DERRY JOURNAL EDITORIAL: A new language and a new way of living

There’s a whole new lexicon now being used day in, day out in these changed times. Words the majority of us would rarely, if ever, have uttered up until a few weeks ago are now part our everyday lingo.
By Brendan McDaid
Published 2nd May 2020, 17:03 BST
There's a whole new lexicon we are acquiring as conversations everywhere centre on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.There's a whole new lexicon we are acquiring as conversations everywhere centre on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There's a whole new lexicon we are acquiring as conversations everywhere centre on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Self-isolating’, ‘coronavirus’, ‘social distancing’, ‘flattening the curve’, ‘personal protective equipment’ ‘pandemic’, ‘essential items’, ‘panic buying’, and ‘quarantine’ flow through our conversations in this new world.

We have had a crash course in scientific and medical terminology as we witness the tragic events unfold at home and abroad. Much of it sounds and feels apocalyptic, and this new language is an indicator of just how much has changed.

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But it’s not just the words we use. Our routines now bear little resemblance to what they had been, up until a few weeks ago. Life has returned to a pace that would have been familiar to generations long past. The tweeting of birds, the rustling of the trees in the whispering wind are restored to us as the din of our fast paced society, engines, aircrafts, the clamour and chatter have died away. And we now have the time to appreciate that dawn chorus, to marvel at the sunrise or last weeks’ silvery supermoon.

We are learning about the gift of time itself - the time to think clearly, to know ourselves and what really matters to us. We will all be scarred and changed by this experience by the time the lockdown is over, some much more than others. But this new way of living - temporary though it is - is teaching us about ourselves.

It is a world in which acts of human kindness, small or grand, are magnified, where a phonecall, a food parcel from a local community group, a visit by the Easter Bunny, an online concert by a local musician, means the world. We will remember that when the chips were down we pulled together to help, protect, entertain and inform.

That communal spirit that has gotten people through adversity in the past is alive today and we may not be so ready to return to the often lonely, permanently quarantined lives of modern western society and the rat race when this is over.

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