From contact tracing to Black lives matter and flattening the curve, here are the words and phrases that were popularised this year
This pandemic plagued year has given us scores of new words, phrases, expressions and metaphors. Some are new to the popular vernacular, like quarantine pod. Some are newly relevant after long histories as specialized terms, like contact tracing. Some, like maskne and walktails, are just goofy little turns of phrase that let us find a drop of joy in this disastrous year. (Ade Hogue/The New York Times)
Happy Blursday! Now quit doomscrolling, grab a quarantini and please keep social distancing.
Imagine explaining that sentence to yourself in December 2019.
This year has given us scores of new words, phrases, expressions and metaphors. Some are new to the popular vernacular, like quarantine pod, while others are just newly relevant after long histories as specialized terms, like contact tracing. Some are technical, like superspreader event and aerosol droplets; some are packed with cultural meaning, like systemic racism and panic shopping; and others still, like maskne and walktails, are just goofy little turns of phrase that let us find a drop of joy in this disastrous year.
“What’s fascinating about this year is that so many of these words have gone from being words that we had maybe heard of and we might have used very occasionally, but they’ve now gone to basically inform almost every single conversation,” said Fiona McPherson, a new words editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. In more than 20 years at her job, she said, “I can’t think of anything that has been similar.”
The sheer breadth of words that were popularized this year — everything from medical jargon to social-media-friendly shorthand — was particularly unusual, McPherson said. And for the first time since 2004, when Oxford Languages, the publisher of the OED, started choosing a Word of the Year, it declined to pick just one.
©2019 New York Times News Service