Nine Pandemic Words That Almost No One Gets Right

One of the best and toughest parts of being a science writer is acting as a kind of jargon liaison. Weird, obscure, aggressively multisyllabic words appear in scientific discourse; I, wielding nothing but a Google Doc, a cellphone, and the Powers of the Internet™, wrest these terms from their academic hidey-holes and try to pin them down with some endearing yet accurate analogy. If I do my job well, sometimes readers never even need to see the original word, because there’s a more approachable way to describe it.

In a lot of cases, that’s how these words move—from academic to journalist to reader. (Hi there.) But sometimes the words leapfrog me. And that’s when I panic.

I have panicked a lot in this way during the pandemic. The coronavirus has prompted a huge shift in the ways we talk with one another, and about one another. That’s what people do in a crisis: We borrow, massage, and invent words to make sense of what’s happening around us.

But this most recent go-round has involved a lot of linguistic “leakage,”. “All of a sudden, something for a professional community is being used for everyone.” We’ve had to assimilate a whole slew of terms from public health, immunology, and medicine, some of them totally foreign (, , ),others more familiar but with colloquial and academic meanings that at least partially conflict (, , ). The transition doesn’t always go smoothly, and confusion and misunderstandings, much like contagion, are very hard to rein in once they’ve started to spread.