Covid-Speak: How The Pandemic Entered Our Language and Changed Us Forever

Join Wayne Grady for an entertaining, informative look at how our everyday speech has been transformed by the disease that continues to ravage the world. 

Tuesday March 28th. 4:30pm, Teatro Santa Ana

“Deftly woven into a journal/timeline, [Pandexicon] takes us through two years of surrealism and limbo.”

~Margaret Atwood

Award-winning author Wayne Grady presents his hot-off-the-press book, Pandexicon, an exploration into how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives. Subtitled How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality, the book is arranged as a concise dictionary of 70 Covid-related words and phrases we now use in everyday speech. Using examples extracted from three years of media-watching, Grady riffs on familiar terms such as face mask, social distancing, and self-isolation that have taken on new meanings, and phrases such as flatten the curve, herd immunity, and long Covid that have become permanent fixtures in our social discourse. The pandemic, Grady argues, has entered our language as it has entered our lives, changing forever the way we relate to each other, and to ourselves.

Following a short introductory talk, Grady will engage in an on-stage conversation with Mark O’Neill, former CBC producer, now president of Amistad Canada. Copies of Pandexicon will be available for purchase. Proceeds from ticket sales and book sales will go to Biblioteca educational programs.

About Wayne Grady

Since the 1993 publication of his first book, The Dinosaur Project – about the hidden connections between the dinosaurs of China and North America –Wayne Grady has become one of Canada’s top science writers. In his 14 subsequent books of nonfiction, he explores such topics as global warming in the High Arctic, the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, New World vultures, the natural history of the Great Lakes, and the place of Homo sapiens in nature. He has received Canada’s Science in Society Award four times, as well as the U.S. Outdoor Book Award (for The Great Lakes) and the New York Public Library’s Best Book for Young Readers Award (for The World of the Coyote). Grady is also a celebrated translator and novelist: his novel Emancipation Day won the 2013 Amazon.ca First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Up From Freedom was widely acclaimed as a Best Book of 2018. He and his wife, author Merilyn Simonds, divide their time equally between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Kingston, Ontario.