Society in danger

Abstract

The word samfundssind, roughly “community spirit” came to be a keyword of the moment in the Danish discourses of the global coronavirus pandemic. In an era of acute dangers to humanity, entire linguacultures underwent massive pragmatic and semantic change, and in this chapter, multiple facets of samfundssind will be analysed, including its metapragmatic and rhetorical profile, its tonality and keying, its cultural construction grammar, and the reactive societal and axiological semantics that came to be associated with the word. The paper exemplifies the cultural pragmatics of danger from the perspective of a local keyword which after its coinage in political discourse came to move an entire population into a culturally specific moral construal of the pandemic, and which at the same time afforded a pragmatic framework for collective affect, action, and responsibility.