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Trains now on Uber. Tees and sees apply check the Uber app. This is scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher

and Tagata. The pandemic has transformed lives and livelihoods, but it's changed the little details too, like the language we use, peppering our everyday speech with scientific terms like social distancing, super-spreter, and asymptomatic.

Yeah, I mean, we've all had to become, you know,

amateur epidemiologists, I suppose,

and familiarize ourselves with these terms

that, you know, normally you would expect just to be in some in some journal

article somewhere. Ben Zimmer is a linguist and language columnist for the Wall Street

Journal. He says a lot of the words that came up fresh to many people in 2020 had existed in scholarly literature for decades.

So for instance, contact tracing is actually attested from 1910.

There's an example from... from an

Australian medical journal talking about school epidemics back in 1910

back in 1910 and they're talking about contact tracing as you know something that the school nurse would need to do to figure out you know who had been infected and the term quarantine which derives from a renaissance era Italian word,

meaning a 40-day waiting period for ships arriving

from plague-stricken ports, dates back centuries.

But it took on new life during the pandemic.

Everybody's talking about quarantining and then it starts generating all sorts of new forms as well.

You know, you can drink your quarantini, you can grow a quarant beard, and on and on and on as people got creative by taking these words and forming

innovative new expressions out of them.

Zimmer also chairs the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society.

At a recent virtual meeting, they voted on the 20-20 Word of the year.

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