I have not been able to track down where exactly the phrase “social distancing” comes from. What I am sure of is that you’ve heard it and spoken it this month. I’m a little less sure, but still virtually certain, that you hadn’t heard it when you rang in 2020. But there are a lot of new things in our new cramped and clinical verbal environment. This experience will probably kill the lighthearted usage of the metaphor “going viral,” at least for a while. The etymology of “isolate,” derived from a Latin word (insula) for both island and a confined and dangerous type of apartment block inhabited by all but the upper crust of ancient Rome, has taken on a newly bleak resonance to me.
Recently, the letters “PPE” would have meant very little. Maybe they would have put me in mind of the “politics, philosophy, and economics” major at my college, though I wouldn’t have heard them in years. Sometime between the beginning of February and the end of March, one started hearing them many times a day, and they started meaning “personal protective equipment,” scarce gear that keeps a deadly virus away from mucus membranes. We now use them casually and authoritatively as though we are all healthcare professionals, because healthcare is at the fore of our minds. What whiplash.
As to “social distancing,” it’s a lot more likely you got the message about employing social distancing measures from the public health authorities than that you got the update that it is not the up-to-date way to speak anymore. A March 26 Washington Post article asked, “Is ‘social distancing’ the wrong term? Expert prefers ‘physical distancing,’ and the WHO agrees.” As Science Alert reported on the same policy change, “The idea is to clarify that an order to stay at home during the current coronavirus outbreak isn’t about breaking contact with your friends and family — but rather keeping a physical distance to make sure the disease doesn’t spread.”
I have not agreed with the World Health Organization on much lately, but I happen to agree that the term “social distancing” is conceptually iffy, if you think about the words. “Physical distancing” seems more apt. Still, is announcing that change “clarifying”? Taking a step back, I can’t help but be creeped out by the assumption that public health authorities think they can plop a massive new bit of verbiage into a frazzled public consciousness and then think better of it a few short weeks later and call up the public at large with an update about the, er, new speak. Orders about how we must handle this pandemic in terms of public health measures will necessarily be top-down like that. Some acronymic organization will tell us whether to shake hands or when to wear a mask or how to report to get a shot of whatever it is. And we must listen. But this obedience is a grim necessity, and it should not be expanded beyond the minimum requisite scope. Tweaking the already awkward vocabulary that has just become part of the vernacular is well outside.
It is not as though how we speak does not matter at all. Effective and scientific public communication is important for how people react. But ultimately, trying to engineer lexically how people feel about isolation by replacing the adjective we use before “distancing” is not going to work.
