These days, we are in the habit of looking for silver linings. Thoughts like, “My houseplants have really benefited psychologically from this quarantine…” have been known to cross our minds. So, we’ll offer one more: The observation that we—as a society—have acquired a whole new language, seemingly without much effort, in the past six months. Take that, Rosetta Stone.
It’s nothing short of amazing to realize that these are all the words we almost never used before January, 2020. Ah, those halcyon days when the novel coronavirus was actually novel. Now this vocabulary comes out of our mouths more frequently than the names of our friends and family--i.e. the people we haven't hugged without fear since we were obsessed with Megxit and Baby Yoda. How cute were we back then, when we didn’t even know how to spell Hydroxychloroquine or pepper our texts with mentions of the Spanish Flu?
This is actually good news: “Being able to communicate using language gave the human species a distinct survival advantage,” writes science podcaster Charles W. Bryant.
When you review our new language in list form, it's a bracing reminder of just how much our lives have changed—and how much we have learned, adapted to and persevered through—in such a (oh-so-very long-seeming) short time.