A Devil’s Dictionary of Pandemic Clichés

Late last year, Lake Superior State University published its banished words from 2021. It’s an annual tradition, though it has no effect on those who use those words — especially on social media like Twitter.

In the same spirit of futile resistance to bad English, I offer my own list of terms we should banish from coverage of the present pandemic. Some of these clichés are euphemisms — genteel terms for ugly realities.

Others are borrowed from other fields of endeavour — politics, sports, war — to inject energy into the discussion. And the most recent pandemic clichés might be called “terms of surrender,” words and phrases that minimize COVID-19 and prepare us to accept it as just another inevitability, like death and taxes.

When we hear these sound bites we should subject them to translation, because they tell us something about our attitudes and anxieties. And they, in turn, help to explain why we are now in the third year of COVID-19.

Challenging

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry’s euphemism for “what’s currently beating the daylights out of us” and “we’re having trouble keeping our story straight.”

Condolences

From the Latin condoleo, “I feel another’s pain.” Health Minister Adrian Dix’s condolences, however, seem mass-produced after being extended to the family and friends of over 2,500 dead British Columbians.

Endemic

This word is being used to camouflage COVID-19 as just another tolerable annoyance, like the common cold. As virologist Aris Katzourakis explained in Nature recently, “an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling.”

An endemic disease can cripple not just countries but continents. According to the World Health Organization, malaria in 2020 infected 241 million people and killed 627,000 of them — most of them African children under five. Measles is also endemic and killed 140,000 people in 2018. WHO estimates that the measles vaccine has saved over 23 million lives in this century. But it could become both endemic and fatal again in North America if anti-vaxers stick to their guns.

Follow the science

Said by politicians as they pass the buck to the scientists, who take flak if the science is unpopular. Unfortunately, the science keeps changing, and scientists themselves often bitterly debate both the nature of the virus and the best way to deal with it.

Freedom

A term now fervently adopted by “Freedom Convoy” truckers and others opposed to evil mandates. Of course the truckers are not free to leave the highway or break the speed limits, but they seem comfortable on the asphalt and eager to be free to import the latest COVID strain from the U.S.

Game-changer

Borrowed from sports, where it makes sense. In the pandemic, it offers the usually false promise of a quick end for COVID-19 thanks to some vaccine or drug.

Gaslight

Adopted from a 1944 movie, the word means deceiving someone by making them doubt their own sanity. “Lie” would do just as well.

In hospital with COVID

This manner of downplaying the pandemic is so subtle it can whiz right by. It’s the difference between saying “with COVID” and “for COVID.” Hospitals are again jammed with patients needing care for serious cases of COVID. But Omicron’s transmission among the vaccinated means that wards are now also seeing routine cases — heart attacks, broken legs — who test positive for the disease and may have few or no symptoms. So people in hospital with COVID and other problems seem less serious than those in hospital for COVID alone. But even an asymptomatic case can cause a hospital outbreak.

Learn to live with it

This was a political favourite early in the pandemic, along with “herd immunity” and “we’re all in this together.” Now that the politicians are pretty sure they’re not in it with the rest of us, they’re beginning to see the pandemic as a nuisance, not an existential threat to themselves.

“Living with COVID-19” will mean accepting shorter life expectancies and slightly higher pay for supermarket clerks. Recruitment and retention of health-care workers will be a problem easily deferred until after the next election. With COVID-19 confined largely to working class and racialized communities, governments will be happy and relieved to learn to live without the virus.

Lockdown

Originally it meant to lock prisoners in their cells during a disturbance or search. Then it was applied to American schools subjected to mass shootings. Now media call it a lockdown when governments impose minor restrictions on whole cities and nations, implying that all civilians are prisoners or at best children to be protected for their own good. This has fuelled protest movements everywhere but China — which really does lock down cities and provinces.

Mandate

Chinese dynasties fall when they lose the mandate of heaven. Newly elected Canadian politicians happily take the mandate of the voters as a command to carry out their party’s platform. But a vaccine mandate has become a term for tyranny, even when imposed by a democratically elected government.

Mild

Widely used in tobacco advertising in the 1950s, as the link between smoking and cancer was established, “mild” has enjoyed a comeback since the Omicron strain appeared in November. Someone noticed that Omicron cases weren’t as severe as Delta’s, didn’t result in as many hospitalizations, and didn’t kill as many people (at least if they were vaccinated). Never mind that it infected so many people that hospitals were still overwhelmed, and killed the unvaccinated much as Delta did. At least (as Andrew Nikiforuk has satirically noted) they were mild deaths.

Personal responsibility

Republican governors and some Conservative premiers use this expression to download public health onto the individual. Vaccinate yourself or not, dude; it’s your call. Of course, if you’re responsible, you’re supposed to answer for your actions. In this case, no one is answerable for spreading COVID-19.

Pivot

Political pundits use this word to mean a sudden change of policy adopted when the old policy has failed. We now apply it when politicians and public health officials reverse themselves: You don’t need a mask / A mask is essential.

Plateau

Conditioned to fret when case counts climb, we relax when they plateau — even if it’s a very high plateau, with thousands of daily cases.

Race

Responding to any threat, those involved start racing for some real or imagined prize at the finish line. Even respected science journals like Nature use the term. In some cases the word might be justified, but let’s take it for granted that no one is dawdling on the way to finding a remedy for COVID-19.

Silver bullet

It’s striking that a fictitious cure for a fictitious threat (werewolves) should acquire new life as a weapon against a real disease. But as Justin Trudeau and others keep reminding us, we still haven’t found that weapon.

Turn the corner

Make some kind of progress; intended to encourage the public without offering much evidence.

Vaccine-hesitant

This term was invented to distinguish the irrationally cautious from the frothing anti-vaxers. Virtually every adult North American was vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough and a host of other diseases before entering Grade 1. This makes hesitancy hard to explain.

That’s my list. Add your own

Dear readers, you are invited to append your own pandemic clichés in the comment section below. Consider this a collective effort to keep perspective as people with bullhorns and agendas try to manipulate how we feel about the pandemic and what’s being done about it.

Most of us get our health news online, and much online news goes for clickbait, headlines that promise an emotional jolt of some kind. Whether the jolt is unwarranted good news or bad news hardly matters, and it doesn’t matter if the reader studies the report critically or skims it before going in search of more jolts. So it’s easy to trust the reports that harmonize with our general impression of an issue, and to disregard the others. That’s how fake news wins believers, and that’s how “Freedom Convoys” get organized.

It’s up to us, then, to take true personal responsibility to get our information from the most scientifically reliable sources we can. If those sources don’t agree because the science is new, then we can withhold judgment until more evidence is in. When we have that evidence, we can demand policies that will mitigate the pandemic for the greatest number, not just for people like ourselves.

And in the meantime, we should behave as if the worst-case scenario was about to hit us. Anything less bad will seem positively mild.