Pandexicon: How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality

Description

Did you keep a list of the words coined by Covid? Wayne Grady did! They're deftly woven into a journal/timeline, taking us through two years of surrealism and limbo.-Margaret Atwood This exploration of the many new terms of the Covid-19 pandemic provides insight into the ways an ever-evolving vocabulary helped us cope with our anxiety and adapt to a new reality. When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Wayne Grady started collecting the words and phrases that arose from our shared global experience. Some, such as "uptick" and "pivot," had existed before but now took on new meaning, and others, such as "covidivorce," "quarantini," "covexit," and "shecession," appeared for the first time, their meaning instantly clear. Through this new vocabulary, we became more able to adapt to change, to domesticate it in a sense, and to reduce our fears. Moving from the very beginning of the pandemic (the "Before Times") and our early response to it through the peaks and troughs of the various waves in countries throughout the world, and ending with a contemplation of what the "After Times" might look like, this book takes us on a journey through the pandemic and illuminates both how this new language has unfolded and how it has changed the way we think about ourselves and each other.

Wayne Grady is the author of three novels and more than a dozen books of nonfiction. His many awards include four Science-in-Society Awards, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, a Governor-General's Award for English Translation, and an Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Kingston, Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Did you keep a list of the words coined by Covid? Wayne Grady did! They're deftly woven into a journal/timeline, taking us through two years of surrealism and limbo. -Margaret Atwood "Compendium, cornucopia, COVID-19! At once a reference and a sketchbook, Pandexicon helps us to see more clearly the ways the recent pandemic has changed both ourselves and our language." - Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures "I've been waiting for a book like this to come out and Wayne got there first. Is it jinxing things to say it's over? Maybe this is only Volume One." -Douglas Coupland "Pandexicon could be our first real monument to the Covid-19 years-an erudite work of memory that brings together language, history, and data so powerfully you might even experience nostalgia. In the battle over the words we used to make meaning of the pandemic, Wayne Grady emerges victorious." - J.B. MacKinnon "This is so much more than a lexicon or dictionary. Grady has given us a travelogue documenting our journey through the rough seas of the pandemic, examining the words we have used to talk about the contradictory cross-currents of jokes, opinions, laboratory data, heart-breaking personal anecdotes, and political rants." -David Waltner-Toews, author of On Pandemics: Deadly Diseases from Bubonic Plague to Coronavirus