Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

The first impacts of the COVID19 outbreak on the life of our departmental community made themselves felt in mid-January—almost a year ago, well before outbreak became pandemic. Our students pursuing their year abroad in China, many of them travelling during the Chinese New Year holiday, were unable to return to their host universities for the second semester. Soon those in Italy, then Spain, France and Germany hastily packed bags, bought tickets they never planned to buy and said rushed, premature goodbyes. Gradually, as winter turned to spring our year-abroaders became a new category: ‘early returners’ and extensive efforts were made right across the department to put in place teaching provision for these students. Language learning doesn’t like a hiatus and we had to fill the gap left by COVID, the invisible scourge of 2020. Issues of accommodation (apartments vacated abroad, rooms to be found back in Exeter), unanticipated challenges relating to the repatriation of personal effects left overseas, headaches closer to home with the timetabling of classes in a term normally teaching-free: all these matters arose, were dealt with, and we moved on, because we had to. Things (that wonderfully vague, euphemistic cover-all term in English) moved so quickly between March and April, April to May into June that we hardly noticed these months going by. It is now November and we have become adept users of a whole new vocabulary. COVID is a linguistic phenomenon as well as a virus. It has brought us ‘lockdown’, ‘quarantine’ and ‘self-isolation’—not new terms, but words that now have an unanticipated familiarity. The pandemic has made ‘social distancing’ and ‘herd immunity’ everyday terms. Even those of us with only the most rudimentary awareness of the workings of science are now conversant with ‘false positives’, ‘super-spreaders’ and ‘droplet transmission’. New meanings have been attached to ‘bubbles’ and ‘circuit-breakers’. As always, human beings have used language in playful, creative ways to respond to the crisis. Someone who ignores public health advice is a covidiot. The inevitable lure of abbreviations brings WFH (working from home) and when we are, this can mean we come to terms with the ‘new normal’ via the consumption of quarantinis during ‘Zoom drinks’. These sentences would have made little sense eleven months ago. 

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The impacts of the pandemic are also felt in our relations to time and to space. In the University sector we are using the words ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ much more than we would ever have anticipated. And the public health guidance has led us to spend much more time on our own or with only a very small number of others and in much narrower geographical areas. When we do this we tend to experience time differently. Human beings have a great capacity for future-orientated thought: we ponder and muse about what could be, what will be, what’s around the corner or in the offing. But at a time when travel and even local movement—the changes of scene that confirm our sense of freedom and vitality—are greatly restricted, it can become risky for us to set too much store by what is to come. There is a moment in Sally Rooney’s debut novel when the protagonist’s lover breaks up with her, leaving her alone, in a form of self-isolation. She waits for him to call, but to no avail. This is how she describes it: 

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He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after that. Nobody did. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. 

Conversations with Friends (London: Faber, 2017), p. 289 

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We all want the pandemic to be over. But given that an end to restrictions and the suffering the virus is causing seem some way off, it is vitally important that we find ways of achieving our goals, ways of being happy in the here and now rather than letting life shrink down to the wearying process of waiting for what comes next. Working towards a degree is more than a distraction. It’s an opportunity to learn, to discover, to be challenged and changed by the material you encounter. We are all working in circumstances different to those we’d really like. We are all getting tired by time in front of the screen and away from the things the pandemic has taken from us. But in the future time after corona, I would like each of us to be able to look back and not to be defined by what we lost or what we couldn’t do but to be proud of what we achieved against the odds, what we learned and what we accomplished. We can get through this and we can make a difference if we remember to look out for each other and focus not on waiting, but on doing. 

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Adam Watt, November 2020