About a month ago, it was the anniversary of the Covid-19 for much of the world. A ringing phrase for a huge part of the past year has been “the new normal.” Asides the saddening fact of casualties of the pandemic itself and efforts made to mitigate it such as virtual meetings, social distancing, and telemedicine, one distinct part of the pandemic was an addition to our vocabulary. Words we would never have thought of speaking in regular conversations and words we never even knew became a new normal. In the midst of all this were words that had been previously derogatorily termed legalese. Let’s take an interesting journey in rediscovering these words.
STIMULUS (AKA STIMMY)
The pandemic wreaked havoc on economies the world over. Mind you, bad economies mean suffering businesses, laid off workers, starving children and a host of unpalatable situations. In response, many governments offered stimulus packages, the most recent being the United States stimulus checks that earned the name “stimmy” which may be well on its way to becoming standard English. Merriam-Webster Dictionary Website has stated that it is part of their list of words being watched that are yet to meet up to their criteria for new words. Stimulus packages are firmly anchored in the waters of tax law and comprise a range of different government taxation and spending measures. When it enacts fiscal stimulus, the government hands over cash, via direct subsidies, loans or tax incentives, to individuals, companies and even entire industries impacted by an economic downturn.
QUARANTINE
Many countries had to dust their statute books on quarantine for this. Nigeria’s Quarantine Act was enacted as far back as 1926 with the most recent amendment being in 1954. Covid-19 Regulations 2020 were enacted under the Act’s authority.
While many travelers from Ebola-stricken countries and survivors of previous plagues were familiar with this term, the rest of the world was hearing this used with so much regularity for the first time. A number of disease control agencies took to the internet to share their knowledge of the difference between quarantine and isolation. The American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention distinguished the terms thus:
· Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
· Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
It was a learning curve for the uninfected and a period of much anxiety for those exposed to the virus and their loved ones, that ended with sighs of relief and celebratory videos when the advised 14 days ended with no symptoms or a negative test result.
FURLOUGH
This was one word that I had simply never heard before. So thanks to lockdown sensation, Meggie Forster for this one. Meggie was furloughed from her sales job and took to satirical lip-syncing on Tik Tok and Twitter.
A furlough is a mandatory suspension from work without pay. From April 20, 2020 to March 15, 2021, approximately 11.4 million jobs, from 1.3 million different employers were furloughed in the United Kingdom. In Spain, as of June 2020, 43.2% of companies placed part of their staff on full furlough and 25.6% of businesses furloughed their entire staff.
This was something many had to come to terms with for the first time. Google searches of the phrase “meaning of furlough” were at an all-time high between 26th April, 2020 and 2nd May, 2020, when many countries were entering their first lockdown.
FORCE MAJURE
There were tons and literal tons of articles and webinars on force majure in the trail of the pandemic. I guess it was the excitement of having a rare occasion where theory played out in real life. Were contracts considered frustrated as a result of the pandemic? In case you were wondering, that’s basically what force majure means — unforeseen circumstances outside a party’s reasonable control which prevent that party from fulfilling its contractual obligations. There were many assenters, a few outlying naysayers and even fewer fence straddlers. But the term was repeated so much for months after the outbreak that I began to consciously avoid webinars that so much as had the word “force’ in them. It was quite enlightening for laymen, however. So the rehashing was not altogether bad.
I will take a lucky guess that many of you were either nodding your heads and considering law school while reading through this article or thinking, “No way. This is certainly not a legal word.” Whichever side you are on, there is a comment section waiting for all your thoughts. Have any new words the pandemic taught you or made you use more often? I would love to hear them.
