Dear Santa, it’s that time of the year, but then this isn’t like any other year. As Xmas comes riding Pandemic season, that spells more woe than mistletoe and more things glum than cakes rum ‘n’ plum, hope you’ll understand if the Wishlist sounds Pandemic fixated.
To script a wishlist that’s non-Covid centric would be like Edvard Munch painting his fabled self-portrait with nary a shade of the Spanish Flu he survived.
Assuming, dear Santa, that you’re also in #WorkFromHome mode, here’s keeping scrolling down Wishlist 2020 short ‘n’ tweet:
Of Words’ Worth & Wishlists
Dear Santa, since we Tweeple are suffering from not only overexposure to sanitisers but also another overdose – Pandemic Vocabulary Fatigue – for 2021, could you please gift us lingo-ism that’s better or battier?
In Pandemic year-end, when Oxford English Dictionary seems suffering from a strange disorder, being at a ‘loss for words’, figuratively as much as literally, to name one “word of the year”, The New York Times has played it ‘safe’ and smart. It’s scripted a Short List of 20 phrases that defined Season 2020. From ‘blursday’ and ‘doomscrolling’ to ‘flatten the curve’ and ‘contact tracing’, making it to the list is all such sundry hashtag-ism hurled at us by Tamasha TV or Twitterverse, for better or adverse.
Dear Santa, could you beat Shashi Tharoor at it and be the first to gift us a farrago of fancier catchphrase-ism for 2021?
{{/usCountry}}Dear Santa, could you beat Shashi Tharoor at it and be the first to gift us a farrago of fancier catchphrase-ism for 2021?
{{/usCountry}}Or, if #WFH has made you lost ‘n’ lazy like most of us, could you simply tweak 2020’s vocabulary to make it battier if not better?
F(l)atten the Curve: So sick are our cochlear compartments of being fed on this 2020 catchphrase that, dear Santa, could you gift its tweaked version – Fatten the Curve?
Hopefully, this ‘Fatten the Curve’ narrative would drive ‘n’ define fattening of pay-packet curves or employment curves in 2021. As much as denoting the fiscal curve, #FattenTheCurve hashtagism could also hopefully herald fattening of the follicular curve on the balding pates of Lamba jis, Lally jis & Co.
New (Ab)Normal: Again, so fatigued are we Twitterati at this catchphrase-ism called #NewNormal that, dear Santa, could you gift us tweaked newness – #NewAbnormal?
‘New Abnormal’ could be a Godsend (or Santa-send) to describe our Pandemic-bestowed battiness better – such as dashing into the apartment or Mall lift with lightning speed one minute and darting out the next second, faster than an AK-47 bullet, upon seeing the strength of lift boarders touching a social distance-defying number of four or more.
#NewAbnormal could also be more befitting for Pandemic’s paranoid quirkiness, such as Lockdown’s Lollitas & Co imagining themselves suffering ‘fatal’ breathlessness every time that jogger of a neighbour – drop-dead dashing dandy Khullar Junior or Khanna Junior – takes the breath away by breezing past few breaths away minus a mask, waddling like wannabe Usain Bolt.
The curious case of “Will You Be My Quarantini?”
Of Maskne & Meet
In a Corona-scape that also spawned cosmetic catchphrase-ism called ‘Maskne’ (mask-induced acne), dear Santa, could you gift masks to camouflage midlife blues, or at least midlife clues. Eyebrows or nostrils that betray more grey than Trump’s grey cells or wrinkles that’re erupting faster than the rash of OTT flicks.
Dear Santa, since we’re pretty fatigued by Coronascape’s crap and many an app – Arogya Setu to Google Meet – could you please gift us life beyond Lockdown’s Living Room called Zoom?
The curious case of more than Meet (s) the eye.