D3X73R

Hello from my dad's house in New York State. Not only did I survive my hotel quarantine, I (more BrE in this position) quite enjoyed it.  In the three days that I've been out, I've done several things that I haven't done since March (at least), including going into a supermarket and a restaurant. What I really missed in small-town American quarantine was the ability to get things delivered (and to order them over the internet, not phone—which would have been an international call for me). I was almost completely dependent (save one Domino's delivery) on brothers and sisters-in-law to shop or get take-out/take-away for me. The very American hotel room had a fridge/freezer and a microwave, so at least I didn't need help every day. I was extremely well-suited for the quarantine. First, I love staying in hotels. They don't even need to be fancy hotels—just clean and quiet ones. Second, and more importantly, I had four years of cautious and isolated living in S...

Recently I was asked to write a piece for an organi{s/z}ation about whether publications should be in "Global English". You'd think "Global English" would be relevant during a global pandemic. But the pandemic has illustrated that variation is the natural state of English around the globe. So far, I've looked into what people call the disease and the advice to 'stay (at) home' . Today's topic is what we're doing at home.  Osman Faruqi posted this on Twitter, and Superlinguo Lawren Gawne copied me in: Curious about linguistic differences in the ways Anglophone countries are describing Covid restrictions. Colloquially it seems like: 🇬🇧 = “during lockdown” 🇺🇸 = “during quarantine” 🇦🇺 = “during isolation/iso” — Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) August 8, 2020 Lucky for us, there's the Coronavirus Corpus , a wonderfully timely resource from Mark Davies and team at Brigham Young University, who are responsible for most of the corpora I cit...