Words Which Defined 2020
The year 2020 was difficult for all of us across the globe due to the fatal advent of Covid-19 which brought catastrophe to the world. It is very apt to say Coronavirus pandemic defined the year 2020 and so did the words that surfaced in our day to day life communications due to this global pandemic. We either heard it or ourselves used these words in our conversations. These aren’t necessarily new and fancy words which many of us have gotten used to in the last year that now they have become part and parcel of our everyday lives. Some of these words have always been around but the unforeseen events that unfolded in 2020 sparked them with a new found relevance.
These words which were always there in our dictionary never got so much significance and prominence as they got in the year 2020, given the absolute unexpected and wild rough ride that the year turned out to be. There are a slew of words that rose to prominence, words that got synonymous with the year 2020.
PANDEMIC: According to Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries it is the most used word in 2020. Given the state of the world in 2020, pandemic has never been more relevant in the recent times as it is has been in 2020 and has been announced as the word of the year. In case of Covid-19 we witnessed an epidemic in Wuhan, China. As it spread rapidly beyond China into other countries, the epidemic became a pandemic, a worldwide spread of the disease.
Interesting Fact:
Human race has seen many pandemics which impacted the world. The 1918 Spanish flu was a pandemic which claimed millions of lives worldwide. Another pandemic struck when the Roman soldiers against Parthia, brought a certain virus that led to the demise of around 5 million people. This single handedly ended the time when Rome was the most powerful.
COVID/CORONAVIRUS: According to The Irish Times the word “Covid” has the most citations ever recorded in the 21st century. It would be an impossible task to speak about the year 2020 without speaking of COVID/Coronavirus and Covid-19. While Coronavirus had been in the dictionary for decades, the term Covid-19 was coined in February 2019 when the global pandemic gripped the world in it’s clutches. Coronavirus Pandemic, is an ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) The virus is a mutant — jumped from it’s animal hosts to humans.
Interesting Fact:
Covid-19 strain is a recent one to mankind but not the Coronavirus pathogen. In the year2003 there was SARS-CoV and in 2012 it was MERS-CoV, in both the cases with infections worldwide.
ASYMPTOMATIC: This term in medicine means a condition or a person showing no symptoms of a disease and they themselves are unaware that they are infected. This word is used to refer to the silent carriers of the Covid-19 disease, where people have been the ‘silent spreaders’ and have infected other people. Many asymptomatic Covid-19 cases went undetected. More than half of residents of a Seattle-area nursing home had no symptoms when they tested positive for Covid-19 and had probably spread the disease without being aware, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Interesting Fact:
The congregation of people gathered in a Church on 19th January 2020, got infected and led to a major cluster outbreak. None realised that the event would have global implications for the spread of coronavirus.
HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE: Prior to Covid-19 pandemic Hydroxychloroquine chiefly is a drug known for decades to treat malaria. Early on in the pandemic, hydroxychloroquine was thought to be a possible medicine for treating Covid-19. Initially it was believed that it will produce antiviral effect against Covid-19 but the clinical trials by FDA proved it otherwise. Unfortunately it quickly became to be the most sought after drug despite experts warning the the drug’s effectiveness on Coronavirus. Since then it became the topic nations were debated about.
Interesting Fact:
Multiple studies subsequently showed no benefit in treating Covid-19, in fact it revealed to be risky for people with comorbidities. The FDA withdrew emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 on June 15th 2020.
SOCIAL DISTANCING: This another important term resurfaced profusely and we commonly used to refer for safety measure against Coronavirus. This term was first used in 1957 by sociologist Karl Mannheim to describe it as a way to enforce power hierarchies in the society based on status. It was only in the mid 2000s when this word was adopted for pandemic measures.
‘Social Distancing’ a phrase of 1950s came to dominate and define 2020.
Although the term was introduced only in the 21st century, social distancing measures dates back to the 5th century BC which the Bible contains to be one of the earliest known references to the practice.
UNPRECEDENTED TIMES: As the word goes by the meaning being “never done or known before”, year 2020 truly turned out to be sheerly something the entire world didn’t anticipate what was coming. The crisis had & has no precedent, no rulebook/precepts that tells governments and authorities as to how to put a complete end to this simultaneously across the globe. Hence this word found its meaning literally synonymous with whatever the world faced in 2020. This crisis brought unprecedented challenges for people and society.
Interesting Fact:
Merriam Webster documents the first use of the term “unprecedented times” around 1795. In the unprecedented times of the year 1918, 103 years ago ‘Spanish Flu’ claimed 50 million lives worldwide, with about 675,000 deaths occuring in the United States alone.
QUARANTINE: Quarantine was the top word to rank in the top when many countries across the world went into lockdown due to Covid-19 global pandemic. Quarantine is the separation and restriction of people who have potentially been exposed to a contagious disease to ascertain if they become unwell. Restricting their physical movements to one’s home or their workplace, separated from all others in order to prevent and reduce the spread to others. 2019 coronavirus outbreak saw countries many asking people who had potentially come into contact with the infection to isolate themselves at their homes or in a dedicated quarantine facility.
Interesting Fact:
The practice of quarantine, began during the14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics. Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days were required to sit anchor for 40 days before landing. This practice was called as quarantine. The word quarantine comes from the Italian word “quaranta giorni”, meaning 40 days.
LOCKDOWN: For some who were privileged the lockdown was a dreamy place and space being at home watching Amazon Prime & Netflix or reading books on Kindle, enrolling for courses online learning new skills and craft. But ironically for some others who were not fortunate enough this proved to be a very difficult time. Migrant workers lost jobs, their livelihood was challenged, they had to relocate and in doing so with all the restricted options, few unfortunate ones lost their lives. My heart goes to
Interesting Fact:
The measures taken to alleviate the effects of the bubonic plague that hit Europe in the 14th century was what is termed as the first ever attempt at a lockdown by the government authorities or those in power.
SUPERSPREADER: A term which we heard over and over again in 2020, with one highly contagious person infected with a pathogen in turn is transmitting the infection to unusually a large number of people. Superspreader events were not necessarily big gathering with numerous people but also intimate and small gatherings with a handful of people.
Interesting Fact:
The story of a travelling British Businessman in 2020 who appears to have passed the coronavirus to Britons in at least three countries was a ‘superspreader’ who played an outsize role in transmitting the infection.
CONTAINMENT: The virus’s high rate of transmission made authorities in countries take distinctive efforts to stop it from spreading further to people. Containment is a planned strategy in the initial stages of a pandemic to cordon off areas with peak cases of infected people so as to curb it’s spread and prevent community spread.
Interesting Fact:
Containment was a foreign policy , a strategy followed by the United States during the Cold War. First laid out by George F. Kennan in 1947, the policy stated that communism needed to be contained and isolated, or else it would spread to neighbouring countries.
WORK FROM HOME (WFH): The concept of Work From Home has been familiar in the IT industry but not that feasible with the Non-IT sector. We saw with the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic pushed for remote work i.e. work from home concept especially in the IT sector becoming the new norm. Given no choice amidst the deadly spread of the pandemic, some of the industries in the Non- IT sector had to opt for WFH. It is estimated that 88% of businesses worldwide adapted to a virtual model of some kind and “remote” became a word of the year 2020.
Interesting Fact:
But the concept of working from the home premises dates back to the Renaissance’s times. As the time went on, merchants & craftspeople prior to the industrial revolution created hybrid work-homes which had street facing shops/workshops and private areas set for day-to-day living.
ONLINE CLASSES/LEARNING: The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in schools, colleges and learning institutes shut all across the world. With online learning becoming essential in 2020 online classes/online learning replaced our real-time classrooms/schools. One another word which became synonymous with online learning is Zoom. It got integrated itself into our learning, professional and personal lives during lockdown and work from home.
Interesting Fact:
Distance education began in the mid 1990s with the spread of the internet and the World Wide Web. Online learning emerged in 1982 with Western Behavioural Sciences Institute employed computer conferencing to deliver a distance education program to business executives. In 1989 the university the University of Phoenix began offering education programs through the internet.
BLACLK LIVES MATTER (BLM): The Black Lives Matter movement against racism and violence towards Black people was started in 2013 by the international human rights to build a kind of society where black people can live with respect and dignity in USA and around the globe. Crimes against this ethnicity have been occurring in the past and in the year 2020 too we witnessed another horrifying incident, which took the world by storm and went viral. A video showing a US police officer kneeling on George Floyd, a black American’s neck for some eight minutes, inspite of Floyd repeatedly saying that he is unable to breathe which was followed by his sad demise. This horrendous went viral. This saddening incident represents the alienation of the people in a flaying democracy. BLM movement went on to organize major protests around the world. BLM movement resurrected yet again in 2020 to remind the world to fight against racial justice.
Interesting Fact:
The BLM movement started in the year 2013 dedicated to fight racism and anti-Black violence. The movement began as a campaign in support of social goal for equality of the black people in the society. It signalled condemnation of the unjust killings of the black people and protesting against police brutality towards them and all other racially based violence that happened to the black community.
IDENTITY POLITICS: Politics based on certain elements of one’s makeup, such as appearance, skin colour, ethnic/social background or gender. There are two kinds of identity politics, the good & the very bad. In the recent several instances the term is used derogatorily as it poses a threat to unity of any nation. Identity politics is seeing a surge in the last two decades across the world when people of a particular race target another group. The term was once used in the battle against oppression. But in the recent decades identity politics has made people to be the victims, where people belonging to certain groups are targeted, discriminated and continue to face systematic inequality. This only deepens and divides the existing gap between the different groups in the society. As long as people are marginalized, victimized or oppressed based on their identities, we cannot get rid off the negative side of identity politics.
Interesting Fact:
The term identity politics was coined by Combahee River Collective, a Black Feminist group in the year 1977. Then the collective group of women saw this as an introduced opportunity for the black women to be actively involved in political matters.
THE NEW NORMAL: With the Covid-19 pandemic changing the world and the way we live and work, the “New Normal”, is here to stay and is set in motion. Accordingly there is a challenge and opportunity to live this new normal at least till the world is completely free of Covid-19, for which the time frame is unknown. We have learnt, evolved and adapted to this different normal. The new reality of the pandemic ravaged world. Even though vaccines have been rolled out, at this moment and in the near future it is impossible to have enough vaccines for the entire world to get inoculated.
Interesting Fact:
It is unknown as to when Coronavirus crisis will end and that is why after the Corona ravaged world this phase that we are in is the new normal that is living with Coronavirus till vaccines prove safe and widely available for each everyone and that scale of enormity is going to take sometime. The new normal today is co-existing with this virus and preventing it from spreading to us, our loved ones, our society and the world.
I and for that matter most of us cannot think of anything else which has happened with such speed — from the end of December 2019 when the first cases of this pandemic were reported in China, till date now when cases are being reported from the entire world. Now in the beginning of the new year 2021, the virus is still around that too having updated itself to a more deadly version. In these uncertain times we are faced with ambiguity and paradox. After an extremely difficult 2020, we have stepped in 2021. We will not win this, unless we win it together, because if one country ignores, then all the safe actions of the other countries will be negated.
With all the harsh realities that we witnessed in 2020 and the year having ended, let us all think about the collective vulnerability of our world. We need to ensure that we all take the important measures personally to be safe and in turn keep others safe inspite of the arrival of the vaccines. Let’s be optimistic and trust the wait. May all the countries exercise global leadership which is in alignment with globalized interdependent world. Collectively as a sensible and responsible unified force let each and everyone of us strive in our own capacities to bring the world back to what it was prior to Covid-19 times.
