(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.