Coronavirus - a story of semantic boundaries

We know a lot more now about pandemics than we used to.

Sure, we'd heard of The Plague - the big one in terms of numbers of deaths and social impact back in the 1300s. We know surprisingly little about The Spanish flu despite its global devastation one hundred years ago. Maybe we saw reports on Ebola, HIV, MERS and SARS; but they happened somewhere else to other people. They were managed and stayed outside our immediate sphere of concern. 

See full infographic at Visual Capitalist

But we've been educated recently. 

This snippet of an infographic from Visual Capitalist with disturbing fluffy things as the number of deaths reminds us we have had pandemics and plagues for at least as long as we've recorded human history. (It's seriouly worth a look at the full infographic.)

Personally and socially, pandemics and plagues are devastating, politically they are exploitable crises, environmentally they are warning bells about humanity's disregard for other life forms, and existentially they refuse our preference to ignore our mortality. 

But semantically they are all over the place. 

The naming of pandemics, including the coronavirus, is an intriguing story.

It's a story of semantic boundaries (try singing it to the Brady Bunch theme).

What defines an outbreak of a disease as a pandemic?

My regular dictionary source, Merriam-Webster, explains: An outbreak is a sudden increase in a disease, typically limited to an area or a specific group of people. If an outbreak becomes more widespread, it may be called an epidemic. If it broadens still further to affect a large proportion of the population, the disease may be described as a pandemic. Pandemics feature new diseases to which people do not have immunity which is why they spreads so widely. 

So, the noun pandemic is defined as: 

♦️ an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population.

The etymology is pan meaning 'all' and demos meaning 'people' (while epidemic uses epi meaning 'among, upon'). 

The word pandemic was first recorded in 1853. Before that, people used the word plague with our current definition of pandemic, along with other broad meanings.

The noun plague is defined as: 

♦️ a disastrous evil or affliction
♦️ a destructively numerous influx or multiplication of a noxious animal
♦️ an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality 
♦️ a virulent contagious febrile disease that is caused by a bacterium (Yersinia pestis) and that occurs in bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic forms
♦️ a cause of irritation 
♦️ a sudden unwelcome outbreak.

Plague number 2: frogs

Probably the most famous reference would be the multiple plagues of Egypt in the old testament. 

The number of biblical plagues varies according to sources, but commonly they are described as ten plagues: water turning to blood, frogs, lice or gnats, wild animals or flies, pestilence of livestock, boils, thunderstorm of hail and fire, locusts, darkness for three days, death of firstborn. (Personally, I find frogs too cute to imagine a plague of them being bad, but I guess you can get bothered by too much of anything!)

So, plague is a broad general noun, with one meaning akin to the meaning of pandemic.

The semantic boundaries of the word plague

The word plague lives on as a generic noun:

♦️ Shop owners ... amid a plague that has killed more than 21,000 New Yorkers and thrown millions into the unemployment lines.

♦️ Swarms of locusts reached the environs of the Indian capital New Delhi, marking the latest advance of a vast plague.

But only one event, one disease outbreak, is called The Plague. 

A plague of THE plague

The Plague spread across Europe in the years 1346-53. At the time it was called the Great Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Death, and only centuries later it became known as the Black Death (starting in the 1750s, probably a mistranslation of the Latin word atra meaning both ‘terrible’ and ‘black’). It was the deadliest human pandemic recorded, resulting in up to 25-200 million deaths in Eurasia and North Africa. 

The Plague was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium spread by fleas on rats. This bacterium most commonly caused bubonic plague, but can also cause septicaemic plague and pneumonic plague. Health authorities now identify the three diseases as The Plague. 

The Plague lives on: from 2010 to 2015 there were 3248 cases worldwide. 

Mmm, the world has The Plague (a disease), but it is not a plague (a pandemic/broad spread of a disease). 

How does a general word plague become a specific name for a disease, The Plague? 

It is an example of semantic change - when humans change the meaning of a word through their use.

Semantic change happens because ... humans. 

As I wrote in Alternate - a small grief, the use and meaning of words change all the time. It's inevitable because that's what humans do with this wonderful, flexible tool called language. Change can't be stopped. 

Two of the ways that words change meaning is semantic narrowing - in which the meaning of word becomes less general or inclusive than previously, and semantic broadening - in which the meaning of word becomes more general and inclusive, illustrated by these circles. 

Over time, the 'boundary' of a word's meaning can narrow - shift inwards to a more specific meaning, or broaden - shift outwards a more expanded meaning. 

You already know lots about semantic broadening, even if you don't know that term. 

Words like aspirin, heroin, hoover, zipper, escalator, thermos, yo-yo, band-aid, liquid paper and google - these all started as brand names for specific products - a narrow meaning. At some stage the words broadened to a more general meaning for a category of similar things.

The names you know as brands and those as generic words depends on your age when that product hit the market plus when advertising 'over-saturated' the market with that word. You might be perplexed if someone younger than you uses a brand name as a generic category name. The brand name Liquid paper™ broadened in the late 1990s to mean 'all types of correction fluid'. I hadn't realised this though, when I replied to a workmate's request for liquid paper with, 'No, but I have Tipp-ex™, is that any good?'

The aim to get a product's brand name into common use can sometimes result in the word's meaning broadening to be a generic word for any similar things in a category. The brand name Google™ has broadened from a specific search engine to a verb meaning to search the internet; we say 'You should google it' even if we use a different search engine.

It's not a desirable outcome of advertising though. The risk to producers is their specific product gets tarnished by cheaper products outside their brand. Marketers call this brand deterioration or genericisation (or informally, even genericide).

Kraft brands: jello, koolaid, mayo, miracle whip, tang are now generic words.

But linguists call it semantic broadening.

Young children use something like this process as they are learning language. They might use a specific word they know, like daddy, quite broadly to refer to all men (much to their mother's embarrassment when they call a stranger 'daddy' at the shopping center). They can use idiosyncratic words too: one of my children used darling to mean 'child' and asked a friend where her darlings were. As they learn language, and as they experience more of the world, children gradually narrow the meaning of everyday words to having boundaries similar to common use.

And there the boundary of the word rests unless something else makes it change.

Semantic narrowing usually happens slowly

Semantic narrowing doesn't have the same obvious drivers of marketing or normal language development. The shift usually takes a long time and happens for any number of social or linguistic reasons that can be hard to identify while they are in progress. 

The word plague is one example. We can have 'a plague of locusts, malaria or even crimes', (broad concept), but when you read, 'the plague killed up to 200 million people', we know exactly which disease (narrow concept) we're talking about. 

The overwhelming nature of the disaster and death drove the shift from a plague, to The Great Plague to The Plague. The formal classification of bubonic plague by health officials came centuries later, so is not part of the semantic narrowing.

Here are a few more.

Word	Old broad meaning	Shifting…	Current narrow meaning
Litter	A bed or bedding	Animals bedding straw	Things scattered about
Deer	Animal		Hoofed grazing animal, males have antlers
Girl	A young person		Female younger than puberty
Meat	Food		Product of animal flesh
Accident	Event		Unfortunate event
Fowl	Bird	Wild bird hunted for 'sport'	Bird raised for food
Disease	Discomfort from any source		Illness
Medium (plural media)	Means, channel, way	Format for presenting information	Companies providing news and information, often online

A plague of locusts in Kenya, 2020

With semantic narrowing the meaning shifts from a broad general category to a specific narrow name for one thing only. These days, we don't know these original broad meanings, or why they changed, apart from perhaps the most recent examples, like media. 

Plague is an example of semantic narrowing that is incomplete, where we still have the word plague as a general noun (and verb), but we have The Plague as a specific name. 

This is happening with the name of the current pandemic too. 

Everywhere I see 'the Coronavirus' in news media or official reports. 

But coronavirus is a broad noun, it is a category of viruses. How did that semantic narrowing happen so quickly?

Some background to naming viruses

We are living in the 'time of emerging viruses', a term coined by virologist Stephen Morse in 1990, back when warnings about an imminent global pandemic first started. 

Source

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses in animals, including seven identified in humans. In people, they cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) first reported in Asia in 2002-3, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. 

When this current virus 'emerged' it was soon identified as a novel (new) coronavirus (specific type of virus). The taxonomists gave it a temporary name while it was further investigated, 2019-nCoV - the name made up of 'emerging 2019' + 'n' for novel + 'CoV' for a coronavirus.

I can imagine virologists and epidemiologist referring to 'a novel coronavirus' numerous times in the past, e.g. "When a novel coronavirus appears in human populations, we need to act quickly".

Unusually, this particular novel coronavirus was written about and worried about by the public for some time before it got an official name. The virus was first identified in December 2019 and declared a 'public health emergency of international concern' on 30 January 2020, but it didn't receive an official name until mid-February. 

Fairly quickly, 'a novel coronavirus' morphed to 'the coronavirus' through the many non-epidemiologists and non-taxonomists writing about it to feed the 24 hour news cycle.

Snips from various social media sources

In fact, social media coined 'The Rona' almost as soon as the spread of the pandemic to the US and other western countries hit media outlets. And the memes began.

This extensive use of 'the coronavirus' to name the new virus was driven by blanket media coverage about the initial outbreak and rapid spread, speculation this was THE predicted pandemic, questions about different countries radically varying responses, the politicisation of those responses, and, of course, the conspiracies. 

 But primarily by the lack of a specific name!

The new baby is named but grandpa doesn't like the name

On 11 February 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced the official names for the virus and the disease. Viruses and diseases get named by different committees, because, well, they are different things. So, we now have Covid-19 (disease) and SARS-CoV-2 (virus).

The announcement of two different names for something already called 'the coronavirus' by the media caused somewhat of a kerfuffle. 

However, different names are not unusual: we have smallpox (disease) caused by the variola virus (virus), and AIDS (disease) caused by HIV (virus). Among the existing coronavirus family, MERS is the disease, while MERS-CoV is the virus; and SARS is the disease, while SARS-CoV is the virus. 

But there was another kerfuffle about the official name for the virus.

Until 2015, diseases were usually named after the area where they were thought to have emerged - think Spanish flu (wrongly named by first public reports rather than first origin), Ebola, Hendra and MERS. New guidelines published by WHO in 2015 require that virus names do not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, while still being pronounceable and related to the disease. The aim is to prevent the use of names that are inaccurate or stigmatising on countries or people. It also sets up a standard naming convention to use over time (which suggests they are anticipating having to name a lot more viruses!)

So, the virus-naming committee followed the guidelines. 

The virus was called 'severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2' (SARS-CoV-2). It might have been 'novel' to most of us, but to the taxonomists determining the ways viruses are named, it was just the second in a series. To them it made perfect sense to just add a '2' for the second one of the type of virus to which it was most closely genetically related.  

But it turns out that the WHO was not that happy with the virus name of SARS-CoV-2. Its own guidelines would indicate the disease name should be SARS-2. However, WHO anticipated problems in communicating about public risk as well as generating panic in those populations that had been worst affected by the SARS epidemic in 2003. 

So, instead of a disease name related to the name of the virus, the WHO decided to call it 'COVID-19' or 'the coronavirus disease'.

In public communication, WHO now only refers to 'the virus responsible for COVID-19' or 'the COVID-19 virus' rather than the official name 'SARS-CoV-2'. Check out the title of the web page describing this decision: Naming the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the virus that causes it.

Importantly, Covid-19 is an easy-to-say official name that provides a name to counter Trump and others using the name the 'Chinese virus'. Trump obviously wouldn't pay much heed to the WHO's 2015 guidelines, but many suspected another motive for his choice of name due to the existing international political tensions. Conversely, some judged that the WHO was motivated to avoid this particular place name, kowtowing to China.

In fact, it was just the first time the new WHO guidelines for naming diseases had come to the public's attention.

Too late WHO, we've called it The Coronavirus

But this virus had already been named by the broad public. It's The Coronavirus. 

Officials who want to communicate health warnings and information have to use this word despite the formal names, or at least use both if they want to get their message across. 

Author's photos

The semantic narrowing process that led people in 1300s Europe to name the most devastating plague in memory as 'The Plague' has led to people in the 2020s already naming this particular virus and disease with its enormous impact on health and economies as 'The Coronavirus'. 

The name 'the coronavirus' has been used by enough people that it's not going back into the linguistic or taxonomic purity bottle. Even though it is technically a broad category name for a range of viruses, the meaning has been narrowed to just one particular virus in the minds of most of us (at least in Western societies). 

And there's no stopping semantic change. 

Just like there's no stopping this virus. 

The story beyond semantic narrowing

Although naming conventions are a minor issue amid a global health crisis, the rapid nature of this example of semantic narrowing process highlights the social and political drivers of word meaning changes. It is a rare opportunity to see semantic narrowing as it happens.

It sometimes amuses me when I notice that words have shifted meaning. But sometimes it annoys me when we can't use a word anymore because the original and useful meaning is diluted or lost.

I wonder if the virologists and taxonomists are just a bit cranky right now. Just what will they call the next human coronavirus? 

Because there will be one.

The ravaging epidemic ... has shocked the world. It is still not comprehended widely that it is a natural, almost predictable, phenomenon. We will face similar catastrophes again, and will be ever more confounded in dealing with them, if we do not come to grips with the realities of the place of our species in nature. A large measure of humanistic progress is dedicated to the subordination of human nature to our ideals of individual perfectibility and autonomy. Human intelligence, culture, and technology have left all other plant and animal species out of the competition. We also may legislate human behavior. But we have too many illusions that we can, by writ, govern the remaining vital kingdoms, the microbes, that remain our competitors of last resort for dominion of the planet. The bacteria and viruses know nothing of national sovereignties. 

Joshua Lederberg writing about AIDS in 1988.

References

• Benedictow, O.J. (2005). The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever. History Today, 55 (3): March 
• Lederberg, J. (1988). Medical Science, Infectious Disease, and the Unity of Humankind. Journal of the American Medical Association, 260 (5): 684-685

Images, used under Creative Commons licence

• Snippet from much larger Visualizing the History of Pandemics infographic: by Nicolas LePan at Visual Capitalist
• Frogs: from Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ts4n9nfz [CC-BY-4.0]
• The Plague: Unknown author/Public domain held by Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=539682
• Semantic narrowing and broadening diagram 1 and 2 by the author
• Various corrections fluids: Liquid paper at Wikicommons and Tipp-Ex at Wikimedia [CC-BY-SA].
• Kraft brands: from Serena Y. Hsie at http://mktgurl.blogspot.com [CC BY NC ND]
• Plague of locusts: Unknown author at Lucis Philippines [CC BY]
• Seven human coronaviruses: Derivative work of an image by Firas A. Rabi, Mazhar S. Al Zoubi, Ghena A. Kasasbeh, Dunia M. Salameh, and Amjad D by Al-Nasser at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pathogens-09-00231-g002.webp [CC BY] 
• Oprah The Rona meme: https://media.makeameme.org/created/you-got-the-c939192d4f.jpg
• Seinfeld meme: at Imgur https://i.imgur.com/FaDygOy.jpg 

Images from social media/news sources, no attribution

• WHO announcement: snipped from the socials, no source provided
• News media examples, photos and posters: snipped from the socials
• Health advice examples: photos taken by the author