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11 PRAIRIE SPRING 2021 SHUTTERSTOCK Word gets around A look at how the pandemic has changed our vocabulary MOST OF US WERE blissfully unaware of social distancing or flat- tening the curve before last year; we hadn't made a curbside pickup much less masked up. Now all of those terms are part of a growing pandemic lexicon that even a Covidiot couldn't ignore. Professor Felicia Steele and stu- dents in her Structure and History of the English Language class have examined these terms and even sub- mitted Covidiot to the American Dialect Society's word-of-the-year contest. The epithet, of course, derives from COVID-19, the dangerous dis- ease caused by a coronavirus. "Covidiot suggested their despair and frustration with someone who stubbornly refused to wear a mask or acknowledge the reality of the pan- demic," says Steele, whose research focuses on historical linguistics. Steele also closely watched how the concept of social distance morphed into a verb. "The phrase itself has been used in public health discourse since the 1990s as a descriptive noun; it's only in the last year that it's taken off as a verb," she says. She tracked the phrase in a Coronavirus Corpus, a gathering of commentary from online sources in THE RED PLASTIC CUP — popular at picnics, parties, and tailgates — troubled Axel Delakowski '21. "I thought of all of the cups that are thrown away," says the biomedical engineering major. "There had to be a more sustainable way." He teamed up with three fellow seniors, finance major Thomas Fitzgerald, marketing major Joaquin Garcia, and chem major Jay Lim, to form Team Zero. The team entered the 2021 Mayo Business Plan Compe- tition, wanting to design a replacement for the single-use plastic cups. Their solution was χ-Cups (pro- nounced "kai-cups"), a riff on the Greek letter chi and their cup's primary ingredient, chitin, a substance derived from seafood waste like crab and shrimp shells. The product is renewable, naturally biodegradable, and home-compostable. It also proved to be a winning formula, earning the students the competition's $30,000 grand prize. "The diverse backgrounds of our team provided a lot of collective knowledge," says Garcia. So long, Solo cup Four students plan to change the way we hold our drinks 20 different English-speaking coun- tries that linguists use to study how usage reflects societal change. Social distancing as a verb began in March 2020, Steele found. And by mid-April, those who care about words began complaining that the phrase was a clumsy and imprecise way to implore people to stay at least six feet apart. Nevertheless, the phrase persisted. Covidiot has remained too, but for those inquiring minds, the American Dialect Society's 2020 Word of the Year was Covid. — Patricia Alex Next up, the group will investigate methods of mass production and develop plans to market the χ-Cups to college students and distributors who are environmentally conscious. — Julia Meehan '22

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