[Ads-l] "pandemic", v.

[Jonathan Lighter]

When you think about it, you can't spell "pandemic" without "panic" and
"Dem."

Why is that?

JL

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 1:41 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> Two meanings.  One is ‘to be confined by the pandemic’ or ‘to spend the
> pandemic’
>
> “As new information comes in, we update our priors all the time,” said
> Susan Holmes, a Stanford statistician, via unstable internet from rural
> Portugal, where she unexpectedly pandemicked for 105 days, while visiting
> her mother.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/science/coronavirus-bayes-statistics-math.html
>
> That inspired me to google “pandemicked”, since the past tense or
> participle would eliminate the much more prevalent noun lemma.  And that’s
> where the other meaning of “pandemicked” comes in:
> ‘To be canceled or otherwise affected by the pandemic’
> As in “What to do if your wedding has been pandemicked”
>
> I’m not sure how frequent this meaning of “pandemic” as a transitive verb
> would be, since the only plausible subject would be the pandemic itself.
> Maybe “Covid-19 pandemicked my school”?
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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