Who is popular today?

It is not uncommon for a major event or a significant year to give us new words. D-Day, Watergate (and almost any other word you can think of followed by the word “gate”, most recently Golf) and “we all partied” are just three examples from home and abroad.
But it is most uncommon – or, dare we say it, unprecedented – for a year or an event to give us so many words that even the folk at the Oxford English Dictionary refuse to confer upon one of them the status of Word of the Year, as they did last December.
With so many of the new words directly affecting how we consume and how we live and how we spend, we thought we’d look at the top 40 that we would love to never hear again.
“Like no other…”
This phrase was attached to almost every single event in 2020 and some in 2021. The first Pandemic Paddy’s Day was one like no other, as was the first Easter, the first summer, the first Halloweeen, the first Christmas and the first New Year’s Eve. But we’ve circled back now and unless the powers-that-be want to update the phrase to read “like last year” it is probably wise to retire it along with “A different kind of…”. And while we probably can’t get rid of the word “unprecedented”, it would be lovely not to hear it for a while.
Meaningful
Remember when the word “meaningful” stood for good and sincere things? Now when most of us hear it, we hear the word “Christmas” immediately afterwards. It was meant so well but who knew the phrase “meaningful Christmas” would end up carrying such dread and despair? Had we not – understandably – craved that meaningful Christmas, then maybe we would have been spared the worst of the third wave of Covid-19 that followed in January.
Stubbornly high
For many years this phrase referred mainly to the unemployment figures – when we checked The Irish Times archive we saw that from the mid-1990s until the last few months it was almost exclusively used in that context. But since the start of 2021 it has come to mean Covid-19 numbers that have refused to dip much below 500 for weeks on end, something that has kept many businesses – and the rest of us – in a state of moth-balled despair.
Social distancing
This time last year we were getting used to keeping our distance from each other. In the early days most of us were practically hurling ourselves in front of fast-moving cars in order to stay apart from random others on footpaths. We have got much better at it, which is both a good and a terrible thing.
Pivot
Shops had to pivot to online when they were forced to close. Then they had to pivot to restricting the numbers allowed to shop in their stores and ensuring everyone sanitised their hands before walking through the doors. Then they had to pivot to click-and-collect and then they had to pivot back to exclusively online trading – and are now waiting to pivot back to click-and-collect next month. They have pivoted so much, it’s a wonder none of them have drilled themselves down to Australia by now.
New normal
Perhaps the most misleading pandemic phrase. It may all be new but there is nothing normal about the world today.
Click-and-collect
There was a time when retailers offered this as an add-on service to allow people to shop online and then swing by a physical shop to pick it up. It was almost an afterthought for most retailers. In the second lockdown, which kicked in last October, it became an essential lifeline for many. Then it was prohibited over concerns that it would get people moving more than they needed to. Shops will now have to wait weeks before they can open up this important means of survival, and some retailers have told us its reintroduction could see them boost their revenue by as much as 50 per cent.
Meal kit
Restaurants have been hit hard by the pandemic and many have responded by offering dine-at-home options. A lot of the meal kits out there are brilliant: you get the food, you whack it into the oven or on to the stove, and before you can say “bon appétit” you are stuffing your face with restaurant-quality food. Then there are others that are so complicated that they come with implements to arrange your dish and video guides. What these meal kits should really include is a Michelin-starred chef to help you put it on the plate.
Flattening the curve
In the first wave of the crisis all the talk was about slowing the spread of the virus to allow hospitals to manage an expected surge in numbers, and while that worked, we had no idea there would be so many follow-up curves coming down the tracks.
Close contact
Just over a year ago, a close contact would have been a good thing. Now it is something alarming; if someone tells you they are a close contact, you want to run away screaming.
R number
In the good old days only immunologists, epidemiologists and other -ologists had any notion what an reproduction number was and why it mattered. But now we all know about it. Is it above 1? Below it? Where are we now? We are also wearyingly familiar with phrases such as aerosols, droplets, community transmission and the rest. And the immunologists, epidemiologists and public health doctors are now household names.
Contactless delivery
Online shopping has surged over the past 12 months. Delivery companies have been run off their feet, and not only do they have to deliver more, they have to deliver it in a different way. Gone are the days they could simply knock at your door and hand you your parcel. Nowadays they must put on a mask, then ring your doorbell, leave the package on the stoop, step back and then wait for you to open the door to pick up your parcel.
Outdoor dining

Outdoor dining on Main street in Leixlip, Co Kildare, October 2020. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA Wire


This has become almost a prerequisite rather than a natty add-on if you want to run a restaurant in Ireland in 2021. Because of Covid we have seen tables plonked on streets where they would never have been in the past. Diners then willingly sit at them and eat their meals, wearing coats in the freezing cold. This summer al fresco dining is likely to be an even bigger deal than it was last year. Last week the Government announced plans to invest €17 million in upgrades for local authorities and businesses seeking to create “European-style” outdoor dining spaces. Businesses will be able to apply for grants of up to €4,000 each to invest in outdoor seating and other amenities under the scheme, while grants worth up to €200,000 will be available to local authorities for investment in weatherproofing and outdoor dining infrastructure. If they could just do something about the weather, we’d be sorted.
Non-essential
Back in the day there was just retail. Now we have essential retail and non-essential retail. Essential is basically food, medicine and a few other bits and pieces. The world of “essential” was widened after the first lockdown to include things such as hardware, but it is still pretty small. We have also had some bizarre moments of dispute, including the time Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise Damien English told the nation that children’s socks weren’t essential while a bottle of wine was. And we have seen some big retailers keen to shift stock deemed non-essential moving their clothes racks into the deli aisles of their supermarkets.
Variant
Just when we thought we were getting to the end of the long list of horrible words that have attached themselves to our everyday conversations with the determination of a spike protein, we keep getting new ones. Variant is up there with the worst of them. As if it wasn’t bad enough to have to worry about one type of Covid-19, we now have to worry about mutations that have come from Britain, South Africa and Brazil, to name just three. It means that no matter what happens in the weeks ahead, we will most likely be kept on edge.
Long Covid
Another reason we will have to worry into the future. The amount of people who are still suffering from symptoms of Covid-19 months after first contracting it is alarming and has given us a new phrase no one really wanted.
Green list
Ah remember the green list? It contained all the countries Irish people were allowed to travel to last summer. It replaced air corridors, which were going to do the same thing. It took weeks for the first green list to be unveiled. The first countries deemed safe for travel with “normal precautions” were Malta, Finland, Norway, Italy, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Slovakia, Greece, Greenland, Gibraltar, Monaco and San Marino. There are no airports in the last three countries, and the only way into them is through countries that were not on the green list, which made no sense at all. Then, almost as soon as it was published, Covid cases started to climb in most of the designated countries and within a few short weeks there were no green countries standing on the wall.
Vaccine passport

Vaccine passport. Photograph: iStock


We are not there yet but there is still a lot of talk of giving people who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 access to delights such as international travel. It is still too early to say how they might workd, as multiple options are being considered by the authorities here, at an EU level, and across the world. Health and technology groups internationally have been working to create a digital vaccination passport on the basis that governments, airlines and other businesses may soon insist on proof of vaccination.
Two metres

Keep your distance. Photograph: Crispin Rodwell


Ever since the early days of metrification, a metre was always something of an abstract concept to many of us. Today most of us can visualise a two-metre distance with laser-sharp acuity.
Contact tracing
Where did you go? Who did you meet? How long were you with them? Did you sneeze? While more and more efficient contact tracing over the past year might has brought us to a better place, the system hastily put in place to try and chart the spread of Covid-19 has been and remains under enormous pressure.
Herd immunity
We are a long way from that.
Test centre
Remember the days when these two words put together referred to other horrors, including the Leaving Cert, the NCT and driving tests? Good times.
Pfizer-BioNTech
Most of us had never heard of BioNTech, and the only reason many of us were aware of Pfizer was because it had an enormous operation in Cork and invented the “famous blue pill”. Now the words Pfizer-BioNtech trip off the tongue as lightly as Coca Cola or Sudocrem.
Oxford AstraZeneca
We loved these guys when they were starting out, but between all the broken promises on deliveries and the – unfounded, according to scientists – fears over clots and all the other jigs and reels, they have become the bad boys of the vaccine world. Having said that, we’d still crawl over glass if we were offered a jab – as long as it was our turn.
Unexpected shortfall
Up there with supply-chain issues and bottleneck as words and phrases to sadden the heart.
Scamdemic
You know the drill: Bill Gates, George Soros, China, the Illuminati, Joe Biden, the mainstream media in Ireland and a host of other shadowy figures came together to unleash a pretend virus on the world so they could make us all afraid, force us all to wear masks in order to dehumanise us, wreck the global economy and otherwise exert control before injecting us with microchips that will … um, we have no idea. While many of the conspiracy theories are simply wild beyond belief, there is still a growing number of people who believe Covid-19 is in some way a scam, a harmless illness that is no worse than the common cold. They are wrong.
Covidiot
A person who refuses to wear a mask or insists on breaching the public guidelines in the name of personal freedom and/or the right to drink cider with their mates by a river or in a park.
Maskne
Is there no end to the indignities? As if it wasn’t bad enough to live in fear of a horrible illness and have all our social outlets shut, retail closed and travel opportunities cut off – not to forget the terrible economic toll and the many job losses – we now get spots wearing the masks. Thanks for nothing, Covid.
WFH

Working from home. Photograph: iStock


While this acronym stands for Working From Home, it could also mean What Fresh Hell or What F**king Hope.
Bubble
While the idea of a social bubble is solid, it is still very sad that they are needed.
Zoom quiz
All the fun things people could do remotely stopped being fun for many of us a long, long time ago. What we wouldn’t give to be crammed into the Teacher’s Club taking part in a charity table quiz.
Covid stone
Well, it was a Covid stone in the first year of lockown, but we are now in the second phase and it could easily become the Covid stones.
Home-schooling
Some parents took to home-schooling with alacrity – at least for a couple of days early in the crisis – and resolved to teach their offspring Russian and origami while working full time from their couches. It wasn’t long before such ambitions were tempered and, when children managed half an hour’s schoolwork, everyone was delighted. At least in the first wave. In more recent times schools have been more on top of it, and it has not been uncommon to children spending hours on Zoom classes every day. It is miserable for the students, for the teachers and for the parents.
PPE
The panicked search for masks in the early days has turned into the omnipresence of the damned things. We know far too much about how they work than anyone outside of a hospital setting or dental surgery ever should.
Superspreader

Superspreader events. Photograph: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty


Can refer to a person – Donald Trump – or an event, such as a Donald Trump party.
5k
Used to be a run people did and then boasted about, or a goal people more accustomed to sitting on their couch had. Right now it is as far from our couch as we are allowed to travel, although this time next week we will be able to stretch it as far as 20km or within our county.
Wash your hands
In pre-Covid times too many people would have been content with running some cold water over their hands for a couple of seconds before wiping them dry on their jeans. But then everyone started washing their hands with the care of a heart surgeon heading into theatre, while the smell of hand sanitiser hangs on to every breeze.
Stay safe, stay sane
As annoying phrases go, this is up there with the worst of them.
Levels 1-5
How far you have climbed in the Masonic lodge or the number of levels you have advanced in your computer game of choice? Sadly no, it is the way we live today.
This too will pass
Not a phrase of Covid times but it is true all the same.