When Surakshya Pant saw her friend breaking lockdown rules and going for a walk, the first thing she did was send him a message questioning his decision. “I told him not to be a covidiot,” says 24-year-old Pant.

‘Covidiot’ is a new term that has been used heavily on social media in recent weeks. Coined by joining two words ‘covid’ and ‘idiot’, it is being used to define those who do not follow physical distancing rules and other precautionary measures to keep the virus at bay.

The coronavirus pandemic has taken the world by storm. In many ways, it has changed the way our society functions, travels and works, and it is also transforming the way we speak. With the rise of neologism in our vocabulary, from ‘covidiot’ to ‘doom surfing’, meaning consuming news related to pandemic obsessively, the coronavirus is changing our lexicon. It is also redefining existing terms, like ‘isolation’ and ‘essential’, and has brought to centre-stage words that were hardly used before in everyday language, like ‘furlough’ or ‘quarantine’.

As more people are getting familiar with creating new words as well as epidemiological jargons, linguist Tara Mani Rai says it’s not surprising that the nature of language itself is being changed. “Language can’t be constant, it is always moulding itself; new words can be created according to the situations people face,” says Rai.

Perhaps the most popular way new words are making their way into our vernacular is through the merging of two separately existing words. The pandemic has introduced a host of portmanteaus: One recent addition is quarantini, made from the combination of quarantine and martini, an alcoholic beverage that you sip during quarantine; and coronnials, used to define the generation born during or after the pandemic made from the combination of two words.

Another portmanteau, Zoombombing, which means unwanted disruption caused by an individual while people are conversing on Zoom, a video conferencing platform, has also been popularised recently.

Words that were until a few months used mostly health professionals and epidemiologists have also become part of everyday language. The top 50 most-searched-for definitions on Merriam-Webster’s website were all related to Covid-19. Likewise, according to Google trends, the words social distancing, lockdown, and isolation also had a 100-fold increase in search volume on Google search.

“I had never heard of the word quarantine before. Isolation had a different meaning for me. As did lockdown,” says Aman Upadhaya, a 20-year-old student.

The term social distancing (now urged by the WHO to be used as physical distancing) too was mostly used as a sociological concept. However, because of the pandemic, the connotation of the word has completely changed.

According to Rai, assistant professor at the Central Department of Linguistics of Tribhuvan University, the semantics of words can change as per social circumstances. “The meaning of words like quarantine and isolation were different. But now people have accepted the new meaning,” says Rai.

Another way the coronavirus has affected language is how we have come to use certain words, especially war metaphors. The President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, declared himself as a wartime president and said that the country is at war, fighting the invisible enemy—coronavirus. Similarly, while addressing the nation on the day of Nepali New Year on April 13, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli also had said that the government is leading the war against the coronavirus. The constant use of war imagery by addressing health professionals as front line warriors is also constantly used to signify how they are leading the pack to combat the spread of coronavirus.

In the Nepali vocabulary as well, there has been an increase in use of loan words. Words like lockdown, quarantine, and isolation still haven’t been translated and are being directly used without any modification.

Although efforts have been made to localise these terms, with many using the term bandabandi to denote lockdown and samajik duri to refer to social distancing, loan words are still extensively used even in local media language, which according to Rai can confuse people as they might not have understood its meaning. “During a crisis like this the government should focus on using words in local languages so more people can understand the message,” he adds.

The pandemic has also popularised the usage of phrases, particularly “flattening the curve”. The use of such terms, according to linguists, is a successful way of ascribing agency to people which will remind them about their responsibility in stopping the outbreak. And that holds true. “In the past whenever I heard the term curve I used to associate it with some mathematical theorem. But now, when I hear the word I am reminded of how we as a society can stop the outbreak of the coronavirus,” says Pant. “Its meaning has completely changed, like so much else.”