The Shifting Vocabulary of Whatever We're Calling That Disease This Week - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
23 April 2020

The Shifting Vocabulary of Whatever We’re Calling That Disease This Week

In the last few months all the peoples of the earth have been impacted by and are dealing with a disease that has killed thousands of our fellow humans – even a few supercilious Darwinians – and we don’t even agree on what to label it. Consider these many documented terms crowding up and down the steps of that Babylonian ziggurat:

Wuhan virus
Wuhan flu
Chinese virus
CCP Virus
Bat virus
Bat flu
Batflu
Corona virus
Coronavirus
CoronaVirus
Covid-19
COVID-19
COVID19
Covid19
SARS-CoV-2
C-19
C19

If we’re going to work together (or, rather, #together apart) in order to survive a certain disease, we should agree on what that disease is.

Another problem is the fuzzy filler-language of tired and inappropriate metaphors and allusions that block effective communications. Consider this limited sampling:

Wartime president
War footing
Our generation’s Pearl Harbor
Our generation’s Normandy
Our generation’s 9/11
War
Like World War II
In the trenches
Front lines
Frontlines
Silent enemy but an enemy

Instead of saying what an issue is, the lazy writer or speaker pulls from a lifetime of hand-me-down puffery to puff further nonsense. Consider the typical graduation speech (which we are unlikely to hear this year because of a disease, not because of a Nazi invasion) with its keys that are forever opening dreams or roads or rainbows or love, never anything, such a lock, that a key in fact opens.

Metaphorical language certainly has its purposes. One does not imagine, say, John Wayne as Marshal Cogburn calling out to Lucky Ned Pepper, “I disapprove of your inappropriate response to my notification of your lawful arrest predicated upon a federal warrant, you wretched man, and propose to counter your further criminal actions with all the power granted to me in my office under the sanctions of the law!” as an effective challenge.

When we speak of contracts, business, science, research, and health care (NOT “healthcare”), though, metaphors and careless language compromise effective communication and thus our purposes. Using language accurately is essential in most of life’s transactions, and it is certainly essential now.

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