From Covid-19 to PPE and social distancing, 2020 expanded our vocabulary.
It’s the end of 2020, and around the world, we’re having socially distant meetings, wearing PPE, and hoping we—or those we encounter—aren’t asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19.
A year ago, not only was the virus unknown to us—it didn’t even have a name—but most of the terms in the sentence above were not part of our daily vocabulary. The pandemic (and how often did you use that word before March 2020?) forced us to change the way we live, and work. In doing so, it also changed the way we behave, and speak, as other crises have done before in history.
Since this was a global health catastrophe, many of the lexical changes have been health-related. How many of these terms do you use now that you never used prior to this most unexpected year?
Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.
