Covid vocabulary 🏥

[Amandine]

Many new words related to the virus have become part of our daily vocabulary lately !
Germany and Spain use the word “corona” to talk about this new virus but the French use the term “covid” instead.
Nevertheless, you may have noticed that journalists (and people in general) use two different articles: LE covid and LA covid, it’s a rather exceptional situation for linguistics!
At the beginning of the pandemic, people spontaneously used the masculine article “le” (probably because “virus” is a masculine word in French) but some time later… the Académie française declared that the article to be used should be feminine since “covid (coronavirus disease)” is translated by “la maladie du coronavirus” in French, “maladie” is feminine so > la covid!

Here is a very serious article that explains this in more detail !

Now the French are a bit lost between “le covid” (more widespread) and “la covid” (more correct)

And you, what do you think?
Avez-vous appris d’autres mots liés à la pandémie ?

[Leocadie]

True! That was such a discussion, in France! I stayed by “le”, because I was already used to say it this way .
Also very interesting: the word “confinement” (Lockdown). Before the pandemic, this word was only used in very specific fields such as sciences. Now everybody says it at least 10 times a day ! And we created new words out of it, like “déconfiner” and “reconfiner”… Can you guess the meaning ? French can sometimes be very simple !