Sometimes we need to state the obvious. So just to make sure we’re conscious of one impact, here are ten words and phrases the pandemic’s added to our everyday vocabularies over the past year.
Coronavirus. (Of course.) We even learned to spell it.
Covid. (Ditto.) Upper- or lower-case.
Zoom. The word existed, just not in the context we now think of first.
Shelter in place. This one still strikes me as strange.
Self-quarantine, self-isolation. I suppose it’s supposed to sound voluntary. Or else.
Social distancing. Specifically, six feet or more.
Vaxxed. Which leads us to:
Moderna. Not as a chic word for contemporary.
Pfeizer. As a synonym for a vaccine, rather than the pharmaceutical giant.
We writers or artists, at least some of us, push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not, only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.
Either it gets published or whatever as is or gets pushed aside, maybe to be picked up later and reworked, maybe to go in the trash. Or maybe Death intervenes.
God puts the tree in the middle of the garden as the instrument by which the two become human enough to die, maybe, but also be reborn … to be human also means to be capable of evil in this sense they do fall … into humanity opening out into history and redemption.
Jnana's Red Barn 