People began searching increasingly for 'epidemic' in mid-January, and 'pandemic' in early February
, too, but for a specific reason: an American senator, Marco Rubio, tweeted a solecistic reference to “marshall law” on March 16th, leading to the spike in lookups People have been searching for more than just relatively rarified terms.
They have also recently been looking up things like, perhaps wondering whether forms like “cancelling” have one L or two. Perhaps more strikingly, there have been increases—hard to call them much more than blips, but visible in the data nonetheless—for words like. Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster says that it’s hard to know for sure why. But he reckons that when people are worried, the need for an abstract term to have a more specific, concrete meaning may seem more urgent. As with stockpiling food and toilet paper, it is as though people are trying to store up as much comprehensible information as they can. Desperate times, unusual measures.
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