How COVID’s ‘pandexicon’ changed the way we speak—and think
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Summary
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Wayne Grady about his new book, The Pandemic: How Words and Phrases Changed During the Pandemic, a collection of essays on the words and phrases that came to dominate our lives for the first three years of the pandemic.
Transcript
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for what you need. TD, ready for you. Are you still shedding your vaccine? Do you have the
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midday quarantini still? These are words that we didn't use a couple of years ago. These are words
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and phrases that were part of the lexicon of the pandemic, or as our next guest calls
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it, the pandexicon. Before we get to our next guest on this, for a conversation that will
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be funny and probably infuriating as we remember some of what we went through in COVID, I want
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to remind you that you can subscribe to Full Comment Podcast. And hello, this is the Full
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Comment Podcast. I'm Brian Lilly, your host. You can subscribe on whatever device or app
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you're listening to us on. And I encourage you to do that as well as leave us a review.
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Wayne Grady is someone who has written close to 30 books. And his latest one is a look at
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how language changed during the pandemic. And what's fascinating is that I was part of that
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changing language as a daily writer of what was happening in COVID and didn't always stop
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to think about how it was changing, how we were using words that weren't there before, how we all
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became experts in things that we'd never heard of before, using very scientific language. But Wayne
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did. He documented it and put it in his new book, a collection of essays on the various words and
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phrases that came to dominate our lives for three years. Wayne, thanks for the time today.
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Well, thanks for having me. How did you come up with this concept of, well, language is changing,
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I'm going to document it? Well, yeah, that's a really good question. Having written a few books
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in the past about topics that were constantly changing, like global warming, for example,
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how do you write about something? How do you write about a moving target in a way that when the book
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comes out, it's not going to be automatically out of date? And I hit on the idea of the writing about
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the words that we use, because they are things that weren't going to change. When we talk about
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face masks in 2020, it meant the same thing that they meant that face masks meant in 2022 and 23 and
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probably 2033. And so I decided to sort of pin the, sort of use the words, the lexicon of the
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pandemic as sort of the structure, or the skeleton for the book, and then hang the essays on that. And
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hopefully, hopefully, these words will be and well, my, my, my theory is that these words will still be
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being used years and years down the road long after the pandemic is we hope over.
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The first section of your book is about the before times. And that's a phrase that I still use.
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Because often, I don't know about you, I'm going to guess it's the same, you're sitting there
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trying to remember when something happened. Was that the beginning of the pandemic? Was that the
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middle? No, no, that was in the before times. And tell me about that phrase, your thoughts on,
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Yeah, well, I think, you know, we try to, I tried to avoid paradigm shift in the book, but,
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one thing that the, that the pandemic did, I think, was to sort of fuse memory. So as you say,
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it's very difficult to remember, you know, the last time, the last time I, we went to a movie,
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was it, was it 2020? You know, was it 2021? Or was it 2019? It has been that long. And, you know,
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it's, it's, it's always been difficult for me and for many people to actually pinpoint how many years
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ago X happened. But I think the pandemic made it exacerbated that tendency because, because not
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much happened. You know, I mean, we were, I mean, a lot, a lot happened around us, but we were, you
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know, sequestered in our, in our apartments or our houses. We didn't go out much. We didn't have
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people over. We didn't go to parties. We didn't go to restaurants. I mean, most of us. And so time
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sort of lagged and time sort of coalesced into, into, into an amorphous thing. And, you know, I
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don't, you know, it's, it's, it's all we can really say is that was before COVID or it was, it was since
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COVID. So like that, you know, the before times we can pretty much identify, but, but whether something
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happened in year one of COVID, year two of COVID, I find, I find it very difficult now to remember, I did
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start making notes about things. And that, in, in a way, the book, when you, when I arranged the words in
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the book into an order, I found myself arranging them chronologically. And that, and that sort of, as you
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say, it starts with the before times, it starts with the, with the phrases that we began to use early
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on in the pandemic. And that, in that way, when you go back and read the book, it does read like a history
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of the, of the pandemic, the pandemic up until now. But I didn't really write it in, intend it that
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way when I was writing it. I just was writing essays about those specific words and phrases.
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Yeah, it's, it's a history of the pandemic through language. Now you start off by telling the story of
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where you and your wife were when the before times ended. So tell me that you were, you were in Mexico,
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were you just on a vacation or snowbirds? We're snowbirds, I guess, although that, to me,
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that word always means Florida. But we, we, we've been going to Mexico now for 12 years,
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for six months a year, for the summer, for the winter months. My, my wife has, Marilyn has severe
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asthma. And here in Ontario at the, at the downwind end of the Great Lakes, it gets very humid and damp
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in the winter and, and very difficult for her to breathe. So we go, we, we go to Mexico, we go to
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a place called San Miguel de Allende, which is up in the mountains, very high and dry. Temperature is
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25 degrees Celsius every single day of the year. And, but very dry. So it's great for someone with
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asthma. So that's where we were in, and we can, we, we go in October or November and come back in
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April or May. And that in 2020, we began to notice that, that, you know, things were heating up in
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terms of the, of COVID. It had been declared a pandemic early March and borders were beginning
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to be closed. People, people, airlines were saying you had to get PCR tests and, and before you could
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enter the country, before you could get on the airplanes. And we thought, and also Air Canada
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announced that in the following on the, I think it was on the 18th or something like that, Air Canada
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announced that a week from then they would stop running daily flights from Mexico City to Toronto
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and reduce them to, to, to, to, to weekly flights. And we realized that if that, when that happened,
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we would probably not get out of Mexico for a long time because there were so many people
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booked, trying to book their way back. So we, we booked a flight on the, on the 20th of March and
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got back into, into Canada. And there were people not wearing masks on the plane. There were people
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wearing masks. There were very few people. We landed in the airport in Toronto at the same time as a
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flight from New York City and almost no one in the, in the immigration section of the airport were
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wearing masks. And that didn't really dawn on us at the time that that was unusual. That was going to
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be unusual. Those were still the days when they were telling us not to wear masks. There's no need to
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wear masks. Yeah. They were still saying don't wear masks unless you're showing symptoms of having,
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having COVID. You don't, don't stay home unless you're showing symptoms. I think when we landed
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on March 20th, I think there had been 200 deaths in Canada at that time from COVID. And we thought
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that was a lot. I mean, it was a lot. And, but we hadn't, and we had no idea how much worse it was going
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to get. Uh, the borders, we weren't quarantined at the border. Nobody was being quarantined at that
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point, but, uh, you know. See, you're, you're already using words that, that we just didn't use
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before. Yeah. Quarantine was around, but when was the last time we had quarantine orders in Canada?
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I know, I know. And, and, and we had to, we had to reacquaint ourselves with what this very ancient
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term meant and why we did it. That's right. I, I, I, one of the things I did in each,
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with each word is look up where the word came from. Quarantine came from, uh, from Italy in the,
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I think the 15th century when, uh, the, the plague was in Europe and, uh, ships coming from the East
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where they thought, everyone thought the plague was coming from. When ships arrived at a port in Italy,
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uh, they had to, um, spend a month or four weeks on a, uh, on a four weeks, 40 days on an island off
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the coast before the, before anyone from the ship was allowed to, to, to go into the port in Italy.
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And those four, uh, 40 days were called, were called the quarantine. And that's where that phrase
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came from. Um, we know it's no longer 40 days. It's now, you know, in, it was, I forget how long
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it was in Canada. In, in France, it was two weeks and they, they called it the quarantine in, in French,
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the 14 rather than the 40. Um, but yeah, we have never used it. Yeah. Ours was 14 days and, you know,
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who, who went away on a trip and thought about, well, when I come back from Mexico, Florida,
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California, Arizona, I'm going to have to quarantine. Yeah. And then that just became a part of everyday
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language. Yeah. Yeah. We're not using it anymore. And I'm happy about that. No. For a while it was
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daily use. Yeah. Yeah. It was a daily concern. Uh, that's part of my, part of my, uh, the reason I
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wrote the book is that, uh, the way I did is that I think that once that when words enter the language
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permanently like that, it's because the, the, the, the event has entered our lives permanently. So I think
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that, that, that we are going to be, uh, the pandemic and COVID-19 are going to have, uh, be
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affecting our lives for a long time to come long after, you know, people are not, um, people are no
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longer, it's not, it's no longer a, a, a worldwide pandemic. Um, it's probably not a pandemic now. I
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think the pandemic has officially been declared over, but people are still dying from it. Uh, the long-term
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effects, the social, the social effects, the political effects, the economic effects, and
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the psychological effects are going to be with us for a very long time.
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One of the other phrases that you used in describing you and your wife coming back from
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Mexico was PCR test, which stands for, uh, polymerase chain reaction test. Right.
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That's one of those phrases that, um, we didn't use before. It's very scientific, but we all
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became experts. Yeah. We all became experts in these scientific phrases. I, I covered both SARS
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and, uh, swine flu. Um, when that went through, that would have been what 2009, I think one of my
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kids was quite ill with, with swine flu. We never, we didn't react in the same way. We didn't have
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all of these terms like zoonotic. Right. Um, and yet zoonotic would apply to both SARS and swine flu,
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but we weren't using it. Um, so, so talk, talk to me a bit about that, about how these, uh, very
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scientific phrases entered our language. Well, yeah, scientific and psychological, like, which I
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guess is the same thing, but yeah, PCR tests. I mean, most of us now refer to PCR without really
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actually, I mean, I had to stop for a minute to think, to remember what PCR stood for. I'm glad you
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reminded me, but, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a test that takes a, takes a swab from, from
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the, uh, from, from a nasal swab. And if there's even a small amount of, of the, of the virus, of the
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coronavirus, which is another scientific term we didn't use before, uh, in, and, and magnifies it to
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such an extent that it, it shows up in, in, in the, uh, in later in the test. Uh, it's, it, you know,
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we, and even that was superseded by the rapid, rapid antigen tests that we, that we, that you
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could get at the drugstore the government was handing out. Everybody takes, um, I used to call
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them rat tests and, uh, big R-A-T random, sorry, rapid antigen tests. The word antigen, you know,
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we all know, we all know what an antigen is and we all know what antibodies are. We all, so I think
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many of us walk around wondering how many antibodies we have floating around in our, in our, in our
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systems, uh, and hoping it's a lot. Um, yeah, the science, the science, science, and, and, and also,
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um, um, psychological terms like self-isolation, uh, for, for many, many years, psychologists have
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been saying that self-isolation is not a good thing. Uh, it, it can lead to depression, it can lead to,
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to various psychological disorders or be a, or be a symptom of psychological disorders. And suddenly
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the government was telling us we must self-isolate. And so we're so, well, what's, what's that going
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to, and there were a lot of people writing about what, what's that going to mean socially for us
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when the pandemic is over after having self-isolated for three, two or three years. Uh, I think we're
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still figuring that part out. Yeah. And it's going to take a while to, for the, for those symptoms to,
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to, for, for those effects to show they have been studying the effects of previous, uh, episodes
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of self-isolation. For example, uh, during the ice storm here in, uh, Ontario and Quebec in 1989,
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I think it was, uh, when people were 99, I was 99. Yeah. That's when I moved there.
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Good timing. Uh, when people, uh, were isolated in their homes for, for weeks and then, uh, because of
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the ice storm until they were, uh, released, um, the long-term cycle, the long-term psychological
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effects from that have been studied. And, and, and, and people were wondering whether those studies
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would apply to, uh, the long-term effects of COVID. Uh, and, you know, something like 10% of the people
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who experienced those, that isolation ended up with, uh, serious psychological, um, problems that,
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uh, persisted after, after the, uh, after the event was over. It'll, it'll be a long time before we
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understand how, how severe those, those, uh, those effects have been. I, I write about that in the
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last chapter of the book, which is after times. Um, but the, the outlook is, is that for many,
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many people there, we're going to be, uh, you know, being affected by the things that happened to us
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during the pandemic. I mean, and it makes sense, right? I mean, it's, I think it's, I think it's as big,
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uh, uh, uh, an event in, in our lives as, uh, well, I would say even World War II for many of us.
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Um, certainly as big as 9-11, for example, the way 9-11 has entered the language, I don't have to
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explain what I mean by 9-11, uh, anymore. And so I don't think I need to explain what I mean by COVID.
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Uh, I think I'll never, I'll never think of a face mask as something I wear when I'm playing hockey
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anymore. Yeah. I, I, so at the beginning of the book, you, you write about how, um, these past
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events and you're describing other past events, uh, like 9-11, um, or the ice storm, but also in the
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book, you talk about different wars or you just mentioned quarantine. Um, and that these big
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events gave us words that stayed in the lexicon. Do you think that we'll be using variant in the
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same way? I mean, variant can have many meanings, but you know, from all the words that you looked
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at, is there anything that is going to stick with us? Um, well, as I, I think face mask will stick with
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this. Uh, I, I never really thought about face mask before the pandemic. Uh, in, you know, I mean,
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I, there were something that you see, if you watch doctor shows on television, you see them wearing
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those, those, uh, surgical masks. Uh, and, you know, uh, and a lot of people still think, uh, during
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the pandemic that those surgical masks were effective against, against COVID, uh, and, and cloth masks.
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Uh, yeah, I think, I think the term words, words like face mask, hand washing. I mean, now I, I don't
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know about most people, but I, I find myself washing my hands more often and more consciously
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than I did before. Um, I don't actually hum the words to happy birthday as I'm washing my hands to
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time myself to see how long, but I do, I, I, you know, I do look at my hands and say, oh, I better
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wash my hands. And I, I didn't do that quite so often before. Um, public, public health would have
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told you to, um, they would have told all of us to, but we, we just didn't do it with the same
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rigor as we did. Yeah. Especially in those early days of the pandemic. Yeah. Well, we did in, I guess
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we did in hospitals, um, um, that the hand sanitizer, I think, you know, seeing those is going to bring
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back, seeing those little jars of hand sanitizer are going to bring back a lot of memories. Uh, a couple of
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days ago, I was rooting through a jacket I hadn't worn for a couple of, a couple of years. And I
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found, I found a, uh, white, uh, N95 face mask in, in the pocket. And I, I, you know, I only wear,
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I, we ordered a whole bunch of black N95 masks a while ago. And so for the last couple of last year
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or so, I've only worn black face masks. And so I pulled out this white one and it suddenly,
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when did I wear white face masks? Oh yeah, it was back in 2021 or something like that. Um, so there,
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there's a lot of social distancing, I think is going to be with us for a long time as
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a phrase. Um, and, and I think people are, you know, somebody said to me the other day
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that when they, when they, when they go into, when they look into it, want to go to a restaurant
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and they look into the, through the door of the restaurant, if it's too crowded and nobody's
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wearing face masks, they say, no, it's too COVID-y. Uh, I'm not going in there. Uh, nobody's
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social distancing. And I don't, I think, you know, five years ago, if I said we, we, we should
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be social distancing. No one would have any idea what I was talking about, but I think
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It was a phrase that we invented, um, for the pandemic. It, uh, and then, you know, we
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had to have experts explain it to us and, and, and, and then have it repeated ad nauseum,
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um, um, for us to figure it out. Yeah. Do you think that there was, um, an attempt by,
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uh, people, I mean, you write about, uh, government's role in all of this. You write
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about anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Do you think that either side or any side or anybody
00:20:04.960
involved in this, were people using language, um, in being manipulative ways, uh, for good
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or for bad, were they using it to try and, um, instill fear or, or, or changing the language
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to make us act in certain ways? Was that part of what was happening during COVID?
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I think so. I think there was a real divide. Well, you mentioned anti, anti-maskers and
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anti-vaxxers. I think there, well, I know there was a real divide between people who, you
00:20:36.080
know, wore masks or, or got the vaccine when, when they became available available and people
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who, who refused to do so. Uh, and, and there was a lot of pressure on, on, on various, on
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both sides to conform to what, to what those, what those people believed. Um, and so, you
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know, the, the term anti-vaxxer is essentially a negative term. Um, it's, it's, it's something
00:21:02.420
that a person who is vaccinated would say about a person who won't get vaccinated. Oh, you're
00:21:07.800
an anti-vaxxer. Well, it's been hurled at me and I've been vaccinated. Yeah. But part
00:21:14.860
of my job as a journalist is to question governments. I cover politicians and, and, and so anytime
00:21:21.760
that I would question, um, okay, well these, we've got these restrictions or these regulations,
00:21:27.960
are they still necessary? Someone would say, well, you're an anti-vaxxer. Right. Yeah. For
00:21:33.700
the, let's see, that's, they're using, they're using the language to sort of put you in a box
00:21:37.640
and, and dismiss your concerns because that you're, you're identified as, as someone who's
00:21:43.160
little on, you know, a little, uh, unreasonable about, about the things that are necessary to
00:21:48.260
do to, uh, thing. The, the term anti-vaxxer, as I write in the book comes, is a sort of a
00:21:53.500
holdover from the anti-measle vaccine movement that took place back, it was beginning in 2007.
00:22:00.520
I don't know if you remember, but, but. Oh, I do. There was a woman who wrote a book about
00:22:05.820
raising an autistic child and she had refused to have that, she had connected his measles vaccine
00:22:13.960
with his autism on, on Oprah. And immediately there was this law, this huge, uh, there had been, uh,
00:22:22.240
an article published in the, I think the. It was the Lancet. In the Lancet. Yeah. Uh, which had,
00:22:28.240
which was refuted in the next issue of the Lancet and withdrawn. It was the only time the land,
00:22:32.740
the first time anyway, that the Lancet had actually, uh, withdrew an article from, from that
00:22:38.100
they had published before, because there was no scientific evidence for the, for the claim
00:22:41.760
that, uh, the vaccine for measles, mumps and, and, uh, MMR or whatever. Yeah. Rubella, uh,
00:22:50.680
was linked to increased risks of, uh, autism in children. That was never proven. It's not, it is,
00:22:57.860
in fact, it has been disproven that that such is the case, but once it got on Oprah and got out there,
00:23:03.380
uh, it became, uh, a huge movement and, and people were anti-vaxxers in those days were, were the people
00:23:10.440
who wouldn't have their children vaccinated against measles. So we just picked that phrase up.
00:23:14.720
Um, we need to take a break, but when we come back, let's talk more about the, the use of
00:23:19.780
language, weaponization of language by, uh, people for various causes. When we come back.
00:23:28.680
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Conditions apply. Speaking about the way that language has changed, the way that
00:23:59.440
COVID impacted the way we use English, uh, when I want to just dive a bit deeper on some of these
00:24:08.260
terms, weaponization of, uh, of terms, um, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker. We've discussed those
00:24:15.200
were used to dismiss people. Um, issues like lockdown though, that if, if, if I told you
00:24:25.220
before COVID that we were going to lock you down, that would sound horrible. And yet it became what
00:24:32.100
people demanded. I mean, that, to me, that is a, a big change, I guess, in how we interpret language.
00:24:38.820
Well, lockdown is one of those terms that we borrowed from the military, uh, or the paramilitary.
00:24:43.880
And, uh, it, it, it's a prison term. It's what they do in prisons. When there's a riot,
00:24:48.280
they lock down a certain section of the, of the prison to prevent, uh, information from getting out
00:24:56.100
or getting in, uh, and, or weapons from getting out or getting in. And it's a, it's a negative term.
00:25:02.340
It's something that we should, when we hear there's been a lockdown and I live in Kingston,
00:25:06.720
there are 19 federal and provincial prisons in the Kingston, Ontario neighborhood. I know what a
00:25:12.100
lockdown means. And, uh, it's, it's not, it's never good. It means that there's trouble in one of the
00:25:17.560
prisons. And, uh, uh, so it's, it's a term that has sort of already has a negative connotation.
00:25:24.980
And when we, when we, and one of the biggest uses of it was in China where they, they locked down
00:25:32.700
the entire country for almost two years. And, and, and so when, when we were, you know,
00:25:38.140
when we were told to stay home, we, uh, you know, to self-isolate or to, to, uh, to not go to work
00:25:44.420
and not go to restaurants and theaters and et cetera, we referred to that as a lockdown as if it
00:25:50.420
was a huge imposition that we really, you know, was really going to be terrible thing to have to
00:25:56.140
go through when in fact, you know, it, it wasn't, it was just, it was a reasonable thing to, to ask
00:26:01.480
someone to do. There's a respiratory illness out there that's killing, uh, millions of people.
00:26:06.680
Maybe it's a good idea to avoid going places where you might catch it. Uh, that's what,
00:26:11.620
that's all that lockdown meant. And, uh, and in fact, the way the government expressed it,
00:26:16.420
it was in Canada anyway, and in, in the West, most Western countries, it was never a direct order.
00:26:22.280
You must lock down. It was, you know, stay home if you can, or try to avoid, uh, contact with other
00:26:29.180
people if it's convenient. Uh, it was never, it was never, uh, as, as I recall, it was never a strict
00:26:35.200
order. Uh, it, it, it depended on where you live, both in Canada and in the world. At one point,
00:26:41.700
Quebec did invoke a curfew, uh, and they were arresting people who were outside.
00:26:46.420
Right. At, at certain times of, uh, of the day. Yeah. And they were closing restaurants and,
00:26:51.160
and, and, and, and, uh, in parts of, uh, of Canada, the, uh, the restrictions were stronger
00:26:58.720
in, in parts of the United States at times, they were stronger than what we had. It all,
00:27:03.160
it did vary. None were, as you say, as serious as China, where, um, if you've seen the video,
00:27:09.600
they were literally welding doors shut to keep people inside. Yeah. We didn't go that far,
00:27:14.720
but it, it, it was, it was a big change. But as I said, lockdown is something that, um,
00:27:20.920
if I had said, Wayne, we're going to lock you down, you would have said, Oh, wait a minute.
00:27:25.480
Yeah. But there were many people that wanted more restrictions. It, that, that's,
00:27:30.780
that there was a big psychological change in how you viewed a word or a phrase that a year earlier,
00:27:38.860
you would have thought there's no way I want the government to do that. Then there was a large
00:27:44.320
part of the population that wanted that. They want more security from a more sense of security
00:27:49.480
coming from more direction coming from the government. One of the, one of the, uh, you know,
00:27:54.240
one of the, one of the ways that, that all the governments worked, uh, during the, during the
00:27:59.920
pandemic was to have lockdowns or have severe restrictions for a while, and then let open things
00:28:06.420
up. So let the economy recover a little bit. And then when, when the numbers started going up in
00:28:11.500
the hospitals again, to shut down restaurants and sports arenas and beaches and parks and things.
00:28:17.580
And then when people started complaining about too, being too many restrictions, they would open those
00:28:22.980
up and then the numbers would start to climb, climb again. And there were people who said, look,
00:28:27.880
this is, this is not working. It's, it's, this is not, this is not dealing with the,
00:28:31.840
with the epidemic. We are, uh, we should stay one way or the other, either like Sweden, for example,
00:28:39.820
stayed, they didn't have any lockdowns. They didn't shut anything down. They just,
00:28:43.400
they just let people go the way they shut down the borders, I think at some point, but they didn't,
00:28:49.020
they didn't close restaurants or, uh, or have, have personal lockdowns. Uh, the two, and that was,
00:28:56.360
that got into the whole idea. Another phrase that, that is in the book is herd immunity,
00:29:00.300
uh, where Sweden's approach was to let the, let the COVID-19 sort of run through the population,
00:29:07.540
get as many people to get it as possible, because once you, they thought once you get it,
00:29:12.760
you have, uh, an immunity to getting it again, uh, uh, which turned out to not be the case.
00:29:19.200
Uh, and, uh, so there were, there were people who thought Sweden had the, was, had the right way to
00:29:25.420
go. There are other people thought that China had the, had the right way to go. There was a movement
00:29:29.600
called zero COVID, uh, in which they, you know, in some places in, in Eastern, Eastern Canada and in
00:29:36.300
Northwest territories, they just shut everything down. Don't let anybody in, don't let anybody out.
00:29:41.760
Uh, and, uh, let's just brace ourselves for, for a bad few months and, and, and let this thing work
00:29:48.740
itself out. Uh, no, no single approach worked very well. China, China's lockdown severe, and Australia's
00:29:56.360
was another country and New Zealand was another country. Uh, they had the lockdown for quite a
00:30:02.100
while, uh, two years in China. And then, um, and then unusual for China, uh, there were, there was a
00:30:10.800
public outcry. There were, there were demonstrations in the streets to, uh, to lift the lockdown. Uh,
00:30:16.960
China gave in and they did lift the lockdown and then COVID got in and just, you know, a million and
00:30:22.940
a half people died in the next three months. You, um, you, you, you're right that in, in Canada and
00:30:30.280
many parts of the United States, we went up in town. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and then, and this is one of the
00:30:36.900
phrases, one of the phrases that you use in the book, we, uh, we had to apply an emergency break,
00:30:42.280
but you say that wasn't a very good term to use. Well, it was Ontario Premier Doug Ford used it
00:30:48.480
to describe what it was going to do. And, um, now I'm going by memory. I think that was April,
00:30:54.320
2021. And, uh, April, March, April. Yeah. And you said not a good term. Why not?
00:31:02.160
Well, for one thing, you, you only put them in your car, you only put your emergency break on
00:31:08.320
when the car is already stopped. Doug Ford used that term to say he's going to apply the emergency
00:31:15.800
break in order to stop the spread of COVID. Uh, after having left things open for so long that,
00:31:21.340
that COVID had, you know, had run rampant through the, through the province, he suddenly said, I'm
00:31:26.720
going to put on the emergency break and, and impose restrictions on, on everything imaginable where
00:31:33.580
people might, might, uh, uh, catch COVID. But using the word emergency is already, uh, you know,
00:31:42.000
a flag that makes people feel nervous. I mean, uh, if, how did things become an emergency or why are
00:31:50.360
things an emergency now when they weren't an emergency two years ago? Um, and I, so I, I think
00:31:55.860
that, and, and also the other thing that with that particular incident, Ford, uh, empowered the police
00:32:02.480
to stop people on the streets and in the, to stop cars on the highway and ask them if, if they're,
00:32:07.480
if what, where they were going was an essential, uh, trip. Uh, and that started making a lot of
00:32:15.780
people think that this was getting a little too right wing. And, uh, so I covered that extensively.
00:32:22.080
And what fascinated me about that is they, there was a group of people who were, uh, supporters of,
00:32:27.960
uh, COVID zero who wanted the type of lockdowns that we had in Melbourne. Right. And in Melbourne,
00:32:34.960
that included arresting you if you went too far from your home. Yeah. And when Ford brought it in,
00:32:41.020
I thought that was ridiculous and he shouldn't be doing it, but the people screaming the loudest
00:32:46.100
were the ones who had been calling for the Melbourne lockdowns. COVID was not good to a
00:32:50.360
lot of us psychologically. I know it's, it, it, it affected us so many, so many of us in ways that
00:32:57.280
were not logical. Uh, and, and I think that is the kind of thing that's going to, is going to stay
00:33:02.940
with us. It was when they, when they did that study on the ice storm that I mentioned earlier
00:33:08.240
in, in Montreal and, and, and well, here in Kingston, they, they found that what the hardest
00:33:13.980
thing on, on people psychologically was the uncertainty of when it was going to be over.
00:33:20.280
And I think with COVID it's, it's the same kind of thing. We did not, we, we had no way of being
00:33:26.400
certain or knowing in any way, how long this was going to last, how long the lockdowns were going
00:33:31.740
to last, how long we were going to be allowed to go to restaurants. Uh, and the uncertainty, the
00:33:37.220
long, the long-term effect of the uncertainty, I think is, is, is, is what is going to be with us
00:33:42.900
for a long time. In fact, that whole, that, that, that word uncertainty, I should have put that in the
00:33:47.980
book because that's a phrase that came up over and over again with people talking about the negative
00:33:52.520
effects of the, of the pandemic. Uh, but you were, we were talking earlier about, about how we use
00:33:58.360
negative language to, to, to talk about the pandemic or how the language that we used, this,
00:34:03.980
uh, um, uh, showed that we had a negative attitude towards, towards the, uh, towards what was
00:34:10.200
happening and using words like, uh, one of the phrases I have in the book is the, is vaccine
00:34:15.460
apartheid. Uh, and that, that, that's the one that I was just about to, to ask you about. You,
00:34:21.040
you've got seven different, um, instances where you use vaccines, including vaccines, vaccine,
00:34:26.480
vaccine, shedding, vaccine, passport, vaccine, nationalism, vaccine, hunters, vaccine, diplomacy,
00:34:32.040
vaccine apartheid is actually extremely offensive to me. I, I, I hate that term, but it was used.
00:34:41.600
Well, and it was used and I think people wanted people using it, wanted you to hate that term
00:34:47.660
because they wanted to lift the vaccine apartheid. It was actually someone from the, the prime minister
00:34:54.380
of South Africa that used that first use that term in a speech, uh, to the world health organization
00:35:00.340
saying that it was the way that the vaccine was being distributed around the world amounted to
00:35:06.600
vaccine apartheid because certain countries, certain countries that were not in Africa were getting,
00:35:12.080
uh, the, the lion's share of the available vaccine doses were, uh, North America was 80,
00:35:18.880
60 to 70% vaccinated, fully vaccinated. That time Europe was, uh, 70 to 80% vaccinated, whereas
00:35:26.260
countries in Africa were 10% or five between five and 10% vaccinated. And, and because the North,
00:35:33.460
because the rich countries were hoarding doses of, of vaccine and poor countries were not getting
00:35:39.060
there enough to give the, to protect their citizens. And, and, uh, the, the president of South
00:35:44.460
Africa said, this amounts to vaccine apartheid and the WHO, the leader of the WHO agreed with him.
00:35:50.740
He said this, we're not talking about, about, uh, leading to vaccine, a situation of vaccine
00:35:57.080
apartheid. We're, we are actually in a situation of vaccine apartheid. Um, and so that led to a whole
00:36:04.260
discussion about one of your other terms, patent waiver. And, and, and suddenly people went from being
00:36:09.800
experts in, um, in infectious diseases to, uh, intellectual property law. I know, I know. And
00:36:17.820
as a member of the Canadian writers union, I've been dealing with copyright issues for years. So
00:36:24.200
I had a bit of an idea of what was going on there and, and the resistance to opening up copyright.
00:36:29.320
Uh, yeah. So patent waiver. Uh, and if, if I do a second version of this book or, or, uh, another,
00:36:36.720
another, uh, revision of it, I'm going to have to add to the patent waiver entry. Patent waiver was
00:36:44.360
when, uh, poor countries like India, uh, um, South Africa, many African countries, uh, asked
00:36:52.120
the owners of the copyrights of the vaccines, the companies like Pfizer and Moderna to,
00:36:59.320
allow the, allow the manufacturers in those poor countries to manufacture their vaccines
00:37:05.420
in the, in those countries, rather than those countries having to buy the vaccine from, from
00:37:10.820
the corporations or the pharmaceutical companies in the rich countries, they couldn't afford
00:37:15.520
it. Uh, and, and so there was a, there was a, uh, a movement, a request to the WHO to actually
00:37:23.720
force those companies to release their patents. Um, and the WHO and the World Trade Organization,
00:37:31.740
the WTO, uh, had, had their hands were tied, they said, because many countries had signed,
00:37:38.120
uh, a treaty saying that they would, they would honor, recognize the copyright of other countries,
00:37:44.960
member countries of the WTO. And so they couldn't order somebody to, to release the patent, but the,
00:37:51.280
it was a humanitarian request. The companies on the pharmaceutical companies on their own
00:37:56.220
were asked to release and they wouldn't do it and they still haven't done it. Even though, uh,
00:38:01.160
since the book came out, the WT, the WHO has, uh, has required, requested the companies, uh, to release
00:38:10.340
their patents and companies have said they would, they still haven't. So it was legal for, it was okay
00:38:17.220
for a, for a country like China or India to manufacture, uh, um, a vaccine that was patented
00:38:25.920
in another country under license where they had to pay, pay the other, pay the pharmaceutical company
00:38:31.920
for that, for that right. But they, but they were never allowed to, to sort of just start making the
00:38:37.460
vaccine on their own without, without paying for it, uh, a lot for it. Have you, have you looked at
00:38:44.800
whether we've seen, um, such large scale language adaptation like this before COVID?
00:38:52.100
Well, I think World War II, I mentioned that earlier, you know, things that were invented during
00:38:57.300
World War II are, are now in the language. Um, ballpoint pens, for example, were invented by, uh,
00:39:05.040
the Air Force so that, uh, airline pilots could, or, or, yeah, airline, people in airplanes could,
00:39:11.480
could write, uh, on their charts. They only, they couldn't, you can't use a fountain pen at 30,000
00:39:18.340
feet, uh, if you're, and, and so they invented the ballpoint pen. Uh, the Jeep was invented during the
00:39:26.120
Second World War. Um, so lots of terms like that, uh, have entered the language. Spam. Spam, yeah, yeah.
00:39:34.480
Which has taken on a new meaning well beyond the luncheon meat. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I think that's,
00:39:41.640
I think, yeah, that's the one that comes to mind to me most clearly. What, what about differences
00:39:47.580
between, um, either classes, you know, it, was there a class difference, uh, in how language changed or,
00:39:55.760
um, how does English differ from other languages in dealing with it? You, you mentioned earlier,
00:40:02.180
uh, the French had a different term. They didn't use quarantine. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. What about
00:40:10.220
those differences? Did you notice any of those? I looked at, uh, the book deals mainly with the
00:40:16.760
language, the English language, how it's changed because I don't, you know, I didn't have access
00:40:21.560
to a lot of other languages, but I did, I did read a study that said that Germany, Germany had come
00:40:27.460
up with 1500 new phrases to talk about the pandemic. Um, I don't know if they actually
00:40:33.560
came up with any new words. Um, you know, the German thing is to, is to take existing words
00:40:39.140
and bunch them together to, to mean something, to mean something else. Uh, I know that, uh,
00:40:44.620
in Holland, they came up, they started using a word, um, um, to, to describe this is called
00:40:53.000
in, it would be literally translated as hamstering. So I think it, and it meant, um, stocking up
00:41:00.040
on things that you think are going to be in short supply later on. So people would hamster
00:41:03.700
toilet paper, um, and people hamstered, uh, uh, batteries, flashlight batteries and things
00:41:11.060
like that. Um, hamstering, hamster. We called it hoarding. Yeah. Yeah. And I still, I still don't
00:41:17.100
understand the toilet paper hoarding at the beginning. I know it's the last thing I would,
00:41:21.220
I would have thought of. I did say that, you know, I, I would understand coffee or Earl gray tea
00:41:26.280
or something, but toilet paper, but you know, it, it, it does make sense in the long run because
00:41:32.660
when you look back, because think, you know, if you, when we were allowed into the supermarkets,
00:41:38.180
the, we talked to that, that one of the things that came up a lot was the, uh, the supply chain
00:41:43.680
shortages. Um, some of the, there's a phrase we didn't use, uh, outside of certain logistics
00:41:50.040
enterprises. We, you know, we didn't use supply chain in general language. No, no, not unless we
00:41:56.060
worked for a retail outlet or something like that. Uh, but yeah, everyone knows now you go into a
00:42:01.800
grocery store and there's no brown sugar. Uh, the grocery store guy will say, well, yeah, we have a
00:42:07.320
supply chain problem and you know what that means. Um, yeah. Uh, Susan Sontag wrote a, wrote a book
00:42:15.160
called illness as metaphor. And she, she talked about, uh, and that was about cancer. And she talked
00:42:20.820
in that book about how, when, when we started using military terms to, uh, to describe the effect of
00:42:28.020
cancer on society. So, you know, we have a, we fight, we have a battle against cancer. We, we have
00:42:33.820
drugs that target cancer. Uh, we, uh, you know, that, that kind of military phrasing. And we, we did use
00:42:42.680
the same kind of thing in, uh, with COVID, you know, the, the vaccines target or, or they, they act
00:42:48.640
like a bullet for, for, uh, for COVID and then using words like lockdown, um, again, military, sort of
00:42:55.760
military phraseology that, that, uh, to describe what we're doing with that, with, uh, to, to mitigate the
00:43:02.300
effects of the, of the disease. All right. The book is Pandexicon, how the language of the pandemic
00:43:08.180
defined our new cultural reality. Wayne, thanks for the time. We could keep chatting, but, uh, we both
00:43:14.100
have to get on with the day, but that, that was a fascinating look back. Um, some good memories,
00:43:19.640
some bad memories, some stuff I want to forget. Right. I think that's, that's, that sums it up
00:43:24.540
pretty well, Brian. Thanks. All right. Thanks for the time, Wayne. Uh, this, uh, is an episode of
00:43:30.180
Full Comment. Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host.
00:43:34.420
This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive
00:43:40.380
producer. You can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Amazon, whatever
00:43:45.840
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00:43:51.880
friends all about us. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.