TIGER, LOUSE, COW, AND SO ON: ABOUT THE ANIMALISATION OF COVID-19

Abstract

"In spring 2020, the world was engulfed by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its aroused disease COVID-19 pandemic, bringing in a variety of changes (including new realities and hitherto unprecedented restrictions) and initially causing a scare in people with how unexpected, wide-spread, unpredictable, and threatening it was. Different languages use a lot of similar metaphors for COVID-19, WAR being the most popular, and war, by definition, also implies an enemy. The conceptual metaphor of an ENEMY is often made more specific through the use of ANIMAL metaphors – in other words, through animalisation. COVID-19 is portrayed as a formidable enemy by comparing it to dry-land, aquatic, aerial predators (predator, tiger, lion, wolf, snake, eagle, shark, and so on), also by accentuating its claws, bite, devouring, or running wild; it is also often described by a pesky, omnipresent enemy that is hard to beat but is not necessarily so dangerous by using metaphors of insects (mosquito, louse, tick, wasp, cockroach, and so on). In turn, the fact that COVID-19 as an enemy has been beaten, subdued is evident in the use of metaphors of various domestic animals (dog, horse, cow, goldfish), as well as rabbit. Many of the conceptual metaphors of ANIMALS reviewed here are similar across most of the languages; however, some of them are ambivalent (in European languages, tiger signifies COVID-19 as an enemy, while in Indian comic books show a tigress as the Superwoman’s sidekick in her fight against the coronavirus; in many languages, the snake stands for COVID-19 as such, while a graphic example from memes to depict COVID-19 in Jordanian social media websites shows a snake (the symbol of medicine; a vaccine) defeating a bat – the symbol of the coronavirus)."