Coronaspeak: Tracking language in a lockdown' by Amanda Laugesen
Lexicographers, not just newspapers and television, respond to disasters. Language is never fixed, never finished, never done. In recent months, language has been shaped by the coronavirus. In this episode, Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at ANU and editor of The Australian National Dictionary, discusses coronaspeak, the language of lockdown.
The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
Subscribe via iTunes, Google, or Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.
Music credit: 'Moonrise' and 'Negentropy' by Chad Crouch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
Comments (3)
I am sure it’s a little like the early months of a total war like World War II, when people were constantly astounded by the speed of events and their surprisingness, and felt the floor was shifting under their feet. We naturally look for shared terms to normalise new experiences. Six weeks ago, most people in my circle didn't know what Zoom was. Now we meet like that all the time, saying, Sorry, have to hang up now, got a Zoom meeting soon and I must read the agenda papers.
It's like the argot of high schools, the in-words your club or ‘pack’ adopts to distinguish itself, or the semi-specialised language of shipboard life we pick up two days out of port (“Meet you at the aft rail before cocktails”, “I wonder how many knots we made today”, etc. An unfortunate example and I’m sorry. )
Apropos of Zoom and wfh, can you and team discover if there’s a useful word for the phenomenon I’ve observed, whereby at least the female participants in a Zoom meeting will swap their daggy cardigan for a clean shirt, bright scarf and earrings and pop on a bit of lippy, while staying in their stained trakky daks and ugg boots out of camera range? And if you don’t find the term, please invent one or set up a competition for one.