Bulletin No. 2, 2020

44 Chinese University Bulletin No.2, 2020 The Second Gentleman of Corona When the 81-year-old William Shakespeare from Warwickshire, England became the second person in the UK to get vaccinated, the Internet was quick to come up with puns on the Bard’s works from ‘The Taming of the Flu’ to Hamlet , where it is at long last decided that ‘’twas nobler in the mind to suffer the needle and antigens of outrageous fortune’. Unprecedented Popularity Alongside the outbreak of the pandemic is an explosion of the use of such words as ‘unprecedented’. Writing for Bloomberg , John Authers argues that the abuse of the word is more detrimental than a mere nuisance as it has provided ‘an (illegitimate) defense [to] companies or politicians with bad news to explain away, or good news to exaggerate’. Masculin ou Féminin? Authorities of languages where nouns are gendered, such as the Romance languages, have come to pin down the identities of various pandemic-related terms. For instance, the French Academy has ruled that the virus is masculine and the disease is feminine. Similarly, the Royal Spanish Academy has said that the disease is feminine. Meanwhile, the Florence-based Accademia della Crusca has found both masculine and feminine designations of the disease acceptable. While it also determined that it should be feminine, ‘it’s so widely referred to as masculine by now that it’s too late to correct it’. World through the Language Glass Le Covid-19 La Covid-19