(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

Often, people talking about the ongoing pandemic (or any other major ongoing situation) will talk about it like "for obvious reasons" or "because of the current circumstances" or, as I kept seeing in signs around the city back when I was allowed to leave the house, "por motivos de público conocimiento" (approx. "for reasons that are public knowledge", is there a common phrase analogous to this in English?). Because, obviously we all know what's going on, right? It's the inevitable context of our lives these days, and context can be left unsaid.

But time passes, right? I could not remember off the top of my head which years SARS or swine flu happened if I hadn't happened to have looked them up earlier this week. And while this one is shaping up to be worse than those, I also think most people don't hear 1918 and think "ah, yes, Spanish influenza was going on back then". And of course if you see some random historical bit of text you might not know what year it was written in, in the first place.

("Spanish flu" and "swine flu" are not considered good practice for naming pandemics by WHO. You're not supposed to name diseases after geographical regions, animals, occupations, etc. [PDF source] and it's preferred to call those "the 1918 flu pandemic" and "the 2009 flu pandemic". Using those names would have kind of undercut my point about not knowing off the top of my head when they happened, though. And yes this is also why you're supposed to say SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 and not "Wuhan coronavirus")

Anyway. Some day in the future people will read your "for obvious reasons" writings and think "Well it's not obvious to me, random person from the past! Would it have killed you to say what the thing was?". Maybe you can take comfort from that, but mostly it's just a thing I think about.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

The signs I passed by on my way to work mostly said "because of COVID-19" and sometimes specifically "because of the COVID-19 pandemic"†, so that's good.

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>>I also think most people don't hear 1918 and think "ah, yes, Spanish influenza was going on back then".<<

I'm not even good at keeping track of timelines, and I totally hear 1918 and think "ah yes, the Spanish flu year" (sometimes "ah yes, the last year of World War I" happens to come first, but both are major associations and they both arrive in my consciousness pretty quickly). That could definitely just be a me thing, though.

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I've only seen one or two people calling it "Wuhan coronavirus", and I think they were people who got on the talking-about-it train back when it *was* primarily a Wuhan thing and just never changed their category tag. Randall Munroe seems to have been wrong about plain "coronavirus" sticking, though: IME people have been increasingly moving to calling it "COVID-19".

(I do think drawing a distinction between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 in non-technical speech is bullshit: if you really need to be clear for whatever reason that you're talking about the virus per se and not the disease, "the COVID-19 virus" is much more readily understandable than having a whole different word. You get to import the associations your audience has already formed with the term "COVID-19", rather than having to build new connections.)

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†Particularly useful since some plausible futures have *multiple* COVID-19 epidemics, and both the definite article and use of "pandemic" imply that this is the first one. Not to 100% confidence (especially since you can't be sure that a random small-business owner is using the word "pandemic" correctly††), but it helps.

††in related news, did you know that if you look up "pandemic" on Wiktionary you *literally* get a picture of COVID-19?

[sigmaleph]

I think the anglosphere has mostly coordinated on "COVID-19" as a name but I still hear it called just "coronavirus" here, for the most part.

I think "Wuhan coronavirus" has mostly phased out by now , but I keep hearing rumours of people deliberately emphasising the connection with China, so for all I know it keeps happening outside my bubble.

I knew the Spanish flu started in 1918 but (until pandemics brought it back to my consciousness) it was not a thing that popped into mind when I thought of the year (Word War I is).