Language fans are watching, enthralled, as the pandemic – which speeds up everything – causes a burst of linguistic invention across the world.

Two academic self-described “leximaniacs” from Australia, Kate Burridge and Howard Manns, wrote a feature on the new slanguage of the quarantimes: ‘Iso’, ‘boomer remover’ and ‘quarantini’: how coronavirus is changing our language. The illustration at the top of their piece in The Conversation is worth the price of admission.

Are you in iso because you’re afraid you’ve caught a case of the Miley? (End-clipped rhyming slang for Miley Cyrus.) Are you decrying the covidiots who protest lockdown orders? After weeks without a visit to the barber / hairdresser are you rocking a Zoom mullet? (Camera-ready at front and sides, a disaster in the rear.) In moments of locked-down boredom do you engage in curtain-twitching? (Spying on neighbors, dog-walkers, or other passers-by.)

Another linguist, the Englishman Tony Thorne, is compiling a more comprehensive list of terms from #coronaspeak. He seems to be proceeding judiciously, waiting for evidence in the media that a term has taken hold before adding it to his collection. From Thorne’s list we learn the likely designation for the generation to be born after December 2020 — the coronials — and the proper term for clothing selected for display above the waist only, suitable for Zooms: upperwear.

According to our Australian linguists, “{S}cientists have recently found {that} learning new words can stimulate exactly those same pleasure circuits in our brain as sex, gambling, drugs, and eating.” Word.