An Era In Three Words
“During the pandemic” is such a strange thing to hear in casual conversation now. When people say it, it hits me in a new way: not as shock, exactly, but as a small crack in the ordinary.
The phrase moves so easily through a sentence. “During the pandemic, we started doing this.” “During the pandemic, that changed.” “During the pandemic, I stopped going there.” It sounds almost like “when we lived in that apartment” or “back before we had kids,” except it is naming something enormous. A global rupture. A public emergency. A private archive.
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The WHO later ended its global public health emergency status on May 5, 2023, and the U.S. federal public health emergency ended on May 11, 2023. Those are official dates, useful in the way official dates are useful. They give the event a frame. They do not explain why the phrase still feels so strange in the mouth.
The Words We Had To Learn
Part of the weirdness is how quickly language caught up. Merriam-Webster made a special dictionary update in March 2020 for terms like COVID-19, social distancing, contact tracing, and community spread, because suddenly those words were not specialized anymore. They were how people made dinner plans, canceled birthdays, understood school, measured risk, and tried to be decent to one another.
Now “during the pandemic” works like shorthand. It can hold boredom, grief, fear, relief, isolation, resentment, exhaustion, sourdough jokes, old group texts, masks in glove compartments, friendships that thinned out, and whole years that still do not behave like years.
What unsettles me is not only that we say it. It is that we say it casually. We fold it into errands and parenting stories and half-remembered explanations. The phrase has become normal because it had to. Language found a way to carry the unbearable without making us stop every time we touched it.
What The Sentence Carries
Maybe that is what everyday speech does after history passes through the house. It does not preserve the full weight. It gives us a handle.
Still, every now and then, I hear someone say “during the pandemic,” and the handle turns back into the door.
A strange phrase
Or, it should be
Every body says it
