Covid, cowering and cowardice
July 25, 2021
We all remember Boris Johnson saying in March 2020 that we should take covid on the chin, followed by him saying in April that year that Covid was an invisible mugger that one should wrestle to the floor. This metaphorical framing of the virus as a physical assailant and of those having to deal with …
Walls and covid
July 7, 2021
A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief blog post about the wall metaphor used during the pandemic. I approved of it, as it highlighted community action: the more individuals get vaccinated, the more protection there is for everybody – one brick doesn’t make a wall, but many do. The metaphor is now being used …
Coronavirus and mental health: Risks, protective factors and care
July 2, 2021
This is a guest post by Dr Rusi Jaspal who is Professor of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. E-mail: rusi.jaspal@ntu.ac.uk Twitter: @ProfRJaspal *** For several years, my colleagues and I have studied the effects of major social change on people’s sense of identity and psychological wellbeing. We have done so primarily through …
Covid, consensus and conspiracy: Mapping a change in narrative
June 25, 2021
I have written about the concept of consensus before, in the context of climate change. Now it’s time to write a few words on how consensus is used as a concept in the context of covid, or more precisely, in the debate about the origins of the coronavirus. The emerging literature surrounding this origin story …
From ‘deadly enemy’ to ‘covidiots’: Words matter when talking about COVID-19
June 8, 2021
This article, by Ruth Derksen, is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. I thought it would make a great addition to the covid collection on ‘Making Science Public’ and I am grateful to Ruth for her permission to republish it. Dr. Ruth Derksen is a Senior Instructor …
From stigma to sigma? The covid variant naming conundrum continues
June 3, 2021
On 31 May the World Health Organisation tweeted: “Today WHO has announced a new naming system for key #COVID19 variants. The labels are based on the Greek alphabet (i.e. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc), making them simple, easy to say and remember.” In her retweet of that tweet Alice Roberts said “…delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, …
Walls, wars and waves: Some more thoughts on covid metaphors
May 21, 2021
The vaccination of the UK population has gone extremely well. There is still a race though between vaccinating against the covid virus and the emergence or introduction of new virus variants. However, fears of hospitals being overwhelmed by covid patients are dwindling. While this is going on, I noticed a metaphor that I had not …
The coronavirus: A global metaphor
May 14, 2021
In cognitive linguistics there is a long-running debate about whether some metaphors are universal or near-universal or whether metaphors are more culture specific. I don’t really want to get into that controversy here, but recent work by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem made me think about it again. In this post I argue that it might be good for …
How the pandemic is shaping worldviews
April 23, 2021
This is a guest post by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem. Ahmed is a postdoc in linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany, and former Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He is the author of Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-Based Experimental Study (Routledge, 2019). *** It is …
A new variant in covid speak
April 9, 2021
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Reynolds alerted me to an interesting new variant in covid speak, a metaphor used by the Canadian Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam in the context of talking about vaccines and variants (a variant is a virus with one or two mutations). As reported by CBC on March …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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