The Economist reports that 4.6 million fewer Britons got surgeries than did in previous years. But things are different in more ways than just that. Notice this weirdly wordy digression in a discussion about a vocal cord procedure:
“Throat surgery is known by a newly popular acronym: it is an AGP, or Aerosol-Generating Procedure. The entire point of ear, nose and throat surgery, says Hamid Manji, Milton Keynes University Hospital’s clinical director for surgery, is to ‘mess around with that airway mucosa, be it pharyngeal, be it nasal, or in this case vocal.’ That releases viruses, which is a problem during a pandemic.”
I have a minor obsession with recording new or newly popular acronyms and euphemisms because these kinds of terms record cultural changes that would otherwise be impossible to prove. When the pandemic started, our common vocabulary was infested with so many new phrases that noticing it drew a clear line between the time before and the time of. In April 2020, the darkest days, I wrote here about constantly hearing “PPE” for “personal protective equipment,” having never known it a month prior. It’s a sign that the Great Masking Bicker Session may finally be abating that I barely remember the term now. But ENTs saying AGP is the new PPE — that is, these doctors now think of cutting into throats primarily in terms of this one virus for which nigh-on 90% of adults there are vaccinated (and all healthcare workers are). Why? Mindset. That is, some people now are done with the virus, and for good or bad reasons, some others think of every single feature of life through a COVID-19 frame.
We are now in the third wave of creepy coronavirus terminology. Take, for example, the construction “fast-spreading delta variant.” This variant is, in fact, spreading fast, though nobody knows if there will be an eventual “breakthrough variant” that defeats the existing vaccines and, if so, whether this is the variant it will branch from. For now, things look good. Yet, the ubiquity of this exact stock construction in about 700 separate trending articles per day is striking. Journalists who write it into headline after headline seem incapable of writing “delta variant” without “fast-spreading” preceding it, like it’s a proper title. It suggests they are not quite thinking about this in scientific terms but, rather, cliches.
More late-pandemic verbiage: In a Guardian story about New Zealand babies, you can find the phrase “immunity debt.” Here is the dystopian neologism for the anti-germophobe. Children starved of a normal, dirty life who lived through “social distancing” wearing “PPE” through their immune systems’ formative years were never exposed to microbes at a normal rate. Now, they are getting sicker than children should get from minor infections.
When I first covered such covidspeak, I noted I could not trace the origin of the policy we were living under, known as “social distancing” but officially as “physical distancing.” It turns out to have originated in a New Mexico teenager’s science project. Then, it traveled through her researcher father into a paper, then via a Bush-era anti-bioterror push into federal policy, where it lay in wait to become our lives for over a year. It was, originally, called “enforced sequestration,” which is more sinister-sounding and therefore more honest about what public health people call a “layered non-pharmaceutical intervention” strategy (they can’t bring themselves to say “mass indefinite quarantine” or “house arrest until further updated”) entails. Hopefully, this is the last, lingering period in which the coronavirus plays a prominent enough role in daily life to generate new features of how we use English.
