” The arm’s length of Latin led to a resurgence of annus horribilis. “Now more than ever” emerged as self-parodic promotional copy for countless retailers, for instance, while former President Donald Trump faced the coronavirus death toll in August with a verbal shrug: “ It is what it is. proved unwilling, or unable, to look square in the eye. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” fans (and perhaps other poets) reached for “trying,” albeit in a satirical sense the nostalgic longed for “the before” and many of us, rendered inarticulate by the scale and speed of events, were reduced to the broadest of generalities: “in these times.”Ī year later, the dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic has come to include not only scientific terms - asymptomatic, positivity rate, community spread - and neologisms - covidiot, quaranteam, mascne - but a startling number of linguistic feints as well, repurposed for a disaster we in the U.S. Columnists and cable news anchors preferred “unprecedented,” novelty being the content mill’s most efficient fuel. In corporations’ hushed advertisements, saying times were “uncertain,” a temporary rest stop on the road back to growth. The phrase appeared last March, much as a wildflower might: with sudden, almost gobsmacked abandon, born in preparation of its own demise.