Panic! in the pandemic

I had my first social distancing argument on Saturday. As I was queuing to pay for kippers at my local farm shop, a woman who apparently had no concept of personal space, never mind pandemic space, was right up behind me. I took a step forward, and she closed the gap again. Then I asked her to keep her distance (politely, I thought), and she sneered at me, shook her head, and told me not to panic. Panic! 

Panic, which I just now learnt is named after the god Pan, who'd shout when he woke from his naps and make the sheep scatter in fright, is a sudden fear provoking anxiety so strong it causes a fight-or-flight response. If you've ever had a panic attack, you'll know how strong a physical experience it is. Even if we're not using the medical or scientific definition, but a looser sense, it's still a pretty physical thing involving running about, not thinking straight, irrational decisions, things like that. 

Panic is not politely asking people to follow the guidelines we've been told to follow in order to stem a pandemic. (Pandemic is not named after Pan, sadly.) It's not a sustained, reasoned, relatively calm course of action. Yes, those of us keeping distance from others may be feeling anxiety, but it's not the sudden desire to flee and shortness of breath and racing heartbeat of panic. 

I've heard this word used a lot about people's rational (to me) responses to the pandemic, though, generally from right-wing or anti-lockdown or anti-mask commenters. They are the ones who think the virus isn't that bad, and that we should just go on as normal, perhaps 'protecting the vulnerable'. If you have this view, then a more appropriate word than 'panic' would be 'over-reaction'. 

Using the word 'panic' is just like when you're having an argument with someone and they say 'you're being hysterical', whereupon the correct response is to shriek 'I'm NOT being hysterical' and storm out slamming the door behind you. It makes you seem unreliable and undermines your actions, making them seem ridiculous or unreasonable. It's a dirty, underhand tactic but it works well. 

And yes, when the woman said that to me, I replied 'I'm NOT panicking' and stormed out. 

They're really confusing as well

 I found a new thing on the internet to be annoyed by. 

On twitter, you can share links (of course) and you can write something about those links, and when you do, your comment appears first and then a preview of the link. When the link is an article, this is typically an image, the headline, and the sub-heading stuff. 

The process of you sharing this link is that you read it, you copy it into your tweet or click the share button to make it appear there, and then you write your comment about it before you tweet it. Therefore in your mind you've read the headline first and then your comment. But when someone else sees it, they see your comment first. 

This can be amusing, as in this tweet where the image (not of SpongeBob) doesn't match the comment about SpongeBob, which is just meant to give more information once you've got the main point of the headline below: 

The FUCK happened to SpongeBob?? pic.twitter.com/WrIIL7d0dA

— Zack Fox (@ZackFoxFilm) August 16, 2020

It can also lead to weird linguistic effects when the comment includes something that normally has to refer back to something else in the discourse. In this tweet, the comment refers to the discovery mentioned in the headline, and so tells us more about 'the molecule'. But because it comes first, we think 'what molecule?'. 

The molecule is based on a tiny antibody originally found in llamas, camels, and alpacas. https://t.co/YVMoc4d4PB

— VICE (@VICE) August 17, 2020

That's because the comes with a presupposition of existence and individuality; when you say the you're asking your conversation partner to accept that the thing exists, and that you both know which one you're talking about. If you've read the headline first, no problem - you've just been told it exists. If you haven't, as in the twitter format, you don't yet know it exists (you know some molecules exist, but you don't know the specific one under discussion here). 

Let's see another. This time, if you read the headline and blurb first, you can see they're asking for regular donations, and the comment tells you that you don't have to donate regularly if you can't afford it, you can also make a one-off donation. 

You can donate once too. https://t.co/3Kn4ZGTFQU

— Foolproof (Sylvia Suddes) (@bossproofreader) August 5, 2020

But if you read the comment first, you run up against two things: first it's pragmatically strange to read that you can donate once, as if there's a limit on how many donations you can make. Without the contrast with 'regular', we understand the meaning of once as 'once and once only' (that's some more pragmatics there). Then we get too and that needs to come after the first option, otherwise what's it as well as? 

Anyway, just a little quirk of the way the parts of the text are displayed, on this specific platform. 

Asking questions to share knowledge on twitter

Anyway, back to linguistics after all the disquisitions on the state of HE. Susie Dent posted a nice fun fact about the word two on twitter.

Wordy fact of the day for kids: the number ‘two’ may have a silent ‘w’, but it’s part of the same ancient family that gave us ‘twin’, ‘twice’, ‘between’, ‘tweezers’, ‘twenty’, and ‘twelve’: all of them have something to do with that number 2. #homeschooling

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) April 20, 2020

The first reply was best: it said simply 'Twix'. But the other replies were really interesting to someone who has recent experience of doing linguistics in public and aspirations to do more of it.

There are lots that are comments, reactions, unrelated replies, of course. The ones I'm interested in fall into two groups: questions, and related facts. Both of them fulfil the same locutionary role: to show that the tweeter has some knowledge of language, to convey enthusiasm, and something else slightly undefinable about interacting with celebrities that you don't know personally on twitter.

The related facts, first. Let's give these gentlemen the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were not mansplaining Susie (i.e. assuming that they, as non-experts in this field, can educate her about her literal field of expertise). So they're doing something else – the fact is to add to the original one, give more detail, add more context, and it's for the benefit of other readers of the original tweet. This is not how 'replying' works in normal conversations, but it's how it often works on twitter.

German has the same root but the "w" is still pronounced in Zwei (Two) and we also get Zwilling (Twin), zweimal (Twice), zwischen (between), zwanzig (twenty) and zwölf (twelve) although tweezers are usually "Pinzetten" which shares a root with pincers.

— Rod Maxwell (@RodericMaxwell) April 20, 2020

And in Dutch ‘twee’ with the W pronounced and the ‘ee’ pronounced as ‘ay’. All the same root. Love how the histories of different languages are intertwined.

— Xander Mol (@Xander_Mol) April 20, 2020

My wife who speaks Scots pronounces it tway.

— James Beaton (@jjb3621) April 20, 2020

Then there's the questions. Some of them are simply information seeking – the fact prompted the asker to seek more information about something that occurred to them. But many of them also have a secondary purpose of showing off a bit, being a bit clever, making an observation and wanting to share it but also doing that in a deferential, face-saving way, to indicate that they are aware that Susie Dent is an expert and already knows this (a question implies that the asker believes the answerer knows the answer).

Does that mean the 'tw' would have had a twə sound originally, rather than pronounced to? So literally two (twoo).

— Zoe Defoe (@ZoeDefoe1) April 20, 2020

(This one is also cute and interesting because they don't mean that the /tw/ would be pronounced /twə/ in the word two, but to say the sound /tw/ on its own you would say /twə/, with an unstressed vowel at the end to make it pronounceable, and I like this a lot.)

This one is a perfect example of the 'question as knowledge-sharing' tactic (though I think in this case the answer is no):

Is the 'in' from 'twin' related to the 'en' plural ending, like in children or brethren or eyen a few hundred years ago?

— John Moynes (@JohnMoynes) April 20, 2020