New Year, New Words, New World
By Valerie Fridland
Every year I spend the weekend after the New Year’s at the same place. Actually, not in the same location, but at the same event, namely the American Dialect Society (ADS) Annual Conference. Yes, I know. You are wondering how I manage to get access every year to such a hot ticket invite.
Just lucky, I guess. Well, that and the fact that I am a sociolinguist that specializes in American speech. That does help me get past the large security presence fighting off the mobs of non-linguists trying to get in. But this year, like so many other things, the conference was cancelled, and I will be at home in my jammies, sipping champagne with my Boxer and my Dutch Shepherd, and maybe my husband and kids if they make the cut, like the rest of the properly COVID-19 behaved masses. Sigh.
So, given our daily realities, do you blame me for living in a fantasy world where linguistic conferences are celebrity events and we don't all wear masks and avoid human contact like a (literal) plague? In any other year, I might have even felt a little irritated at using many days of my winter break off from the University working on a scholarly presentation and hanging out talking linguistic smack with a bunch of other nerdy academics. But not this year. This year I will miss it.
I doubt my romanticizing fondness for even blasé things I used to do sets me apart. I think we are all having this same sort of realization that some of the things we liked to complain about or even might have resented a bit in our pre-pandemic life are actually things we miss now. Like attending school in person for instance, though my teenager would vehemently deny it. Or going into your office and having your colleagues drop in to chat while you are trying to meet a deadline. Or simply being able to cough in public without having people look at you like Typhoid Mary.
But fortunately, not all is lost. This new way of life has brought some new bright sides despite its darker days. For instance, I am saving a LOT of money on water bills only taking a shower on days I have a Zoom with people that might expect some modicum of hygiene (most of my colleagues, I have learned, luckily really don’t). I don’t have to figure out what to send for lunch for my kids, with mac n cheese cups and instant ramen now staples in my pantry. (Don’t judge -consider how their new-found microwave skills will serve them well in college.) And the two puppies I adopted in the fall before the pandemic have not destroyed nearly as many shoes, pillows, and dog beds as the two before them that didn’t have human company 24-7. But most of all, our massive shift to Zoom has opened up some new possibilities that have really changed how I interact and engage with the world. And, to my surprise given the awkwardness of my first few zoom lectures, not always in a bad way.
For instance, before the pandemic, I often gave talks within the University or to local community groups but having to travel to give public talks outside of Nevada limited the number of those I could do to just a few a year. With Zoom, though, the world has become so much smaller and easily traversed in just the time it takes to hit the ‘start meeting’ button. Now, I can give an interview in Japan and still be home in time for dinner. That, two years ago, would have seemed crazy. In the past three months, I have been to Dublin twice and India once, as well as in New York, Washington State, California, and, well, everywhere that has an Internet connection. Though my frequent flyer miles have taken a hit, my ability to connect with people far and wide has blossomed.
And it has not only been my work that has seen the benefit of being able to catch a glimpse of each other’s bookshelves or bedrooms through video portals. I have also been able to reconnect with some dear friends from long ago. While we had been exchanging holiday cards and random phone calls since college, having kids, jobs and, well, just life in general, had gotten in the way of really maintaining our relationship across the miles. The pandemic gave us the time and the method to find each other again. Now, Sunday nights often find me on Zoom having a glass of wine and catching up with my two besties from long ago.
And as for my conference, I still won’t get the chance to exchange linguistic war stories over vodka shots with my far-flung colleagues this year, but not all is lost. The event in the conference I look forward to most every year is the annual Word of the Year vote, a contest that has been held every year for the past 30 years. Hundreds of linguists from around the world get together and, in a spirit of good fun, nominate and vote on what we think the most influential, bizarre, useful and useless words of the year have been. Last year, for example, (my) pronouns took the overall prize, and Ok Boomer was voted the most useful. This year, despite the cancellation of the conference, the Word of the Year (WOTY for those of us that are really hip) is moving online, another way that the massive shift to video conferencing is helping us maintain a bit of normalcy. With new words like COVID, corona-cut, social distancing, doomscrolling, quarantining, super-spreader, shelter-in-place, and PPE now familiar to us all, I think we will have a lot to talk about.
So, in the end, armed with a lot of new pandemic-related words to nominate, I will still be enjoying some semblance of a normal post New Year’s weekend. Plus, I don’t even have to shower. Now if that’s not the beginning of a great new trend, I don’t know what is.
Photo/Valerie Fridland.
Dr. Valerie Fridland is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. An expert on the relationship between language and society, her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and scholarly collections. She is co-author of Sociophonetics, coming soon from Cambridge University Press, and lead editor of three volumes on Western-states English. Her language blog, Language in the Wild, is featured on Psychology Today, and her lecture series, Language and Society, is available from The Great Courses. She is also working on her first book for a popular audience, I Hate When You Say That!, coming out with Viking/Penguin. She regularly appears on podcasts and news programs such as The Elegant Warrior, The Mentor Project, CBS News, and Newsy’s The Why.
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