We now have a name for the disease. These were the words of the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) in a historic announcement on 11 February 2020. Back then, there had only been 393 cases of a mysterious new respiratory illness outside China, and in most places life continued as normal. Covid-19. Ill spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine, he continued. Little did we know that this oddly technical-sounding phrase would become not just a household name, but an era-defining one.
On the same day, the Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which researches the family of viruses that includes Sars, Mers and some strains of the common cold, rushed out a paper. It redesignated the pathogen that had until then been called 2019-nCoV, the n standing for novel. The new name was severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or Sars-CoV-2.
Fast forward to August 2020, and both these terms, alongside coronavirus itself, have been used billions of times. New words normally enter the language gradually, as trends gather pace (think selfie), or a new import becomes popular (as with foods such as oranges and avocados). But pandemics arent like that they spread rapidly and assail us with scientific terms and slang as society struggles to adapt to each new, terrifying presence.
We have crunched Covid-19 to Covid; the specific coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 is mostly now coronavirus, and has been joined by the pandemic (for some in Australia, the pando), rona and even miss Rona. There are terms to describe experiences linked to the virus: people suffer from happy hypoxia, Covid toe or become long-haulers. Previously niche words and phrases have become wearily familiar as they are applied to the social effects of the crisis, from lockdown to furlough and shelter in place.
The world has been here before, of course though not with todays level of connectivity, where information circulates at dizzying speed. Deadly disease outbreaks have beset humanity for centuries, each bringing with it a new vocabulary, and a new way of conceptualising the threat.
For Nancy Bristow, historian and author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, naming an illness can fulfil important social functions. People are desperate for understanding in the midst of something that is incomprehensible. And in the midst of that uncertainty, I think we look for things that we can know and that we can control. This can involve summarising the symptoms (Russian sneeze was one name for the 1889-90 flu), downplaying the severity of the illness (three day fever was used on US government information leaflets in 1918) or, most notoriously, linking it to particular countries or communities (flu has come in Spanish, Asiatic and Russian instalments, and Aids was initially known as gay-related immune deficiency, or even gay cancer).
Donald Trump has attempted to stir up anti-Chinese sentiment and divert attention from his own failures by using the terms China virus and kung flu, but evidence for anti-Spanish feeling in 1918 is scant. Its relatively simple, Bristow says, about the most widely used name for the outbreak. Spain was a neutral country during the first world war. So they were very open about reporting on this scourge whereas other nations hid the story initially.
When the pandemic overwhelmed the US in the autumn of 1918, there was no backlash against people of Spanish descent. The country was obsessively focused on Germany, its enemy in the first world war, with rumours that the illness was a plot somehow engineered by the kaiser. Not only that, but martial metaphors abounded, too. The flu was our foe, droplets from coughs and sneezes were compared to bullets sprayed from machine guns and doctors and nurses became soldiers in white.
Oddly enough, the word pandemic was used relatively rarely. Historian Tom Ewing searched newspaper records for 1918-19 and found only 335 uses of the word, many of them referring back to the 1889 outbreak. Instead epidemic was the term of choice, with 45,461 instances. Another common word for flu, grippe, now totally fallen out of use in English, was used 23,649 times. Borrowed from the French, it derives from a Germanic word meaning to seize, with the sense changing to afflict, which is also where we get the word gripe.
Grippe was also used to describe the pandemic that swept across Europe and the Americas in 1889, commonly known as Russian flu, and the subject of Ewings current research. Western newspapers record widespread cases of respiratory disease in St Petersburg. They very quickly start calling it Russian influenza, or Russian grippe and that name pretty much sticks around into the early 1890s. Again, however, that geographical label didnt seem to be especially pejorative.
Which is not to say that Russians were particularly enamoured of the idea that it all started with them. In earlier flu epidemics, the disease was described as the Russian illness in Germany and Italy, and Chinese catarrh in Russia. Although it is true that a pandemic almost always arrives from another place, there seems to be a consistent desire to lay responsibility for it elsewhere ideally far away from us.
One conclusion of this line of thinking is that the source of infection must be extraterrestrial. An article in the Times from 1889 delves into the origin of the word influenza. First given in Italy, in the course of outbreaks at Venice and Milan in 1741, [it] was a manifest survival of the superstitions which, four centuries earlier, attributed the plague to the influence of three great planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars entering into conjunction with Aquarius.
While pandemics in 1889 and 1918 might not have led to the shunning of Russians or Spaniards, the early names given to a 20th-century plague made one community practically untouchable. New York-based writer Andrew Solomon recalls first reading about a mysterious new disease in the early 1980s, when he was 18.
I remember it incredibly vividly. I was in the office of the ophthalmologist who prescribed my contact lenses. And there was a copy of a magazine with a little entry on this new disease that was affecting homosexuals, he says. The phrase that jumped out at him was gay-related immune deficiency or GRID, an early term for Aids. I was stricken with complete terror. And suddenly I thought: Oh, I see, Im probably going to die because of this. I remember thinking: but how and why, and isnt this hard enough already?
The term gay cancer was also used. It felt as though it reinforced the idea, which was current in the culture at large, that being gay was somehow acting against the idea of the will of God or the rules of the society.
The nomenclature suited what Solomon describes as an almost eugenic point of view in the Reagan administration, the idea that it was never going to affect anyone but gay people, and if we got rid of all the gay people in the society, that wouldnt be such a bad thing.
Our choice of names for new diseases might seem trivial, but some descriptions can cause real harm, the WHO now agrees. In 2009, during the swine flu, the Egyptian authorities ordered the slaughter of 300,000 pigs, a hammer blow to the livelihoods of Christians, who owned most of the animals. Already subject to discrimination, they saw the cull as an exercise in scapegoating. At the time, WHO official Keiji Fukudacondemned the actions and said that, despite the label, We dont see any evidence that anyone is getting infected from pigs. In 2015, he announced new guidance for naming diseases. It stated that geographical locations, names of animal species and population-based references should all be avoided.
The message is lost on one particularly powerful individual. Ewing and Bristow agree that Trumps attempt to link Covid-19 to China eclipses anything they have observed in either the 1889 or 1918 pandemics. It serves him well politically, says Bristow. And it cultivates the kind of anger that is very much a part of the movement that hes tried to build in the country. If you have a name that identifies a country or a group of people, you have somewhere to place the blame, far from your own door. And to me, thats clearly what the US president is doing, here in 2020.
David Shariatmadari is the author of Dont Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Languageread more
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