Poems in lockdown: Cultural aspects of English and Russian “coroneologisms”

Abstract

Thanks largely to the affordances of social media, the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a glut of neologisms, loan-words, abbreviations, calques and other linguistic variants. The crisis was accompanied in most nations by social measures curtailing what have long been seen as fundamental liberties; hence, it has foregrounded the re-emergence of old controversies about individualism vs collectivism, the nature of personal freedom, the role of the state, the right to healthcare, the distribution of wealth, and so on. On the UK side, our study explores some emergent neologisms in English and Russian, especially implicit meaning in terms like “social distancing” and “lockdown”. We consider cross-cultural implications that relate to the way each national group conceptualized, and lived through, the experiences of lockdown. Linguistic practices may reflect deep-seated habits of being that characterize different countries, and thus our research may shed light on long-standing questions of national stereotypes. We look at some of the Covid-19 neologisms produced and/or used in British and Russian contexts, on the assumption that, by comparing these micro-linguistic practices, it is possible to learn something concerning the cultural realities of the countries in question, along the lines proposed in the works of Hofstede (2001) and Wierzbicka (2003).