Why the pandemic introduces language that is 'hard to explain'
Tuesday, August 4, 2020 - 09:31
in Psychology & Sociology
New words and phrases like "flatten the curve," "social distancing," and "stop the spread" have entered our pandemic lexicon at a dramatic rate. To make sense of the changes, Penn Today spoke with linguist Andrea Beltrama, a postdoctoral fellow within MindCORE, an interdisciplinary center for the study of the mind in the School of Arts & Sciences. Beltrama studies the way in which language encodes meaning. Speakers are constantly conveying social information as a subtext, he says, and the power of words often lies in emotion, not accuracy.