To cap off this round of Words of the Week, I put my conspiracy theory cap on for “defect”, discover the differing degree of being “asymptomatic”, and request for a hyphen to help remove ambiguity.

It has been a good week for parts of speech in this week’s bout of Words of the Week. In part one, I was given reason to write about “nouns” at length, something that is troubling to do when one half of this blog series’ purpose is to describe the relevance of the past week’s most popular words in current events. Now I have good material for “preposition”, and it is all thanks to the absence of a hyphen.

Words of the Week for May 11-18, 2020 – Part 2

Late by two days, but here nonetheless, I present words 13-25 for this edition of Words of the Week.

13. Verb

Last week’s ranking: 11

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

Discussions continue online about the use of “Zoom”, “quarantining”, and “social distancing” as verbs. “Social distancing” may seem like a new verb today, but I would argue that we have been practicing social distancing for quite some time already:

I instead think we should be calling this “reclusing”, as in to be in recluse, or “self-isolation”, as described below in “transitive.”

14. Culture

Last week’s ranking: 14

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

Our feministic hero from part one of this week’s rankings breakdown stays put at #14 on the Words of the Week list. Browse the news and you will find all sorts of articles and editorials about how and why this virus will or will not change our cultures. What will be the “new normal”, people wonder.

I fret not about any such drastic change in culture. The second that beaches open in California or Australia, people who are in-tune with beach culture were clamouring to get back. Café cultures will pick up where they left off when lockdowns end. Church culture will congregate once again when big gatherings are okayed.

We are clamouring to return to things long-ingrained in us. For me, that is returning to sporting events, gyms, pubs, and travelling.

15. Impermissible

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

When any one news story drags on, and on, and on, synonyms for overused words within those stories start to crop up. Impermissible has arrived to Words of the Week to spell words like “forbidden”, “not allowed”, and “prohibited.” Now as we near the third-or-so month of quarantine, we ask what is permissible and impermissible in social life.  

16. Furlough

Last week’s ranking: 8

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

I bemoaned last week that “furlough” in English is, I believe, misused in the context of the coronavirus. The news says that people are being furloughed from their jobs in the sense that they are laid off, as seen in the second definition above, but furlough’s primary definition means “to have permission” or to be granted holiday. It seems disingenuous to say we are furloughing people during the virus when we are in fact laying them off.

17. Love

Last week’s ranking: 16

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

A litany of acts of love towards fellow man is in the news. Those are nice things about which to read! There are smatterings of editorials on how to love yourself and how to “find love” during the coronavirus. These are hollow things; a chasing after the wind.

Having the time to slow down, reflect, and ponder what and who is in, out of, or around our lives has been silver lining for many during the ecdemic.

18. Defect

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

My newsfeed in regards to the word “defect” is littered with multiple links to a research paper on titled Global Congenital Heart Defect Closure Devices Market 2020 Coronavirus/COVID – 19 Impact Analysis. I am a brutish man and short on medical vernacular, so I had to look up what a closure device is. A closure device is used to close a defect or an opening between the right and left sides of the heart, for those of you who are also brutish like me.

I am a bit perplexed why this particular market report for this particular health device, albeit super advance and important, has such as widespread presence in the ol’ Google search pages. If I put my conspiracy theory hat on and equip the “Terry Smell Test” (the skill taught by my journalism professor and academic mentor Dr Thomas Terry of sniffing out fishy stories), I sense something devious is afoot. Americans have poor health issues already, and now Covid-19 threatens. Will closure devices be marked up in price?

19. Asymptomatic

Last week’s ranking: 19

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

A Forbes article penned by two University of Toronto doctors (doctor doctors, not English major doctors), says that “The ultimate weapon for a virus that ‘wants’ to inflict devastation is the asymptomatic spreader…”  That kind of statement there is the primary reason we have so many and such harsh lockdown measures.

The article goes on to describe the complications of the term “asymptomatic.” The doctors explain a spectrum of asymptomatic carriers: from those who truly, absolutely do not have or ever had symptoms on one side to those who have mild symptoms but do not seek medical support on the other side. The second group is called “paucisymptomatic.” Pauci, according to Merriam-Webster’s, means “few” and is a combing form word.

There is yet another group called the “presymptomatic” group, and this includes people who initially exhibit no symptoms but later show symptoms of Covid-19. Together, the pauci- and presymptomatic carriers are often “mislabelled” as asymptomatic carries of the virus, and it is these two groups, the doctors say, that need to be isolated in order to reduce the spread of the virus. The number of true asymptomatic persons is probably much lower than we think, the doctors say.

(The doctors who wrote the article are Dr Isaac Bogoch and Dr Allan Detsky. I had moved too far along with the breakdown of this word that it was becoming increasingly awkward to suddenly introduce them at any late stage in the text. It was a similar experience as to those encounters you have with friends at church or other groups where you do not remember or you may not actually know the name of the person that you frequently chat with, but too much time has passed in your acquaintanceship for you to come clean and admit that you do not know the person’s name.)

20. Montage

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

The apotheosized fighting fury is back. “The gods of war have awoken” Mike Tyson, and this is the training montage he posted online to prove it:

21. Transitive

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Competition! Er, I mean, a friendly ally: This Quartz article compiles coronavirus-inspired words (and from times well before this virus). “Infodemic”, “social recession”, and “elbow bump” are highlights of this list.

One verb of interest is “self-isolate”. Being both intransitive and transitive verb, self-isolate means to “isolate oneself deliberately; (now) especially to undertake self-imposed isolation for a period of…”

Self-isolate seems far more fitting to describe how we are approaching social distancing. Guilty as charged, I think people were hankering for an excuse to become a recluse.

22. Socialism

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

Socialism fell out of the Words of the Week last week for the first time in this blog series’ history. Ever since Bernie Sanders threw in the towel for the US presidency, the volume of discussions on socialism has seemed to subside a bit.

Then came the coronavirus.

Methods of dealing with layoffs and economic hardships by many Democratic leaders in the last few weeks have been labelled as socialistic in nature. In this past week, Democrats called for a block in corporate mergers that accept relief funds, a call that some Republicans called “latent socialism.”

23. Preposition

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

We may have a conflated word on our hands.

One of the beautiful things about English is its words can carry so many different meanings, and so many different words can also mean the same thing. English can also be a nuisance. English pronunciation seems arbitrary at times (tell me why “once” is said “won-ce”ˈ[wən(t)s], and why “sword” is not “swerd” like “word” is). Flipping back to the neat side of English, prefixes and suffixes are fruitful and multiply freely to create new words in bunches.

When it comes to prefixes, according to the English grammar books I have on hand, not using a hyphen between the prefix and the root word is encouraged. The only time to not use a hyphen after a prefix is if it makes the whole word look odd (antiaircraft vs. anti-aircraft) or if it creates ambiguity (re-cover vs recover).

And it is this issue – the issue of ambiguity – that made me believe I found part of the reason why preposition appears so often in Words of the Week.

Read the following headline aloud: World Health Organization “prepositions supplies to speed-up testing of suspected COVID-19…”

Did WHO supply prepositions? Or did it pre-position supplies?

The reader in my brain orated pre-pə-ˈzi-shən, (as is prep-o-zi-shen, or those annoying function words expressing a modification) and not pri- pə-ˈzi-shən (as in pree-po-zi-shen), as in to position something before something else or in advance.

My word-usage crusade grows in purpose: use a hyphen in “pre-position” to avoid confusion with “preposition.”

Pre-position your prepositions away from the end of a sentence.

24. Draconian

Last week’s ranking: 18

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

Draconian is governance à la mode for 2020. Whereas some individuals capitalized on self-isolationism at the behest of social distancing orders, some governments have capitalized on imposing strict rules and guidelines at the behest of “flattening the curve.” Fair to say that nearly everyone abided by Draconian measures at the initial onslaught of the virus, but as time goes on, it is going to be interested to see who will be hesitant to relinquish these measures.

25. Superable

Last week’s ranking: unranked

Meaning and usage

Why it is in the news

My ability to find relevance in current events for certain words is certainly superable. Not only does Microsoft Word want to correct its spelling to “separable” or “super able”, but search results for this word in the news produces Spanish-language content. My A1 Spanish comprehensions skills cannot parse what is trending in the Spanish-speaking world.

This is a lacklustre way of ending this edition of Words of the Week. I am sorry for that. If you have made it this far into the blog post, thank you. Tune in next time as I anticipate the breakdown of words such as catachresis, aureate, waveson, mingy, oeillade, aggrandize, and vanilla.

Bye!