10 ways to tackle coronavocab: #9 Work

The world of work has inevitably changed hugely over the past few months for many people and those changes have thrown up both completely new language and a spike in frequency of words and phrases that students may not have encountered before.

Which vocabulary you choose to deal with and how will, as ever, depend largely on your students' context, their interests and experiences. Many adult learners, on both General English and Business English courses, will have first-hand experience of the impacts the pandemic has had on their own working lives. Whether they've suddenly had to work from home, whether they've been furloughed or whether they're tentatively getting back to work and having to comply with new restrictions, they'll have stories to tell.

Some students (of Business English or EAP students studying business, economics, etc.) may have a wider take on how the pandemic's affected the economy as a whole or particular industries – a great opportunity not only to delve into the new vocab here (furlough, hibernate, bounce back) but to revise other relevant language too – there's lots of talk currently about the on-going effects on sectors like retail, hospitality and tourism, for example, will staff be laid off or made redundant when furloughing and other government support comes to an end?

Or with younger learners or those looking for a slightly lighter angle, there's lots of scope for exploring the more amusing side of remote working – has anyone experienced zoombombing or abandoned much of their usual workwear in favour of upperwear only? Has anyone experimented with Zoom backgrounds?

Some examples in context:

Surveys show that people are investing in their WFH setups even as reopening progresses.
Many employees are not in occupations that allow remote working.
Staff can work remotely but are allowed to travel into the office for essential work where social distancing is practised.
(noun) He has been on furlough since March but has now been asked to attend a redundancy consultation meeting with his employer.
(verb) In early March, the retailer said it would furlough around 130,000 employees nationwide.
Our engineers are classed as key workers and continuing to do their jobs to find and fix problems like this.
The team has taken the decision to hibernate the project until the pandemic has passed.
He has had weekly Zoom calls with the production staff.
We're all currently suffering from Zoom fatigue.
We are working in groups of four that are isolated. We fondly refer to these groups as quaranteams. 
I think our tops make great upperwear as you nail your Zoom meetings in the comfort of your home.
We are following all government regulations carefully.

Activities:

• There are plenty of discussion topics to use with Business English students which this vocab could prompt around how the lockdown has affected their own working life, their company, their industry or even their country's economy. Take a look at my last post about phrasal verbs with back to prompt a discussion about how learners think the economy or their sector will recover - will they bounce back or will they ease back slowly?
• What collocates with Zoom? Make sure you go beyond the buzzwords and explore with students the language we’re using to deal with the new realities of working remotely.

• There are plenty of memes around about the perils of working from home – is the cat your new co-worker? These could provide a fun starting point for a discussion. Or if you have students who are working or studying from home, get them to share photos of their workspace (or just a detail if a wide shot feels too intrusive) and describe some of the problems – along with Zoom fatigue, you could elicit other relevant phrases like too much screen time, ergonomics, distractions, etc. 

Photo credit: Peter Fullager and Felix

• Everyone loves a moan – has anyone experienced zoombombing or zoom fatigue? What other glitches and drawbacks have students experience on video calls (work or non-work) – a rich area for drawing out new vocab (the screen froze, accidentally unmuted my mic, backgrounds, interrruptions, etc.).

Hibernating

I've mostly been avoiding getting caught up in commenting on the language of the current coronavirus crisis, although I've enjoyed reading posts by the likes of Leo Selivan and Prof Susan Hunston on different aspects of what's going on linguistically. One new usage that does seem to have struck a chord with me though and which I couldn't resist investigating is hibernate.

There's been a lot of talk about businesses hibernating, i.e. stopping work temporarily and going into a kind of suspended animation, with workplaces closed and employees furloughed, keeping costs at a minimum and hoping to wake up and spring back to life when all this is over. The choice of the word hibernation piqued my interest on a couple of levels.

A natural pause

I think for most people, the idea of hibernation probably conjures up images of cute sleeping animals curled up safe and warm, waiting for spring. It's a safe, cosy sort of a word which suggests a natural pause.  

Photo by George Kendall on Unsplash

The only direct alternative I could come up with is mothball, which has much less pleasant connotations. If a business operation is mothballed, it makes you think of something sitting musty and unused (and so prone to moths) for a long, indefinite period of time, perhaps never to be reopened.

Shifting usage

A quick corpus search (using the Timestamped JSI web corpus) shows that up until the start of this year, the collocates of hibernate were overwhelming animal-related (bears, bats, hedgehogs and squirrels), apart from a few specific references to computers which can go into 'hibernation mode', a kind of standby. However, looking at the latest data for March and April 2020, a flurry of new collocates appear:

Businesses aren't just hibernating, they are closing down.

The industry won't be able to hibernate during the pandemic without government support.

To tackle the virus, the economy must hibernate.

These are, arguably, all fairly straightforward metaphorical uses though. What's really intrigued me is the new use of hibernate as a transitive verb:

The Australian Government are seeking to hibernate businesses so they can bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.

Spanish government "hibernates" economy to counter Covid-19

They really did do as much as they could to hibernate the economy.

the team has taken the decision to hibernate the project until the pandemic has passed

AirAsia Group is temporarily hibernating most of its fleet across the network in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There's quite a bit of parallel use of the noun hibernation, with some novel collocations there too:

our priority should be putting the global economy into controlled hibernation while quarantine measures are in place

It's why many car dealers are going into temporary hibernation

As cricket, along with the rest of sport, goes into enforced hibernation

with the Philippine economy put in forced hibernation

keep workers on the books for a hibernation period during the pandemic

The whole hibernation strategy is built to buy time for that recovery to happen

It'll be interesting to see which new words come into use when the global economy starts to wake up, scratch itself and emerge from hibernation. I suspect the metaphor may get extended.