COVID-19, the beer flu; or, the disease of many names

Abstract Since the coronavirus outbreak began to spread worldwide in the early months of 2020, English speakers have been coming up with new names for the disease at a rate of knots. The myriad unofficial synonyms for COVID-19 that we currently have at our disposal provide an extreme example of overlexicalisation, and it is not so much the number that is impressive as the sheer speed at which they have been coined. This study is based on a personally compiled corpus of tweets covering the period from late January to late May 2020 and aims to work out what mechanisms underpin the creation and use of some two hundred and seventy synonyms, paying particular attention to the role of slang, wordplay, verbal humour, bigotry and xenophobia. The author identifies and discusses a set of categories that help to better understand the attitudes behind these words, some of which bespeak a desire to confront the grim reality of disease, while others – the majority, in fact – seek to denigrate and stigmatise its “ideal victims” (the baby boomers) or its “evil perpetrators” (the Chinese). In a different context, this study might be deemed just a celebration of the creative levity and wit of English speakers when faced with adversity. In these dark times, it is also a sad testimony to how some of our primitive fears have come to be reflected in our pandemic lexicon.