Pandemic, lockdown and Megxit: the most influential words of 2020
How do we get new words and how do old words get a fresh twist? In normal times, it’s a well-worn process, linguistic business as usual. There will be a new invention or thing to buy, such as “wifi” (1999) or an “iPod” (2001). People will pick up on trends or changes in behaviour and give them labels such as “crowdfund” (2008) or “catfish” (2012). Last year, the Guardian identified “femtech” and “cancelled” as among the words that embodied 2019. This year, you may have noticed, has been a bit different, the verbal equivalent of a dawn raid: a few insistent items of vocabulary have smashed down the front door and pointed guns at us while we cower under the duvet. And while it’s right that the changes wreaked by the virus dominate this year’s list, there have been other developments. As the big dictionaries unveil their wotys (words of the year), we ask which ones – for good or ill – best capture the spirit of 2020.
Pandemic
The kingpin. Yes, there is coronavirus, Covid-19, Sars-CoV-2, ’rona, all the various guises this hideous pathogen has taken, with their particular emphases, technical meanings and so on. But the word that best describes the situation we are in, the sheer scale of it, the can’t-really-think-about-anything-else-ness of it, is “pandemic”.
It is built on two words from ancient Greek – pan, meaning “all”, and demos, “people” – and has been used in the sense of “affecting everyone” since the 17th century. Interestingly, the Greek derivation means it chimes ominously with two other English words, “pandemonium” (a word coined by Milton, the “abode of all the demons” in his Paradise Lost) and “panic” (which has its own interesting etymology, but that is another story). The first great pandemic of the 21st century has indeed created panic and pandemonium – and there appears to be no panacea (“cure-all”) in sight.
Herd immunity
Yes, I know it’s two words, but I will take my cue from Oxford Dictionaries’ 2019 woty, “climate emergency”, and nominate this potent combination for 2020. Apart from anything else, it shows how scientific concepts can acquire political connotations and how every new problem seems to get fed into a social media sausage machine, emerging with familiar “culture war” contours. At the beginning of the crisis, it was not clear that lockdown was somehow more leftwing or going without a mask was a “Maga” gesture, for example.
Herd immunity is a case in point: it entered 2020 an uncontroversial concept in epidemiology, the state of protection from a disease that results either from vaccination or from most people having had it. It acquired an evil reputation partly because of Boris Johnson’s comments during an interview in March: “One of the theories is that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population.” Suspicions that the government might be volunteering our chins for the task were not dispelled by rumours of Dominic Cummings’ position, summarised in one report as “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.
Lockdown
Like pandemic, lockdown – which Collins has declared its winner – was already reasonably familiar. But the specific meaning it has taken on – legal restrictions including confinement to the home in order to stymie the spread of the virus – means it will for ever be linked with disease control. It was originally used to describe keeping prisoners in their cells as a security measure after a disturbance – hence the “lock” element. By analogy, it was also used to talk about terrorist attacks or school shootings. That kind of lockdown would last a few hours until the area in question was made safe. Now, it seems more like drudgery, a long, boring staycation in which many pleasures we took completely for granted – parties, gigs, drinks with friends – are denied us.
Zoom
Zoom is 2020’s most prevalent eponym: a word derived from a proper noun, in this case, the name of a video-conferencing company. As such, it stands in the grand tradition of Hoover, Portaloo, Kleenex and Google, products so successful that they enter into common parlance and keep their companies’ trademark protection officers busy (if we hear from any of them, we will try to invoke a linguistic exemption). They may be wasting their time, however. Once a word escapes into popular culture like this, it takes on a life of its own. “Zoom” has become a verb – “are we Zooming tonight?”– and is being applied to pretty much any platform that supports live video, regardless of who made the software: “Can we do the Zoom via Google Meet?” At this point, perhaps we should spare a thought for Skype, which appears, from the branding point of view at least, to have had a very bad pandemic.
Megxit
Let’s leave the virus behind for a moment and cast our minds back to simpler times, when royal gossip could dominate the news cycle for days at a time. Early in January, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, announced that they would step back as “senior” members of the royal family. Although Harry had every reason for wanting to escape the constant scrutiny of the British press, the event was called “Megxit”, playing perhaps on the sexist trope of the new woman who sweeps in and turns a man against his friends. But it may have boiled down to the fact that her name contains a velar consonant, allowing it to blend seamlessly with the “-xit” suffix, which, as the Brexit saga ran out of steam, was in dire need of new employment.
Antifa
Donald Trump’s relentless stoking of tensions helped ensure that 2020 was a year of continued political and social upheaval in the US. On 31 May, he tweeted: “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization”. Protests had followed the police killing of George Floyd, an African American man from Minneapolis, and Trump’s response was to blame the radical left (needless to say, his threat against what is a loose coalition, rather than an organisation, was never carried out).
This was not Antifa’s first rodeo, though. In 2017, after clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, it made the Oxford woty shortlist, with the dictionary pointing out that it was borrowed from the German Antifaschistische Aktion, after a network of antifascist groups established before the second world war. If you are still wondering about the pronunciation, you can say it any way you like: a stress on the first syllable (ANtifa) and on the second (AnTIfa) both seem to be common. Trump, for what it’s worth, says AnTIfa.
BLM
In reality, the shockwaves from Floyd’s death spread far beyond a few dedicated activist groups. Black Lives Matter, a movement that began in 2013, once again became emblematic of the fight for racial justice and was used so often that its initials no longer need further explanation. The slogan was adopted not just in the US, but across the world, with rallies in Canada, Australia and across Europe. In Britain, it spurred a new reckoning with our past and led to the most dramatic images of protest for a generation: the toppling of a statue of the slave-owner Edward Colston and its jubilant dumping in the harbour.
Karen
The US’s summer of race also popularised “Karen”, the caricature of a patronising middle-class white woman who is either blithely unaware of her racial privilege or prepared to use it to punish or humiliate people of colour. “Central park Karen”, for example, was the label given to a woman who called the police on a black birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, who had asked her to put her dog on a lead. The African American commentator Karen Grigsby Bates (she ought to know, right?) places “Karen” in a lineage of punching-up terms that includes “Becky” and “Miss Ann”. Others point out that the word has been weaponised by misogynists to abuse and denigrate women in nasty ways. Both are true, but that is the thing about words: they can mean different things in different mouths.
Simp
From the depths of gen Z’s troubled psyche comes another gendered insult (yes, I realise how depressing it is that so many of our wotys are disease-related or pejorative, but I am merely the messenger). A “simp” is a guy who tries to get in with a woman by fawning over her. He is desperate and self-abasing. You could think of “simp” as this year’s “incel”. And if you have not come across it at all yet, perhaps that is because you are not on TikTok, where the “simp nation” meme has been circulating since December 2019. There are various explanations of the word’s origin, with some claiming it’s a rather unsavoury acronym, but it seems more likely that it’s a shortening of “simpleton”.
Doomscrolling
Sorry again for the lack of light relief. Perhaps it’s all the doomscrolling I have been doing. But who can blame me if I find myself compulsively refreshing social media for reassurance that the news might not be as bad as all that, only to find more bad news and then some more. For many of us, the early days of the pandemic doomscrolling was an irrepressible tic. We may have been looking for evidence of progress on treatments, sure, but what we found was a report of a possible reinfection or an outbreak of bubonic plague. For what it’s worth, I reckon that we may be about to turn a corner, as far as bad news is concerned. Although we undoubtedly face a gruelling winter, those virologists seem to be making progress. For next year, I am pencilling in “vaccine” and “post-pandemic”. Fingers crossed.
David Shariatmadari is the author of Don’t Believe a Word: From Myths to Misunderstandings – How Language Really Works (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
