You can write one, too.
My response was short, ragged, disjointed. Rambling about the transmission of energy from soil through roots to plant. But I was avoiding. Transmission has become a loaded word now, dripping with the implication of disease jumping from one body to another. We are but transfer points for this virus, transmission joints, in a more medical, scientific parlance, we are known as vectors.
Think of all the terms we have become so familiar with so quickly: isolation, self-isolation, isolate, contact tracing, cordon sanitaire, droplets, aersol-borne. Essential activities, essential workers. Fomites - inanimate objects that transmit disease, not the coronavirus strongest method of attack, but what our constant cleaning (no longer considered OCD) of doorknobs, countertops, packages, bags attempts to defeat. Community transmission. Negative-pressure rooms - not the place you want to spend your last hours on this planet. R0 - reproductive rate. Viral Shedding - what we might be inadvertently doing before any symptoms show.
New terms: quarnatini, quarantime (the inability to determine any particular time of day or week or season while sheltering in place), quarantizzy - what the cat does at the end of the day. Quarantune - songs of the coronavirus. To Zoom. Drive-by birthday parties.
Think of the ordinary words that have acquired newer meanings. Surge. Flatten the Curve. The peak - that rapidly moving target of the height of infections.
Think of the terms we may never forget. First million cases. Antibody tests. Plague. Masks. Pandemic.
First Spring Spent Indoors.
Coronavirus Glossary
No comments:
Post a Comment
Noise makers!