2 years of the pandemic: Covid-19 expanded our vocabulary, and now we can't unlearn words like covidiot

From ‘gesichtskondom’ (literally translates from German as 'face condom') to 'mukhapatti' (face strip in Marathi), words denoting the face mask entered many a lexicon.

The last two years have seen a variety of words enter the English language, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of us now exhibit a cocky familiarity with epidemiological terms, and have probably used neologisms such as ‘doomscrolling’, or ‘covidiot’, or maybe even ‘coronials’ (babies born or conceived during the pandemic) at one time or another since March 2020.

Similar linguistic activity occurred in other languages, too.

German, with its affinity for compound nouns, for example, has been awash with new words, which are way more evocative than their English counterparts when it comes to reflecting the realities of life in a pandemic. In March this year, the Leibniz Institute for the German Language compiled over 1,200 words that are in play in Germany. These include ‘abstandbier’, for a socially distanced beer; ‘coronamutationsgebiet’, which refers to a place where coronavirus mutations are rampant; and ‘gesichtskondom’, which stands for a face condom and is a particularly vivid variation on ‘face mask’.

The French, fiercely protective of their language, too, have seen an influx of new words into it. In May, the French dictionary Le Petit Larousse announced that it had added 170 new, pandemic-related words to its 2022 edition. Besides obvious entries such a ‘SARS-CoV-2’ and ‘Covid-19’, there are some delightful neologisms such as ‘coronapiste’ (a lane for cyclists launched during the early months of the pandemic in Paris) and ‘télétravailler’, for home- or remote-working.

Meanwhile, the Dutch dictionary publisher Van Dale has chosen ‘prikspijt’ as the word of this year. ‘Prikspijt’, says Van Dale, indicates “regret or short-term pain that someone experiences after they were vaccinated against a contagious disease.”

Speaking to the NL Times, Ton den Boon, the editor of the dictionary, said: “Prikspijt is a broad concept and it is a good reflection of what is happening in society. On the one hand, you have the activism on social media by people who are against the coronavirus vaccinations. But ‘spijt’ can also be understood as a term that you use if you experience pain for a short time after being vaccinated, or because the vaccinations do not seem to be the ultimate way out of the crisis at the moment, as hoped.”

A closer reading of the recently released Oxford Languages 2021 report — ‘vax’ is, unsurprisingly, the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year — throws more light on the linguistic impact of Covid-19. According to the report, which studied the world’s major languages, while the Bangla word for vaccine is ‘tika’, the language has also borrowed the English word, rendered as ‘bhakseen’. “This loanword has come to almost exclusively refer to the Covid-19 vaccine, and is used primarily on digital and social media,” the report states. “The original Bangla ‘tika’ is usually used in rural contexts, by older or monolingual speakers, by traditional media, and for widely-used existing vaccines, like those for measles, chicken pox, etc.”

Girish Kuber, though, has always looked beyond loan words where possible when it comes to his work. Kuber, editor of the Mumbai-based Marathi daily Loksatta, says: “Marathi has never had a word for a type of mask that is used to prevent transmission of disease. Of course, we have ‘mukhota’, but that is used in a different sense. So, we came up with ‘mukhapatti’, which is more specific and health-related.”

Down south, the Malayalam writer and essayist N.S. Madhavan has some interesting observations to make. “Most new pandemic-related words in Malayalam are adopted from English, such as ‘sharirika akalam’, for social distancing. And, strangely enough contact-tracing here is known as ‘route map’. But while Malayalam always had a word for epidemic, ‘pakarchavyadhi’, we now have an occasion to employ ‘mahamari’ for pandemic,” says Madhavan.

‘Mahamari’ is also the word for pandemic in Marathi, says translator and linguist Dr Supriya Sahasrabuddhe. (Marathi is derived from Sanskrit and developed along with other dialects, says Dr Sahasrabuddhe, while Malayalam, according to the linguist Peggy Mohan, has an overlay of Sanskrit.) ‘Mahamari’, which refers to a great pestilence, is derived from Sanskrit: ‘maha’ meaning great, while ‘mari’ is ‘to die”. Several other words have also been created in Marathi over the last two years. We have ‘Covid-kajali’, which refers to kohl or blackness, and suggests the grim situation created by the pandemic; 'sampoorna talebandi’, for lockdown; and ‘corona-bali’, which stands for death due to Covid-19,” says Dr Sahasrabuddhe.

At the start of 2022 — despite Omicron — this writer hopes, like the rest of the world, that the new year will be kinder than the preceding two years. The prospect of ‘languishing’ for yet another year is highly daunting.