The pandemic has been horrible for a lot of people, but it also generated a wealth of funny videos, cartoons and new words.
A ‘portmanteau’ combines two existing words to make a new one, such as ‘podcast’ [iPod + broadcast]; over the past year I came up with ‘Angstipation, ‘Cobo’ and ‘Coveat’, as well as ‘Mea Covid’. Many other words evolved online, on sites such as Urban Dictionary.
Cobo
At the height of restrictions, lonely people sat in the streets, eating off paper plates, swigging cans of beer and belching at other ‘Covid Hobos’. Grown men chatted illegally behind bushes, taking turns to bob up and check for police.
Coveat
This refers to the relaxing of a restriction, immediately followed by a caveat. For example: ‘Vaccinated people may appear in public without masks on, BUT they can only walk with one other person, who must also be vaccinated.’
See also my updated idiom: ‘There’s a tunnel at the end of the light.’
Angstipation
Eighteen months ago, I remember one of my friends saying, ‘Wow, dude, we’re actually living through a pandemic.’ It felt like a war, an invisible invasion. There was an immediate impact on so many private lives, presenting us with so many layers of uncertainty.
Back then we were paranoid about hugging and devoted to washing vegetables. We were ‘angstipated’, with ‘angst’ and ‘constipation’ forming a state of persistent, hardened worry.
Mea Covid
Not a portmanteau, but a play on ‘Mea Culpa’, in which no one takes responsibility for anything. When you ask why the shoe salesman is giving you a sheath for your sock, he will shrug and say, ‘Because of The Covid, sir.’ Is there any point in questioning how a respiratory disease can be transmitted through the toes? No.
When you ask the waitress why you can’t pay with a card, she won’t say, ‘Because the bank doesn’t trust this restaurant’; instead, she’ll shrug and say, ‘The Covid.’ It’s a magical word that exonerates its user from all blame.
‘Mea Covid’ also points to how distinctly the virus affects each individual. For many people, the national response to coronavirus, curtailing luxuries such as travel and concerts, elicits an intense, prolonged irritation; but for others it’s caused redundancies and collapsed businesses, missed education, overworked medical wards and the sheer horror of being unable to visit dying relatives in hospital.
Viarus
One big current question is the origin of COVID 19—was it a ‘zoonotic’ transmission from animals to humans via a revolting ‘wet market? The comedian Jon Stewart disagrees: ‘You know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus lab.’
He said it is too much of a coincidence that a lab researching these illnesses was at the same place where the outbreak occurred, while the host of the show, Stephen Colbert, said that it was equally likely that they put the lab there because it’s where the diseases had occurred before.
Whatever you believe in, one thing is certain: COVID-19 is very effective at spreading through human populations, ‘via - us’. This phrase was coined by my friend, a Chilean composer.
Quarantini
In Malta, there was never a time when we couldn’t drive from one place to the other, or had to justify the ‘essential’ nature of our journeys to the authorities. But we still needed plenty of ‘quarantinis’— a regular Martini, drunk alone.
I spent both of my quarantines working from home, practising The Imperial March from Star Wars on my keyboard, bouncing on a trampoline to lift my spirits and watching too much YouTube. I should have spent more time learning how to make cocktails.
Lockdown Syndrome
A play on ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, during which multiple quarantinis are consumed, with many ‘snaccidents’ (you start with a couple of biscuits and end up finishing the whole pack). There was never a lockdown in Malta, but quarantine was infectious: in April I heard that 10,000 people were confined to their homes in Malta because they’d been in contact with people who’d tested positive.
Airgasm
This is my favourite portmanteau from the Pandemic. An ‘airgasm’ is that blissful rush of air when you rip off your mask after seven hours in an aeroplane.
Some of my friends enjoyed the lack of tourists in 2020/2021, but holidays often resulted in disaster. How many horror stories have I heard of travellers stranded in airports, crippled by bizarre paperwork, or driving frantically cross-country to catch the last ferry before the borders clanged shut?
I had my own corona travel disaster. Following the ‘UK-strain’ panic of January 2021, the Maltese government began allowing only nationals and residents back into the country. As I stood in the queue at Heathrow, I gazed down at my expired Residence Card. It wasn’t an issue when I’d left Malta, as normally I only use my passport for travelling, but now I felt uneasy.
I’d applied for the new residence permit in July 2020, and I’d been promised a new card, but had heard nothing for six months. No one had told me to travel with the confirmation papers, now safely tucked away in my filing cabinet in Malta.
I stood in the queue at Heathrow, thinking, It’s the twenty-first century: surely I’ll be in the system?
I wasn’t.
The airline gave me a COVID helpline email address and threw me off the flight. I ended up staying for a week with an NHS friend in Bristol, during the harshest winter lockdown of the pandemic.
I had to stay quiet for fear of nosy neighbours tipping off the police; I felt like a fugitive, hiding from the COVID Gestapo. I spent a week grimly calling and emailing the authorities in Malta; in the end, I got two of my friends to break into my apartment in Malta to photograph the papers required for me to travel.
Once I’d received helpful letters of transit from the British Consulate, I could move on to joyfully calculating the exact time I needed between taking a PCR, processing the PCR and getting on a plane.
A week after being thrown off the flight I stood in another queue at Heathrow, gripping a folder-full of documents. I was tense all the way through Customs and Security, all the way to Luqa airport; only when I got into my apartment did I rip off my mask, enjoy a wonderful airgasm and start mixing up a fortnight of quarantinis.