In 2021, words are all we have

From New Normal to Workcation, pandemic catchphrases have followed us into the present year

- Bijoy Venugopal

LAST YEAR this time we were looking ahead, making to-do lists. This year we’re listless, and staring vacantly at the elusive promise of a post-vaxxed future. While we’re at it, fiddling with our N95 masks and having nightmares of being married in PPE suits, our millennium has unceremoniously turned 21. Collectively, we are at an age when wisdom is expected to dawn upon us and settle embarrassingly on our shoulders like dandruff.

Those among us who have survived the pandemic look on with disbelief as the century hobbles into its third decade. We invent ways to wish away the negativity as we make sense of earthly time, confused about which truths to believe. Along with app-ordered meals, we diet on disinformation dispensed industriously by the dangerous minds that occupy the dens of political power. The darkness outside has seeped inside of us. The recession is real. The depression is deep. The exploitation is thorough. And the pandemic, which we have now learned to live with, has infected our vocabulary with phrases that aren’t going out of circulation in a hurry. Here are a few that we will be babbling all the way through 2021.