The COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic (a global health emergency) following its ravaging spread and increasing death toll that led to the unprecedented multi-sectoral crisis and collateral damage.  These, and the non-discovery of reliable therapeutic medicines combined to generate rising fears and tension across the globe. To cope with these realities, discourse participants devised humorous expressions to create laughter, ease tension and melt fears.  The paper seeks to examine the contextual usage of such humorous expressions used in Nigeria, particularly in Calabar, that denote the sociolinguistic milieu, and shared knowledge and experience of the interactants.  The study adopts Relief and Encryption Theories of Humour because the theories account for the situational appropriateness of the humorous expressions as “coping devices” in coherence with the cognitive, linguistic, situational and social contexts. Data were generated by means of participant observation in on-site and virtual interactions in social media platforms. Findings show that COVID-19 pandemic has exerted irresistible pressure on language resources that stimulated the creation of humorous expressions as coping needs for the consequential circumstance. Specifically, the humorous expressions such as “happy wives”, “sad husbands”, “side chicks are hungry” among others were regularly and contextually deployed for comic reliefs and cognitive recreations to stimulate laughter in crisis.  Linguistically, the expressions are devised English structures and other constructs with codemixed elements derived from the registers of several discourse domains that reflect the Nigerian sociolinguistic environment. The constructs are therefore modelled to demystify the pandemic and unify interactants in order to ease tension and cope with the realities of the preventive and survival protocols.

This paper seeks to analyse the nexus between the social concerns and the style in selected poems of Unimna Angrey's collection entitled Drought (Ubuang). The social problems that provide the social situation upon which the poems are based and which undermine social stability include poverty in the midst of plenty and environmental degradation. Drought in this poetic idiom is the metaphor of the excruciating poverty, which the Nigerian people, represented by Kigbor Ukpe people, suffer in the midst of abundance. It is not just the period of dry season, but a period that rains were supposed to have set in. It is a period of shortage of resources in the midst of plenty. The desire to communicate these social concerns to a wider audience constrains his style of poetry to be pacy and accessible. The paper concludes that the social situation is the metaphor for the language and hence the style of the collection.

This paper analyzes comments by readers of an online article in The Punch Newspaper entitled "CAN crisis deepens", the crises that threaten to rock the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN. It aims to show how name calling and vulgarity as a trademark of language use in the virtual community can pose a threat to national peace and security. Some of the comments that trailed the article deviate from civility, break the conversational and politeness maxims, extend the frontiers of the discourse at hand and inundate it with name calling and vitriolic language. The method used in this paper consists of highlighting the comments and analyzing this discourse using Grice's Cooperative Principles and Politeness Principles of conversation. The paper concludes that public discourse among the netizens (members of virtual community) has the tendency of degenerating into expletives, discourtesies and disparagement because the public space is a faceless one; hence the comments which have deviated from the norms of civilized discourse pose a threat to religious peace and harmony among Christians in Nigeria and by extension to national peace and security.

Abstract-This paper analyses selected poems in the poetry collection of Joe Ushie entitled Hill Songs and those of Unimna Angrey's collection entitled Drought (Ubuang). It is an investigation of the linguistic choices that the selected writers have made in order to establish their connections with their environment and the representation of the effects of the negative and unfavourable conduct and destructive activities of man on it (the environment). The paper uses a conflation of three theories-ecofeminism, modification in grammar and conceptual theory of metaphor. In this respect, focus is mainly on the use of lexical items, verses, the imagery and certain literary devices, such as metaphor and simile, that the poets deploy in their works to establish that connection and the attack that the environment, which man is inextricably a part of, has undergone in man's quest for development. The aim is to draw attention to the poetic discourse on the effects of the man's interactions with the environment as expressed by these new poets. The paper concludes that the poets' concern for, and conviction about the symbiosis between man and the environment have constrained the deployment of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric idiom and the style of their poetry.Index Terms-man, anthropomorphic and anthropocentric idiom and style