically referred to photography, rather than online meetings.
The Oxford report notes that the most popular words that followed the word remote in 2019 they were village, island, control, Location and supervision. While supervision remains on the list for 2020, the others have been replaced by learning, working, personaland instruction. In 2019, focus typically coexisted with words related to photography. In 2020, the list of focus-related words includes via, meetings and conference.
These lists provide a wealth of fascinating material for those interested in the language. Many of the examples listed above involve changes in the frequency with which certain words or combinations of words are used. Another form of linguistic innovation is the reuse of existing words – think about what the following words meant to you a year ago, if at all, and what they might mean to you now: bubble, flatten curve, lock, leave, first line.
Another form of change is the creation of new words and phrases that become common, such as managed isolation and isolation voucher, are you silent and turn on the sound. One of my favorite types of linguistic creativity is blending, in which two words or phrases are combined to form a new one.
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Paul Warren is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington.
Consider examples like covidiot, coronials (a mix of coronavirus and millennials to denote babies born during Covid) and anthropause (since anthropology and pause, referring to the slowdown in travel and other forms of human activity during 2020). OR Blursday, because when your remote work means you no longer know what day of the week it is, and job, for when work and vacation time become less easy to separate. An interesting case is shame about the mask (presumably by analogy with shame the body), interesting because it has been attested to with opposite meanings, with a change as the pandemic spread: shaming someone for wearing a mask or not.
Closer to home, the Australian National Dictionary Center chose I like this as word of the year, a shortened form of isolation, used in phrases like in iso, baked iso, iso cut (for homemade haircuts made during the confinement). Now let me shed a little hand sanitizer and prepare another iso milk.
* Paul Warren is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. He teaches and researches New Zealand English, phonetics, and language psychology, and is the author of Uptalk (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
