Thursday, March 26, 2020

Covid-19: Euphemisms for the Duration

Sociology poll (preceded by an explanatory personal anecdote):

When I was a young kid -- single-digit age -- like all members of Generation X I lived a life of extreme cartoon deprivation, compared to kids today: other than Saturday morning cartoons, the only ones I could watch on a regular basis were old (1930s through 50s/earliest 60s) shorts which originally aired in movie theaters, but by the time I came around you'd find them on local indie TV stations that mostly aired whatever syndicated content could be had cheap. Since a lot of those cartoons (Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, Max Fleischer's and Tex Avery's oeuvres) came out in the early 40s, I actually got a "feel" for certain aspects of daily life in World War Two before I had any inkling of their contemporary equivalents -- for example, I had a vague understanding of how "ration points" had to be considered whenever you'd buy food at the grocery store, loooong before I knew anything about the importance of checking the unit price of an item in order to get the best deal (e.g. "Paying $1.50 for the 20-ounce bottle is a better bargain than paying $1.00 for 10 ounces").

Thanks in large part to those cartoons, I also knew that during the war, many Americans referred to it as "the duration" -- certain businesses would sport signs saying "closed for the duration," people (or anthropomorphic animals) would talk about doing things only "for the duration," etc. Obviously, this was used as shorthand for "the duration of this war." And now, almost immediately after covid-19 brought about radical changes to my ordinary everyday life, I started referring to "the duration" -- I just checked the archives of a chat forum where I hang out, and in just the past three days I've mentioned such sentences as "Texas has also banned abortions for the duration" and "Jeff's workplace has [instituted various changes] for the duration," among others -- and of course, I have no idea if I came up with this phrase "on my own," so to speak, or if I am merely defaulting to a usage I learned as a very young child watching cartoons older than my parents.

So, here's a question for all of you: what phrases, abbreviations or euphemisms, if any, have YOU been using when discussing the quarantine and other covid-19 issues?

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