Getting a Message Out

If you’ve got a message that you want everyone in the community to hear, what do you do?  Anything involving the internet is going to leave out a lot of people, so that’s no good.  Television isn’t watched as much as it used to be, and it’s probably expensive to put a message on there.  Nobody reads newspapers anymore, right?  So what do you do?

In the case of the Dubuque County Public Health Incident Management Team, you put something in people’s mailboxes.  The other day I received this really colorful 12 inch by 9 inch double-sided information sheet on card stock of some sort, and the first thing I read on it was “VACCINE ACCESS” listed in black letters in the top right corner.  Underneath that it read, in smaller red caps, “PLEASE DO NOT CALL YOUR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER OR PUBLIC HEALTH ABOUT GETTING VACCINATED AT THIS TIME.”  (Do not call your “public health”?  Oh well.)  Then underneath that, in black letters but not all caps, it says, “Vaccinations will first be given to priority groups decided by the CDC and Iowa Department of Public Health.  Examples include: healthcare workers, nursing home residents, first responders, essential workers, adults with high-risk medical conditions, and older adults.”  And then underneath that, still on the right side of the page, this time in white letters with an orange background, it says, “Please get vaccinated when supplies increase and you are eligible.  Vaccinations will be free and are expected to be available to all adults at healthcare providers, pharmacies, and vaccination clinics.”  There’s a star beside the word “adults,” which is because “Vaccines for children are not yet available.”  There a note across the bottom of the page (in white letters with a red background) that says, “VACCINES ARE NOT YET AVAILABLE FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC.”  Then there’s more information below that in red letters with a white background, and there are various other colors all over the page with general information, and on the other side there’s a black background with an abstract rendering of the virus on it and six different font/color combinations of print, and another orange section entitled “What Local Experts Want You to Know,” and the whole thing is visually stunning, a real attention-grabber.  It looks like a modern textbook, it’s so beautiful.  I’ve often wondered how children learn anything from such beautiful books.

The information is pretty good though.  I never expect much information content when I see catchy graphics, but this mailing isn’t bad.  It explains all about COVID-19 and repeats the usual CDC guidelines for “stopping the spread,” as we say now (social distancing, washing hands, etc.), and as I read this, my first thought was that I’d heard this a thousand times for about a year on television.  The thing is, not everyone watches television much, so maybe this is news for them.  It’s written at an adult level too, which struck me as odd.  I’m used to a junior-high reading level from doctors’ pamphlets, I suppose.  As an example, here’s the answer to the question “How safe is the vaccine and what about side effects?” as stated by Dr. Hendrik Schultz, a member of the Dubuque County Board of Health:

The safety of the COVID-19 vaccine has been closely monitored by the CDC, FDA, and other agencies.  The possibility of having an allergic reaction is rare and extremely small.  A mild immune reaction is a common side effect, however.  We intend for this to happen when you receive a vaccination, as your immune system forms a response to build protection.”

I don’t know how many people in Dubuque County read their mail addressed to “Postal Customer” as thoroughly as I do, but for people who do, this method of getting the word out is very effective.  I can’t help thinking about the homeless though, and people who don’t read well enough to wade through all of this verbiage.  Hopefully social service agencies can help them.

Happy New Year

This year hasn’t gotten off to a very good start, so I’ve been looking around my house for some inspiration.  Any positive messages would do, I guess.  As usual, the advertisers have the best ones.  Here’s a selection:

From my bathroom, here’s Raw Sugar Simply Hand Wash: “Living Purely Unfiltered. We find goodness in simplicity and beauty in being real.  This consciously crafted hand wash preserves our belief that less is more and that the simplest things in life can make the biggest difference.  Love your skin.  Love yourself.”  This one goes on to add: “Sugar Note: Inner beauty is the most beautiful look on you.”  The soap bottle is signed by “Ronnie and Donda” Co-Founders.”

From next to my refrigerator, I’ve got a package of Nature Valley Granola Bars.  On the back of the package it says “we are better outside,” all in small letters, then on a side panel that statement is explained: “When we get outside, something amazing happens.  You can feel it.  It can make us feel more energized, helps manage stress, and strengthen our families.  We think the world could use a little more of that.”  Then it adds in all caps: “WE ARE BETTER OUTSIDE.”  Apparently we feel kind of small before we use their soap in a bottle, but after using it, we feel good enough to use ALL CAPS.  And go outside.  Or something.

From inside the fridge, here’s Dannon Light + Fit Greek yogurt:  “Add Some Light. It’s a simple idea, really.  Because healthy living isn’t all or nothing.  It’s more of a DO-WHAT-WORKS-FOR-YOU KIND OF THING.  So, let’s all lighten up a bit, shall we?  Nobody’s perfect & that’s fine by us.  Because keeping things light lets YOU DO YOU.”  

From my freezer, here’s Bellatoria pizza: “Come to Bellatoria—a warm and inviting place where you’re always welcome.  This is where friends and family gather to relax, share lively conversation and enjoy good food.  Bellatoria Pizzas bring the spirit, flavor and traditions of Italy to your table with delicious varieties of crusts and toppings that taste like they were prepared especially for you.  Buon Gusto!”

From my living room, here’s Easy Freestyle Crosswords by Martin Ashwood-Smith. “Take five and ease up—freestyle!  With the 72 all-new puzzles in this book, beginners can try themeless crosswords, usually reserved for experts only.  Wide-open grids allow longer, fresher, and more interesting words and phrases than what’s typically found in themed crosswords.  And easy clues add to the fun.  It’s time to put your feet up, unplug, and loosen up while solving freestyle puzzles!”

So the puzzles aren’t that great and I usually have to look up some answers in the back, but at least eating and puzzling are better than watching TV these days.  Happy New Year, everybody!

Jabs

I’ve got a new toy.  I bought a little internet radio, and it uses wifi to get stations from all over the world quickly and easily.  It doesn’t really do anything that a computer can’t, but I like it because it’s so simple.  You just press one button, and the radio comes on to the last station you were on when you turned it off.  For me, that’s usually the BBC World Service.  They have international news that we never hear about from other stations, and they don’t have any commercials either.  

You have to get used to how they say things sometimes though.  It’s usually a fairly innocuous little turn of phrase that strikes me as interesting and nothing more, but a couple of weeks ago I heard something that made me sit up straight in my chair.  It involved the new COVID vaccines that were coming out.  Britain was first to approve the Pfizer vaccine, and they said on the radio that the people could expect to get the first “jabs” within a matter of days.  Jabs?  Do they really say that?

It turns out that they do.  Apparently the word doesn’t imply a strong physical thrust like it does in American English (or at least that’s my theory), so people won’t mind getting a jab anymore than they’d think twice about getting any other shot.  When PBS ran a BBC television spot of people getting vaccinated, Judy Woodruff first explained that the word “jab” referred to a “shot” or “injection,” if I recall correctly, and then the English television news reporter used the word more than once.  Some news stories on the BBC use the word repeatedly to the point that I start feeling sick.  Jab jab jab.  I don’t know why that bothers me.  

So is it just me?  Am I completely crazy?  My copy of The Random House College Dictionary (revised edition, 1984) lists the definition as “1. to poke, or thrust smartly or sharply, as with the end or point of something,” and then it goes on: “2. to punch, esp. with a short, quick blow.”  In other words, Muhammad Ali had a great left jab.  Those are the only two verbs listed; the nouns have the same two meanings that the verbs have.  I have to go to my Kindle dictionaries, the New Oxford American Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of English, to find a special usage for jab; they say it’s “a hypodermic injection,” though they say it’s “informal” and the second one also lists it as “British.”  I’ve heard it on the CBC from Canada too, come to think of it, but not as frequently.

So here I am, happily playing with my latest toy, another pandemic purchase that I’d not have made in normal times, and I’m thinking about when I can get jabbed.  It’ll be a few months, it looks like.  That’ll be enough time to prepare myself for the experience.   

Mamma Mia!

Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer best known for emphasizing environmental issues and scientific detail in his stories.  He writes about everything under the sun though, and as far as I know, there’s never really been another writer like him.  He never writes the same story twice, and when you read Robinson, you’re in for a roller coaster ride.  Philosophy, the arts, pop culture, politics—it’s all there.  He writes about all of it.

And language, of course.  In his latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, Robinson writes about a near future in which climate change gets worse to the point that the United Nations appoints a special ministry to deal with the problem.  They don’t have much power, but over time, people start to take action and improve the situation.  Toward the end of the novel, one of the main characters talks about a special event, an appointed time when all the world’s people come together to sing.  Here’s an extended excerpt:

So the time came and we listened to the voices on our phones.  We are the children of this planet, we are going to sing its praises all together, all at once, now is the time to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet, on and on it went, it seemed clear to me that the original had been written in some other language, that we were listening to a translation into English, and if fact you could tap around and hear what was being said in other languages; Gupta insisted on listening to it in Sanskrit, which he admits he doesn’t understand when spoken, though he reads it, but he claimed that what we were hearing had to have been written or thought originally in Sanskrit, maybe even thousands of years ago, and in fact the Sanskrit version did sound very primal, which made me curious and I clicked around and found a version in Proto-IndoEuropean, why not?  It sounded like Spanish.  I switched to Basque, supposedly a living fossil of a language, and it too sounded like Spanish.  Actually both sounded quite a bit stranger than Spanish, older than Spanish, odd harsh primal sounds, but no more so than Dutch or many another language that isn’t Hawaiian, you always hear all the same sounds, and no matter which language I tapped on, I kept hearing mamma Gaia.  Yes of course mamma would be one of the oldest words, maybe the first word, invented over and over by babies trying their best to talk but having limited control of their mouths, and yet always trying to say the same thing, to beseech or celebrate that great goddess filling their sight, the fountain and source of all food, warmth, touch, love, and eye contact—mamma!  I cried out that night on the ridge, seeing the why of it for the first time, the why of everything, of course it’s a category error on my part to genderize the planet in that crass way, but we were high that night on the worldwide lovefest, and since everyone else was singing and cheering and hooting as after having caught a great ride on a great wave, I just kept shouting Mamma Mia!  Mamma Mia!  Because of course, being human, the other first word we speak is always me, mine, me me me, and God bless the Italians and whoever else in the Romance languages for holding fast to that very first Ur phrase, the same in all the languages, I check Proto-IndoEuropean and sure enough it was the same there too, Mamma Mia!  Mamma Mia!  Genius of a language!

Like I said, a roller coaster ride.  And what a ride!  

Robinson, Kim Stanley (2020). The Ministry for the Future. New York: Orbit.

Color Vocabulary

I’m halfway through this ten-hour video workshop, and I can’t help but notice that the language the participants are using is quite different from my own.  For example, I’ve got this big printed manual with pages in three different colors, and the names of the colors seem odd to me.  The white papers are always “white,” so that’s no problem, but then the yellow ones are referred to as “canary” and the light brown or off-white ones so far have been called “ivory,” “blush,” “eggshell,” or (get this!) “ecru.”  Yes, ecru.  It’s pronounced with a long “ee” sound as in the word “see.”  I looked it up, and it’s a real word.  The amazing thing is, how do these people know all these words?  It’s like over thirty years ago when I had different colored files at my workstation, and my boss wanted me to bring her the “burgundy” one.  I had to ask around to figure out which file she wanted.

Apparently they know them because they’re women, and according to research I’ll get to in a moment, it’s because women either shop for clothes more than I do (which is never), or they redecorate rooms (also never).  The organizers of this workshop are all women, as are at least eighty percent of the participants.  There’s research going back at least as far as 1911 that deals with women’s color vocabularies, and Robin Lakoff’s famous work Language and Woman’s Place (1975) basically states this as fact: Women know more color words.  It turns out that there’s color research available out there that’s fun to read, and it makes you think a little bit.

The one I like, and don’t ask me why, is from Elaine Rich of Carnegie-Mellon University.  It’s from 1977, so it’s a few years old, but it’s so simple I thought I’d summarize it here.  Rich colored two-inch squares in the center of 25 index cards in different colors; she used crayons from Crayola’s box of 64 for the purpose.  She then showed the cards to subjects one at a time and asked them to tell her what the color was.  (She didn’t time how long it took them to respond as had other researchers.)   The subjects were men (aged 20-35, grad students or working in a “technical field”), men (aged 45-60, trained in a technical field, “highly educated”), women (aged 20-35), either technical or nontechnical but highly educated), women (aged 45-60, most of them married to the older men), and, somewhat oddly, Catholic nuns.  Most of the nuns were over 30.  They all wore habits too.  Hmmm.  Okay, I say.  The idea, I suppose, was that people in a technical field (Carnegie-Mellon folks, no doubt) would maybe know more colors.  Or at least I think that’s the idea.  Fortunately, the results didn’t show anything related to profession was important, so I can skip this part.  I would tell you how many subjects were in each group too, but I honestly don’t know much more than the fact that “the groups ranged in size from seven to 24 subjects.”  That’s not enough subjects, but oh well.  I’m assuming they’re all native English speakers?

The procedure was simple: You show each card to a subject, and the subject is supposed to imagine this scenario: “You have bought a shirt and now want to buy a pair of pants to match the shirt.  You go into a store but haven’t got the shirt with you.  You want to say to the sales-person, ‘I have a _____ shirt.  Show me a pair of pants to go with it.’”  That seems like a fairly direct and slightly impolite way to say that, but it seems plausible enough to really happen.

The responses were coded with points awarded like this: Basic (1 point) for words like “red” or “green”; Qualified (2 points) for “light blue” or “greenish yellow,” for example; Qualified Fancy (3 points) for using a fancier qualifier, as in “brick red” or “hunter green”; and Fancy (4 points) for the colors I noted in my introduction, or for the examples used in the research paper: “lavender,” “magenta,” and “chartreuse.”  Yeah, those are all a bit fancy for me.  Note that since there are 25 cards, the maximum score for each subject is 100.

Results time!  It turns out that, sure enough, “women use fancier words than men” (to quote the results section).  Also, Rich reports, “Younger men use fancier words than older men.”  This could be because when men get older, their wives buy their shirts for them, so they forget the color words, at least what few words they knew to begin with.  (Remember that this is 1977.  The researcher is more or less assuming that wives buy their husbands’ shirts for them.)  Rich also finds that the nuns used fewer fancy words than did the other women but still more than the men did, possibly because (and here’s my interpretation) they don’t shop for clothes now but maybe they used to know more color words when they were younger, so they’re still better off than the men.  The women’s groups other than nuns scored, on average, from 64 to 66, the nuns scored 60, younger men scored 56, and older men 47.  Over half of the non-nun women used either Fancy or Qualified Fancy responses, but only six of the 25 responses from older men fit these categories.  

There are obvious problems with this research, everything from the scenario itself to the interpretation of results to the low number of subjects to how most, if not all, of the subjects are highly-educated.  But despite its shortcomings, I like research like this.  It’s simple, it’s fun, and you can do it yourself.  So let’s get out our old box of crayons and start doing some linguistics! 

Rich, Elaine. “Sex-Related Differences in Colour Vocabulary.” Language and Speech, 1977. Vol. 20. Pages 404-409.

Rod Serling

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.  It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.  It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling is probably the best writer for a visual medium that I’ve ever encountered.  He was seriously wounded in World War II and took to drinking heavily for what we would now call PTSD, but eventually found writing to be his medicine.  I’ve rediscovered him recently as I’ve started to work through five seasons worth of his most famous television series, The Twilight Zone.  The show’s introduction got us all into the mood for what was to come, a science fiction or fantasy story that more often than not had a point to it and stuck in your head.  He wrote more than half of the scripts for the show, but in my opinion, it’s really the narration that stands out.  I’ll show excerpts of two episodes here.  

In the first season, Ed Wynn guest stars as a street vendor who’d been fingered by Mr. Death in an episode entitled “One for the Angels.”  He is to die at midnight, but he has other plans – at least until a little girl gets run over by a car, effectively dying in his place.  Then he makes his greatest sales pitch to save her:

Street scene: Summer. The present. Man on a sidewalk named Lew Bookman, age sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman. Lew Bookman, a fixture of the summer, a rather minor component to a hot July, a nondescript, commonplace little man whose life is a treadmill built out of sidewalks. And in just a moment, Lew Bookman will have to concern himself with survival – because as of three o’clock this hot July afternoon, he’ll be stalked by Mr. Death.

Mr. Bookman’s pitch succeeds, and the little girl’s life is spared.  Here’s Serling’s closing:

Lewis J. Bookman, age sixtyish. Occupation: pitchman. Formerly a fixture of the summer, formerly a rather minor component to a hot July.  But, throughout his life, a man beloved by the children, and therefore, a most important man.  Couldn’t happen, you say? Probably not in most places – but it did happen in the Twilight Zone.

In “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” later that season starring Claude Akins, Barry Atwater, Jack Weston, and Burt Metcalfe, a small town experiences a power blackout.  The electricity is off, and even portable radios and cars won’t work.  A little boy has read about aliens, and he says that “they” have done this to the town.  Then one man’s car starts, and no one knows why.  Maybe he’s an alien?  How well do we know our neighbors?

Here’s the opening narration:

Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street…This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment – before the monsters came.

Eventually a riot erupts, and sure enough, aliens out to conquer earth are responsible.  At the end of the episode, Serling narrates:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill…and suspicion can destroy…and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

Serling also wrote feature films and went on to host Night Gallery a few years later, but the emphasis on morality and the human condition make his earlier series stand out for me.  He passed away in 1975.

Derecho

We had a bad weather system come through central Iowa recently.  The meteorologists called it a “derecho,” which means a very strong straight-line wind that blows for hundreds of miles.  The wind gusts topped one hundred miles per hour, and people in Cedar Rapids are still suffering almost two weeks later.

The local newscasters spent a few days telling us that the word derecho meant “strong wind in a straight line,” or something similar, but I already knew what the word meant because of an incident that had happened to me when I was a foreign exchange student in Costa Rica in 1985.  I was moving from one family to another, and I needed to call a taxi but my Spanish was terrible, and I was scared of taxis because I’d had a bad experience with one before.  One of the sisters, named “Luz” (not her real name), helped me out.  Here’s what I wrote about that incident at the time, which I cleaned up in early 1986 to read like this:

I thought the time would never come, but today I actually moved to another house.  It wasn’t easy either.  I’ve got two suitcases and a bag, so I couldn’t just get on a bus and go like I usually do.  Somehow, you just don’t get on buses with a lot of baggage, I don’t think.  It just doesn’t seem normal.  Add to that the fact that neither the Sánchez family nor my “new” family owned a car, and I had a slight problem on my hands.  How was I supposed to get where I was going?  Well, you know what happened, don’t you?  You’ve probably figured it out by now.  If not, I’ll give you a clue: Remember that taxi ride I had a few months ago when I first came here?  I think you’ve got the general idea.

I had decided that I wanted to leave early in the day, so I got up, had an unusually congenial breakfast (everybody was so friendly!), and afterward told Luz about my problem.  She told me that I needed a taxi and gave me the number to call.  Naturally, I was terrified.  Phones are really tough here.  I don’t know if I just don’t hear very well on the phone or if my Spanish is really that bad, but it’s awfully hard to understand anybody on the phone.  Even so, I’d done better with talking lately, so I got up my courage and called the number.  The guy on the other end said “bueno” a few times, which is always nice to hear because it generally means that somebody understands at least ten percent of what you’re saying, and then he asked me if I had any “particulares.”  Particulars.  He wanted to know if I had particulars.  I madly searched the dark recesses of my brain for a suitable translation, failed, and gave the phone to Luz.  Failed again!  I still can’t understand what these people are talking about half the time.  Anyway, Luz said I didn’t have any, and that was the end of the conversation.  The taxi came in about twenty minutes, I said goodbye to Luz and Carmen (I don’t know where the parents were), and off I went.  I felt about as horrible as I’d ever felt since coming to Costa Rica. 

The taxi ride was an adventure, of course.  I’d really rather not talk about it, but for the record, the taxi took off in the direction of San Pablo, the name of a township (or some subsection) of Heredia that I’d told the driver.  I didn’t remember exactly where I needed to go, but I figured he knew well enough where this place was and could get me in the general vicinity of where I was going.  I figured wrong.  We got to a fork in the road, and he wanted to know whether to go left, right, or straight.  I said, “Derecho.”  He went straight.  We got lost.  I was wrong, of course: Derecho, it turns out, means “straight,” but I thought it meant “right,” so that’s what I said.  I should have said “derecha” instead.  I was one letter off.  I’m really getting fed up with this language.

Anyhow, the taxi bill, or whatever you call it, came to 150 colones [about three dollars], which is outrageous for a one-mile taxi ride but probably not so bad for the three-mile one I ended up taking.  My new family was waiting outside their place and helped me take my stuff into the little back room of their house.  They were so thoughtful!  They even had something ready for me to eat!  This family is great; I couldn’t ask for anything better.  Really!  If I weren’t so upset at messing up Spanish so much I’d probably be writing all about how nice they were, how the children asked me funny questions (“Are there airplanes in the United States?”), how little Rafael toddles around like the one year-old he is and makes faces, and so on.  It’s a great place to be.  

And that’s what happened.  After 35 years, this incident was triggered in my mind, and all because of that one word.  It’s strange how frustrated I felt at the time, but now I only have happy memories of this.  

Visual Lingo

I go to a grocery store once a week during the pandemic, and normally that’s all the shopping I ever do.  Normally.  This week I decided I’d try this new grocery store in Dyersville called Dollar Green.  I’m pretty sure it’s really a new version of Hy Vee, one of Iowa’s two big supermarket chains, and it’s supposed to appeal either to poor people (it’s a “dollar” store) or to healthy people (it’s “green”).  I’m not that terribly poor right now, but I try to be healthy, so I tried it.  

My experience wasn’t the best.  Three things caught my attention right away: 1) Almost nobody was wearing a mask (We’re a nation of morons.) 2) Hy Vee has more and better brands of things than this store does, and 3) There were no cashiers.  I could deal with the first two parts, since I always have on a mask and keep away from people, and I could get my favorite spaghetti sauce some other time, but the third was a lot tougher.  I’d tried self-checkouts before, and the basic problem is always that I don’t understand the language they use.  I don’t use cell phones except in emergencies, and the computer screen is set up for people who already know the visual lingo, for lack of a better term.  

So here’s what happened.  I only bought about five things so I’d have less work to do at checkout time, I walked up to one of the computer screens that countless other people had been touching (no sanitizer in sight), and I was met by a woman about half my age who asked me if I’d ever used a self-checkout whatchamacallit before.  I said, “Never successfully,” so then she told me that it was easy.  (That’s when I knew it was hard.)  I was able to scan a couple of things, and then she took them and put them into a plastic bag.  Then I needed to weigh some bananas, so I set them on the scale and touched the screen where it looked like I was supposed to — it was a picture of grapes, so I thought it was for produce — and then I typed in the number on the little sticker stuck to the bananas.  Except that there was no keypad on the screen, so I used the other one where the credit card goes.  My mistake.  Then it gave me an outlandish price for grapes, but I didn’t have grapes.  I had bananas.  My helper had to scan her card to nullify that transaction, and then she told me to try again, but there was still no numeric keypad on the screen.  She showed me how I was supposed to hit this red button, and that meant that I’d get a keypad.  (I believe I’ve seen this picture on the cell phone my sister set up for me, now that I think of it.)  So then I got that right, but then I did something else wrong and she had to swipe her card again, and after that I needed to pay for this stuff, and I got flustered and didn’t know what to do, and so I put my credit card in the slot and waited for instructions, and she said, “Use the pin pad,” and I didn’t know what that meant, and she pointed and showed me (it’s the numeric keypad I’d used before!), and I got my ten dollars worth of stuff, managed to say a weak “thank you,” and got out of that store, probably for all time.  I think this is how Captain Kirk got all those alien computers to start blowing up, with smoke billowing out the back of them.  I’m at least as “illogical” as he was.

So I’d thought self-checkouts might be safer during a pandemic, but I’m not so sure now.  Other things in the stores make more sense, like the dots on the floor six feet apart — sometimes with instructions like “Wait here for the next customer,” but sometimes not.  Then there are the one-way aisles.  You’re supposed to go in only one direction, but thankfully everyone ignores those or else you’d be forever getting stuck.  But at least the stores are still trying to take the virus seriously; most places aren’t, like how the park in my hometown, Farley, used to have yellow dots six feet apart on the picnic tables, but as soon as the governor started opening up restaurants and everything else, someone took the dots off, so I guess it’s safe to sit right up next to each other now.  The dots were just dots with no words, but the meaning was clear.  Sit on the dots.  Stay safe.  

So now I need to go to another store, like maybe the Fareway next door.  That’s Iowa’s other big supermarket chain.  I say I need to go, but right now I’m hiding in my house because one of my neighbors is setting up for a garage sale, and there’s sure to be a lot of people over there pretty soon.  No masks, of course.  These people aren’t for real, are they?

Coronaspeck

I was settling in to watch the first Formula 1 race of the year, the long-delayed Austrian Grand Prix, when Sky Sports’ commentator and former F1 driver Martin Brundle said something about how he had a little “coronaspeck,” the new German word for that extra little belly fat that we all have because we’ve been sitting around so much.  I’ve got some of that too.  Shared experiences like the current pandemic always give rise to new words and expressions, and I think the Germans have outdone themselves with this word.  The BBC website defines coronaspeck not as belly fat, but rather “stress eating amid stay-at-home orders.”  I guess maybe it’s both the overeating and its resultant expanded waistline.  

The BBC has listed several other words that have been invented recently.  They refer to “the ubiquitous WHF,” which I’d never heard of (I think it’s “Working From Home,” probably a British usage or else I just missed it) and PPE, or Personal Protective Equipment, which we say here in the U.S.  They report that in Spanish there are two words that can refer to people who don’t wear masks, socially distance, and so forth: “covidiota” (a covidiot – it sounds better in Spanish) and “coronaburro” (comparing such a person to a burro, or donkey).  We’re used to “zoombombing” (joining a Zoom video conference uninvited, especially with nefarious intentions), “doomscrolling” (incessantly reading bad news on the internet), and even one I’ve mentioned before without realizing it, “stay-at-home orders,” which is self-explanatory.  Apparently, this term is not used worldwide; in Malaysia it’s “movement control order” and in the Philippines it’s “enhanced community quarantine.” I wonder if the Philippine government came up with that one.  It doesn’t sound like something that the average person on the street would say.

So here we all are, trying to do social distancing, which isn’t social at all.  It’s physical.  In the process, we look at our computers too much, and now optometrists are getting worried that we’re going to have eye problems.  The people who are really going to have a hard time are the ones who engage in “quaranstreaming,” or streaming videos for hours on end when they’re in quarantine.  Or “quaz” as Australians say, short for quarantine.  They use “sanny” a lot in Australia too; that’s sanitizer.  If you’re quarantining, you can have a “quarantini” while you “quarantine and chill.”  More than anything, you shouldn’t engage in “öffnungsdiskussionorgien,” the German word defined by the BBC as orgies of discussion related to reopening policies – literally “opening discussion orgy.”

As it happens, there’s no orgy of discussion here with my job at a small college in Iowa.  We’ll be fully open for the fall semester.  Our federal government in Washington has decided that all ESL programs have to have face-to-face instruction, so I’ll be putting on a mask and fogging up my glasses along with everyone else next month.  I wonder if there’s a word for that?