COVID-19, the beer flu; or, the disease of many names

Abstract

Since the coronavirus outbreak began to spread worldwide in the early months of 2020, English speakers have been coming up with new names for the disease at a rate of knots. The myriad unofficial synonyms for COVID-19 that we currently have at our disposal provide an extreme example of overlexicalisation, and it is not so much the number that is impressive as the sheer speed at which they have been coined. This study is based on a personally compiled corpus of tweets covering the period from late January to late May 2020 and aims to work out what mechanisms underpin the creation and use of some two hundred and seventy synonyms, paying particular attention to the role of slang, wordplay, verbal humour, bigotry and xenophobia. The author identifies and discusses a set of categories that help to better understand the attitudes behind these words, some of which bespeak a desire to confront the grim reality of disease, while others – the majority, in fact – seek to denigrate and stigmatise its “ideal victims” (the baby boomers) or its “evil perpetrators” (the Chinese). In a different context, this study might be deemed just a celebration of the creative levity and wit of English speakers when faced with adversity. In these dark times, it is also a sad testimony to how some of our primitive fears have come to be reflected in our pandemic lexicon.

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“…Veselu virkni koronas kā ļaunas sievietes (arī prostitūtas) personificējumu piemēru angļu valodā no dažādu valstu pārstāvju ierakstiem "Twitter" sniedz Antonio Lillo (Antonio Lillo), angļu filologs no Alikantes universitātes Spānijā. Viņa ieskatā to mērķis ir rotaļīgi mazināt stāvokļa smagumu, izmantojot strupinājumu Rona (< Corona), kas ir homofonisks ar sieviešu vārdu vai uzvārdu un nereti lietots kopā ar kādu sievietes sociālo lomu vai profesiju apzīmējošu substantīvu: Miss, Mrs, Sister, Mama, Lady, Auntie, Queen utt., piemēram: Queen Rona is not working hard enough... (11th April; australia) 'Karaliene Rona nestrādā pietiekami smagi... (11. aprīlis, Austrālija)' (Lillo, 2020).…”

COVID-19 and its Linguistic Variants from “Miss Rona” to “Boomer Remover”

“…A recent in-depth analysis (Lillo, 2020) of the different ways COVID-19 has been renamed on Twitter showed that Covid-19 and coronavirus are used as synonyms and are often reduced to Covid or shortened to corona. This study also found that Twitterers used affixation and shortening to create playful variations, rhymes and puns of these base lexemes.…”

“…Although there is no semantic association between the two words, this homophony has produced various interesting names, mainly made up of compounds. Among the various examples listed by Lillo (2020), there are noun phrases in which the word corona as synonym for COVID-19 is associated, in a jocular way, with Corona beer, such as Mexican lager beer, Pale lager virus or Mexican beer disease. In these cases the premodifiers Mexican, pale and lager respectively denote the origin, the characteristics and the style of the beer (lager is a type of bottom-fermented and conditioned cool beer).…”

“…The US is the most active Twitter country in the world (76.9 million) and the UK is among the top 10 countries with the most Twitter users (18.4 million), while countries such as France (10 million), Spain (8.75 million) and Italy (not among the top 20 countries with the most Twitter users), are less active. Moreover, most of Twitter users in English-speaking countries belong mainly to the young generation (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) and partly to the middle-aged 1 Coronacoinages is a term coined by the American linguist Zimmer who first used the #coronacoinages to track the pandemic-era new blends on Twitter platform on 13 th March 2020 (Zimmer, 2020). 2 A blend is a word formed by fusing two (or sometimes more) words together, so that part of the material of these words is lost (Beliaeva, 2019).…”

Coronavirus rhyming slang

“…In this respect, it is worth noting that RS serves one of the main purposes of slang in general (see Partridge, 1970: 6) which is to function as a coping strategy for the primal fears of disease and death. The coping function of slang (see Benczes & Burridge, 2019: 75-76;Burridge & Manns, 2020) is indeed one of the major reasons for the proliferation of light-hearted slangisms over the past couple of years (Thorne, 2020), including a host of blends (Roig-Marín, 2021a, 2021b)-upwards of 40 per cent of all new coronavirus-related words (Moldovan, 2020)-and a whole glut of synonyms for COVID-19, the latter a subject I have dealt with elsewhere (Lillo, 2020).…”