November 01st, 2013

In 2006, and even in 2014, saying "Have you ever lived through a Pandemic before," is one question that was as distant as Mars is in my thinking. For most of us, Gen Y, Gen X, the only approximate reference to pandemic-level events prior to 2019 happened on other continents, or during hurricanes. With the exception of 9/11 bombings, where hundreds of thousands of people died in the span of a few hours. I am still am in the shock of my life when I view the numbers about the virus sars-cov 19 totals.

When I were a college student, we wrote about the differences of vocabulary in newspapers. Not that the newspapers sugar coat or censor in any way, but the common knowledge is that the newspaper should be able to be read and understood by a 7th grader. Of course, that is not the case, because in 7th grade, who really had time for reading news all day long? Most of students had school, possibly an after-school-program or sport, and then sitcoms like Boy Meets World, about Corey and Tapanga, or Saved By The Bell, about life of Zach and Mario, or Tostitos commercials to keep them busy.


Since I’ve recovered this account from some strange circumstances, all I can say is that dialects of various countries have various vocabulary for medical terminology that represented illnesses, outbreaks included. Did you receive a virus shot when you were little? Well the proper word for it is a vaccine, but during the majority of time between 2019 and 2020 all we did was debate the benefit versus adverse reactions to it. For a long time I really saw no point in the vaccine. Was I supposed to inject it myself or were they going to provide a nurse? How will it affect me? Will I also survive or die like that person on YouTube and you know the ones if you were alive during this 2019-2020. But if you somehow missed it it was usually medical workers who somehow got affected by the adverse effects, which was very strange to me. Did anyone in 2006 know what the West Nile virus is? Not specifically. We knew where the Nile river is and the Egyptian pyramids are. And that’s our 7th grade training not diagnostics which, in all fairness, even our biology teachers in high school seldom mentioned. How was I to know that a fluorescent cactus plants would lead to longer life or not.


In 2006 the level of outbreaks that they do today, simply did not exist. So although our world in 2021 includes futuristic Star Wars and Yoda, futuristic science technologies like the SpaceX flights to Mars, and NASA, and the International Space Station(ISS), the ground level information and terminology often depends on the dialects spoken in that region. 


During the pandemic 2021, I had a glimpse of popular Philadelphia sitcom and specifically my region's dialect portrayed on TV, and to my shock and disbelief most people seemed to agree that "water" is pronounced "woder" and other such dialectical nuances. Perhaps due to my immigrant upbringing, I missed that kind of nuanced pronunciation. Since we did live in other regions of the states. Because the British English that was my teacher, said the "tee" sound is not rolled like a "duh" sound. Most likely I will never pronounce it "dialectically," unless really requested. However, the title of this post was aimed at promotion of literacy and vocabulary building and not letting students down with the Mars, Sputnik, and Nasa homophones or too many jokes about nature’s actual sounds from Disney’s Tarsan. Although it’s also a teaching method, perhaps. ​
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