The so-called COVID-19 crisis may not be the Black Death of the Middle Ages, but in the digital age it has brought out the fact that the media have utilized the malleability of contemporary American English to couch their utterances in ways that may seem to wreak havoc with the boundaries between traditional grammatical categories, namely the fundamental distinction between nouns and verbs.

That is what is happening when media language takes a noun phrase like “social distance” and makes a verb out of it; or “self-quarantine,” etc., etc. English in the twenty-first century (on both sides of the Atlantic) increasingly feels no compunction about making verbs out of nouns, or for that matter, nouns out of verbs, e.g. “good read,” “recent ask,” etc., etc.

At a time when social communication of all kinds is at a premium, we all benefit from the digital revolution that will ultimately conquer even the contemporary iteration of the Plague.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[ADDENDUM: Readers who know Russian may wish to (re)read Pushkin’s so-called ‘Little Tragedy’ “Пир во время чумы” (“Feast During the Plague”), loosely based on a scene from John Wilson’s poem “City of the Plague” (1817). For a definitive analysis of all four ‘Little Tragedies’ see my “The Metonymic Structure of Pushkin’s ‘Little Tragedies’,” which is chapter 8 in Michael and Marianne Shapiro, Figuration in Verbal Art (Princeton University Press, 1988).