The Oxford English Dictionary has released its “word of the year” for 2020, which consists of many words. This is the first “best of” article I have come come across this year, so this is officially my “first of the best of the best of” post. Note, not all things in my “best of” series are good, I just like to stick with the name.

This is really a whole “year in review” post with some vocabulary words thrown in. Here are some of them:

• bushfires
• Covid-19. Interesting – “coronavirus” was the term in March and April, then “Covid-19” became more popular from May on. Not surprisingly, “pandemic” was also popular.
• WFH (I was thinking “work for hire”, but no, that doesn’t make any sense. This is “work from home”. Come on, the acronym takes the same amount of time to say as the words, and nobody is paying for paper or ink any more. We don’t need this acronym!) Also “remote” and “remotely”, “mute” and “unmute”. They don’t mention “virtual” but that is popular where I am.
• lockdown and shelter-in-place. Not mentioned in the article is “stay at home”, which turned out to be the official legal term where I lived. It makes sense, because “shelter in place” conjures up visions of incoming missiles, and lockdown implies people can’t go outside, which was never actually the case. We also had “curfews” but these were used in reference to civil unrest.
• circuit-breaker (didn’t see this term much in the U.S., but I saw it in Singapore government communications about their lockdown, forwarded by the U.S. embassy there. 10 years ago right now, I had recently arrived in Singapore for what would turn out to be a 3-year stint living and working there. After 7 years back in the U.S., I still get the dispatches from the embassy and have never taken the time to figure out how to turn them off. Anyway, I think this is a good way to communicate the purpose of Covid-19 related restrictions – they cause significant short-term inconvenience, like a blackout, but they prevent long-term catastrophe, like your house burning down.)
• support bubbles (haven’t heard this one actually, but I think I can guess)
• keyworkers (must be what we are calling “essential workers” here in the U.S. I assume locksmiths are included). “Frontliners” and “front line workers” have also been used.
• social distancing, face masks, PPE (PPE also annoys me, but at least the acronym rolls off the tongue easier than the full name. In my opinion though, using industry-specific jargon never makes anyone sound smarter, especially jargon you just learned and act like you have always known.) Also mask up, anti-mask, anti-masker and mask-shaming. For the record, I wear a mask to protect myself and others, and even just to make others feel more comfortable even in low-risk situations. I still feel annoyed by the masks though, because they should be the last layer in a many-layered defense provided by our government. Because our government has failed in every other layer of defense, mask shaming and “personal responsibility” are all they have left. Fuck you guys. Do your jobs next time.
• Superspreader
• Reopening
• furlough
• Black Lives Matter, BLM (Bureau of Livestock and Mines?), George Floyd, cancel culture. I might add “police brutality” and “police reform”. I also found myself trying to distinguish between a “protest”, a “riot”, “civil unrest”, and “looting”. This year might be the first time I heard the term “civil unrest” referring to the present day where I actually live, rather than referring to the 1960s. I’m also going to add “of color”. It seems everyone now has to be classified as either white or “of color”. I’m not sure this captures the diversity of people we have in our country.
• moonshot (Covid-19 vaccine development will probably go down in history as an example of how you can throw an enormous amount of money at a scientific problem and get rapid progress – alongside nuclear weapons and going to the moon. But this seems like easily the most positive and humanitarian of the three.)
• unprecedented – gets used in the title and throughout the article, but they never actually call it the word of the year
• mail-in
• conspiracy theory, QAnon
• “Isn’t now exactly the moment when we should be using Brexit more than ever?” (My answer as an American: NO!!! I’m sick of hearing about it. But maybe if you are in the UK it is relevant even if you are sick of it. My personal opinion is Europe is a nice continent and anyone should consider themselves fortunate to be part of it.)
• Workcation and staycation are apparently popular somewhere, but I haven’t heard these much.
• Impeachment, acquittal (already forgot about this)
• “anthropause” – I have never heard this, but apparently it refers to a temporary dip in carbon emissions and air pollution during the pandemic. They say media coverage of climate change actually decreased for the year.