Abstract
Abstract From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments, health agencies, public institutions and the media around the world have made use of metaphors to talk about the virus, its effects and the measures needed to reduce its spread. Dominant among these metaphors have been war metaphors (e.g. battles, front lines, combat), which present the virus as an enemy that needs to be fought and beaten. These metaphors have attracted an unprecedented amount of criticism from diverse social agents, for a variety of reasons. In reaction, #ReframeCovid was born as an open, collaborative and non-prescriptive initiative to collect alternatives to war metaphors for COVID-19 in any language, and to (critically) reflect on the use of figurative language about the virus, its impact and the measures taken in response. The paper summarises the background, aims, development and main outcomes to date of the initiative, and launches a call for scholars within the metaphor community to feed into and use the #ReframeCovid collection in their own basic and applied research projects.
Highlights
Nous sommes en guerre, en guerre sanitaire, certes: nous ne luttons ni contre une armée, ni contre une autre nation
Full statement available at https://bit.ly/COVIDMorrison. This brief overview of the discursive inauguration of the COVID-19 emergency underscores the crucial role of metaphor in talking about, and making sense of, complex and unprecedented events such as the extremely rapid outbreak of a global pandemic
As will be shown below, other metaphorical frames arose as well in early discourses on COVID-19 in Europe to refer to the spread of the virus and the measures taken in response to it
Summary
En guerre sanitaire, certes: nous ne luttons ni contre une armée, ni contre une autre nation. This brief overview of the discursive inauguration of the COVID-19 emergency underscores the crucial role of metaphor in talking about, and making sense of, complex and unprecedented events such as the extremely rapid outbreak of a global pandemic. War metaphors in particular have attracted an unprecedented amount of criticism from diverse social agents (linguists, historians, politicians, healthcare workers, commentators and citizens), for a variety of reasons that we will explain in this paper (see Section 2) Within this context, #ReframeCovid was born as an open, collaborative and non-prescriptive initiative to collect alternatives to war metaphors for COVID-19 in any language, and to (critically) reflect on the use of figurative language to frame high-impact, multi-faceted events such as the coronavirus pandemic. Social impact it has had so far, the use of #ReframeCovid data for research purposes, and issues of open-science policy
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