The World Of Coronaspeak

This book explores the concept of Coronaspeak, the language adopted by the global community as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; it involves jokes, slang, public health slogans, cliché, and coronalit (corona related literature). In Coronaspeak we see new vocabulary and coinage like solomoon (honeymoon without the honey), elbow bump or Coronafussgruss (German, ‘corona foot-greeting’), variant labelling in the Greek alphabet (omicron and delta), new drug naming (AstraZeneca), medical jargon (pathogen, R number), semi-technical (spillover, variant) and common expressions (stale air, rebound), and informal speech, dialect and nonce words (jab, jag, and ‘the lurgi’). The book highlights the capacity of words to adapt to shock and social disorder, and argues that they are part of disaster management, with entries from Italian, French, Japanese, German and Korean, taken from scholarly articles and print and internet sources.