Living With Buzzwords

Buzzwords, shorthand and slang are part of how we communicate with each other. They are useful for simplifying concepts that would take too long to explain, where that explanation would distract from the main thrust of the conversation. They are also prone to overuse or misuse, creating the very distraction the use of that word or phrase was trying to avoid.

Business leaders, politicians and other authorities are often trapped in this grey area of trying to communicate clearly and simply without over-burdening the audience with long-winded explanations and segues. (Though the latter is a trait of some people.)

Inspirational posters are another form of buzzwords and shorthand. These posters became a trend that led to a backlash because they were overused, and the triteness of the sayings started to wear and annoy people. “Believe and Succeed”, “Walk the Talk”, “Be the Bridge” and the most infamous “There is no ‘I’ in Team”.

At their most useful, organizational buzzwords can provoke introspection, change a viewpoint and help a team work to a common goal. At their least useful they become bizspeak, a form of jargon that has lost utility and is only used as a conversation crutch or to demonstrate that the speaker is of some
importance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new list of buzzwords that experts and communicators coin to communicate their ideas. “Flatten the curve” was a call to action at the very beginning of the pandemic. Flatten the curve was a buzzword created to unite us in a common goal, to bend the arc of new
infections away from exponential growth. Early on it had utility as the measures we had to control this new virus were few. It helped serve to alert people to new actions and behaviour that could help keep us and our neighbours safe. What it offered was a clarity of purpose and a goal to work towards.

As we learned more about the virus, and how it could be controlled, a new buzzword was coined, “COVID Zero.” Some jurisdictions adopted it, others did not. In late 2021 and into 2022 we are now hearing a new buzzword being repeated “learn to live with COVID.”

What is of concern is that many of these buzzwords (or buzz-phrases) is that their purpose is to describe what leaders, experts and each of us need to do or need to accept and learn. Flatten the curve has utility because we know what we are working towards, quickly reducing the number of new cases each day so that the pandemic does not overwhelm society and the institutions society relies on. Flatten the curve then led to the more ambitious concept of COVID Zero. COVID Zero has particular utility because of the stated goal. No new infections at all. There was much debate about the merits of COVID Zero. What it offered was a clear objective that could be used to measure success or failure of the efforts to achieve it. As measures were adopted they could be monitored, measured, adopted, tweaked or abandoned as they were evaluated if they moved a jurisdiction towards COVID Zero. It did not matter if COVID Zero as an absolute target was impossible to sustain. What it offered was a common purpose that everyone could understand. It was about saving lives and protecting health.

Ontario, and many other provinces adopted the concept of balance instead. Balancing the needs of the virus with the needs of the economy. Which, when stated like that, shows that it is an inexplicable goal. Nowhere is it implied that people, their health and wellbeing, is a priority.

Which has led us to the new buzzword. “Learn to live with COVID.”

What does that even mean? What is the goal? Where is the objective of that?

Learning to live with COVID could mean anything. It could mean that we don’t apply any control measures at all, allow the disease to run rampant flooding hospitals and morgues, and whoever survives gets to rebuild the society that is shattered as public institutions like health care and education crumble. The economy is in tatters, families are ripped apart, but the final result is living with COVID.

At its most optimistic it means… nothing at all.

The use of the word learning in learning to live with COVID, implies there is something that we don’t understand. But what is it that we don’t understand?

Learning to live with COVID has no utility as a buzzword at all. Arguably, that is what has been happening in most of Canada all along. Since COVID Zero was never adopted, Living with COVID was always the goal. And we have learned many harsh lessons over two years as we lived with it.

We learned that our senior citizens are not valued as people. We learned that our health care system is woefully under resourced. We learned that quality education is not important for our children. We learned that many of us were expendable, offered up as sacrifices to balance the needs of the economy
with the needs of the virus.

We have been learning to live with COVID for the last two years. And the lessons we have learned are ugly ones indeed.