Canadian Writers Abroad

Mark Sampson reviews Wayne Grady’s Pandexicon: How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality (Greystone Books, 2023)

On a Wednesday morning in September 2024, I was onsite at my day job – Wednesdays are typically our work-at-the-office day – and, over Microsoft Teams, reached out to a couple of coworker chums to ask if they wanted to meet up for a coffee klatsch. One of them was game, but the other announced that he was home sick, having tested positive for Covid-19. We wished him a speedy recovery, and then I indelicately added: “DON’T DRINK ANY BLEACH.”

As evidence that he is likely a wiser and more temperate writer than I am, Wayne Grady chose to exclude Donald Trump’s off-the-cuff Covid remedy from his very thorough and engaging new book, Pandexicon: How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality. Had Grady chosen to include it, Trump’s brainless suggestion would’ve landed in the chapter called “Vaccines and Miraculous Cures,” alongside other entries such as Hydroxychloroquine, Carvativir, and Ivermectin. But to even use the term “entries” is to mislead the reader into thinking that Pandexicon is a simple reference tool compiling the various terms, neologisms, and slang that arose during the pandemic. It is not. Rather, Grady has written a vigorous and linear narrative of Covid-19 through its terminologies. The writing, as the saying goes, reads fresh, even if it outlines a recent history that most of us already know.

The great strength of this book is the way it puts pandemic-related words and phrases into a broader etymological or cultural context. For example, in one chapter Grady dissects the problematic term “uptick” in relation to its origin with stock market tickers: the latter connotation is positive, referring to a slight rise in a company’s stock value; whereas “uptick” in Covid infection rates is, obviously, negative. In another instance, he takes the pandemic’s use of the term “social bubble ” and weaves it into a wider discussion of other bubbles – specifically the politically polarizing concept of “filter bubbles”:

The filter bubble phenomenon has been linked to Trump’s success in the 2016 presidential campaign, during which Russian hackers are believed to have flooded US voters with pro-Trump propaganda. In Barack Obama’s farewell speech, he warned that “a retreat into our own bubbles” could pose a “threat to democracy.”

Throughout Pandexicon, Grady remains very much on the side of science, health officials, and the common good, and shows no patience for disinformation and the many conspiracy theories that plagued our collective pandemic experience. I especially liked his take-down of the specious concept of herd immunity as it pertains to public health policy: “Isolating vulnerable people (in long-term care facilities, for example) in the hope of achieving herd immunity in the rest of the population is not immunizing the herd; it’s culling it.”

Yet, Grady also conducts a much-needed political balancing act between extreme views on either end of the Covid spectrum. He draws, for example, comparisons between anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers and those suffering from “coronaphobia” (an exaggerated fear of contracting Covid-19). He does a similar comparison between the terms “revenge travel” (people making up for tourism opportunities lost during lockdowns) and “cave syndrome” (an unwillingness to leave the comfort and safety of home, even after restrictions are lifted, which is related to a much more odious form of social isolation known in Japan as hikikomori, a complete disconnection from society and your social contacts). In each instance, Grady shows that irrationality and self-absorption are not limited to one side of the political divide or the other.

Pandexicon does contain the occasional misstep. In the entry on coronaphobia, the book discusses another fear, chronophobia, defined as a fear of time. I’m not sure “fear” is the best term to describe what lockdowns and other social-distancing measures have done to our relationship with time since March 2020. If I may be so bold, I’d like to offer an alternative term, chronodysphoria, a sense (however irrational) that, thanks to Covid-19, we have slipped out of step with the passage of hours and years, that time has essentially become meaningless. We can’t always judge how much time has passed between events the way we used to, thanks to lockdowns; we’re often startled by how much or how little time has occurred from one milestone to the next. I think this is a much more accurate way of describing the pandemic’s lingering effects on our psyche.

But overall, Pandexicon is a wonderful addition to the growing body of books about the pandemic. Grady keeps the personal anecdotes and perspectives to a minimum (so refreshing for a work of nonfiction these days) and instead attempts to capture Covid-19 in its totality through sheer journalistic rigor. His book accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to show how extreme or unprecedented experiences can alter our language, which in turn can alter our very thinking. Or, as he puts it himself: “If, as Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst has argued, language represents the taming of thought, then the use of a new word in a new way must represent a new thought, or a change in our old way of thinking.”

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Mark Sampson’s new novel, Lowfield, will be published by Now or Never Publishing in April 2025, which also published his short story collection, The Secrets Men Keep (2015). He is the author of seven other books, including the novels All the Animals on Earth (Wolsak &n Wynn, 2020) and The Slip (Dundurn Press, 2017), and the poetry collection Weathervane (Palimpsest, 2016). Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.
Mark Sampson photo: Ibtehaj Asif

Further

• Wayne Grady published Emancipation Day (2013), Bringing Back the Dodo (2006), and Up From Freedom (2018) with Penguin Random House Canada.
• As well as Pandexicon, Greystone Books published Grady’s Breakfast at the Exit Cafe (2011), The Great Lakes (2007), and Tree (2018, with David Suzuki and Robert Bateman).
• Read or listen to an excerpt of Wayne Grady’s The Good Father (Doubleday Canada 2021).
• Bruce Johnstone interviews Wayne Grady for TNQ.
• Read an excerpt of Mark Sampson’s All the Animals on Earth at Wolsak and Wynn.
• Some Covid nonfiction books: These Days Are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown, by Rebecca Rosenblum (with mentions of her husband Mark Sampson), Covid-19 by Jacalyn Duffin, MQP, 2022; Pandemic Spotlight by Ian Hanomansing, Douglas & McIntyre, 2021.
• Some Covid novels: Songs for the End of the World, by Saleema Nawaz; Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett; Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout; and the plague novels written just before Covid, including Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue (Spanish flu), and of course the dystopian novels of Emily St John Mandel.
• The Globe and Mail‘s “2020 Hindsight on COVID-19,” (March 11, 2025).