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.