Shivakumar. Hiremah
The birth of a language itself took
place in the mode of
communication which started with the articulation of the
combination
of particular sounds. Every child
starts acquiring the skill of a language by
listening the sounds along with an effort to
reproduce it in the same manner. Soon starts to speak that language by
understanding words (sounds) and their meaning. When the children are exposed
to new social occasions, issues and different kind of lively environments,
eventually they start to acquire new words and enrich their treasury of
vocabulary.
Though English is a
foreign Language for Indian learners, yet it’s a beautiful and fascinating language
which gained as well as added its thousands of words with many native
languages. That’s why even the children could speak chunk of English words/
phrases along with their mother tongue, unknowingly that those are foreign
words.
In the
very strange and unprecedented crisis of the Covid-19 period, definitely we are
all introduced to so many new words related to this disease. It is nothing but
‘Neologism’. And the children also started to acquire these words by understanding
the exact meaning of these new type of words with ongoing situation and used
them in speaking (by mixing with mother tongue) without any difficulty. That’s
the situational mode of ‘Pidgin’.
The
term ‘Covid-19’ was only coined in February-2020, when the WHO announced the
official name of the Virus. In a very short period of two-three months, the
world of dictionary has bulged with the entry of new vocabulary to talk
about Novel Corona Virus. Suddenly the people as well as the children
stared to talk words like – Corona, Covid-19, Lockdown, Social distancing, Quarantine,
Sanitizer, Ventilators, Screening, Super-spreader, Symptomatic, Isolation, Pandemic,
Mask etc.
Along with these words (which are already
existed but unknown to common man) some of
the abbreviations like WFH (Work From Home) PPE (Personal
Protective Equipment), SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) PUI( Person
Under Investigation) stood on the tip of the tongue. Therefore now a day’s,
students (including rural areas) are much familiar with specialized lingo,
including the above said abbreviations. Covid-19 pandemic has introduced us a
new glossary out of our regular linguistic practice and brought us into contact
with specialized vocabulary which we could not even expected.
Let’s have a glance on the
meaning or description that covid-19 has
given to some of these words.
Corona: a structure that looks like a crown
or curved crown shape. The Virus of Covid-19 Possesses this type of structure.
Lockdown: declaring emergency to stop
mingle of public in certain areas, to prevent exposure or transmission of the
disease.
Social distance: maintaining a safe
distance from other people to slow or keep ourselves from the spread of a
contagious illness or disease.
Asymptomatic: absence of fever,
dry cough, sore throat, shortness of breath and body aches, among other less
common symptoms that may turn to be corona.
Symptomatic: showing symptoms of
Covid-19 that includes fever, body aches, dry cough, and shortness of breath.
Community spread: the spread of a
contagious disease (Corona) in an area where there is no information of how
someone has infected with the disease.
Super-spreader: a highly contagious
individual who can spread the disease to a crowd that came in his/her contact.
Clinical trial: testing or trial of new
medicine/vaccine for its safety and efficiency.
Self-quarantine: keeping oneself
away from any contact with other people for a period of two weeks.
Self-isolation: the act of separating
oneself from others to avoid spreading of suspected disease.
Containment area: an area with limited
access in or out to avoid the spread of infection.
Pandemic: quick spread of an
infectious disease all over the world, larger than an epidemic.
Screening: testing of corona symptoms
before testing for the virus.
Forehead thermometer: a device that used
to measure body temperature through hovering near the forehead.
Although a lot of the terminology is actually older, still we’re using many
of these words just now and so they seem fairly new. Along with these words,
some Emojis like -the folded hands emoji, the medical mask emoji, and the microbe
e
emoji have also become more popular during the
covi-19 pandemic. Even ‘The Oxford English Dictionary’ hass updated its
dictionary with such like words by including revised versions of existing
entries (which replace the older versions).
One remarkable thing we have to notice here is that, without much hard effort,
students also became much familiar with these new terms which they never
practiced before. They are using these words because of the communal usage and
practice. It simply shows that to teach the new words or content words, the
best way that a teacher could apply is creating situations in the classroom by
providing an English environment. By that the learners could easily adopt the
words and start to use them without hesitation.
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