G'day mate, how are you doing? Today, I am going to talk about how the most frequently used noun has evolved as a critical event occurs. According to the data from Oxford Corpus, the trendy noun media and/or people often use has dramatically changed every month since December 2019.
Prior to 2020, the word 'Coronavirus' has relatively rare outside scientific and medical arenas. The term 'COVID-19' was just coined in February 2020. We don't have any day we're not hearing this word on telly or the internet, which has become today's most dominated term for sure.
Before COVID-19, we were always hearing the words such as impeachment, Brexit and Climate. Please have a look at this table:
Interestingly, we have never seen this kind of dramatic change of trendy keywords. These three months are absolutely rare in Oxford English corpus history.
Before Dec 2019, none of these keywords had been rarely heard, but US President Donald Trump's impeachment case triggered this dramatic transformation of frequently used keywords, followed by Climate, Brexit and Coronavirus.
As many of you guys know, just till Jan 2020 Australia's bushfire was one of the most frequently used term in media. Everyday, people in Australia including myself had been petrified with encountering another conflagration at that time. Now that that fear had completely gone before the tiny epicentre of flu-like or Coronavirish fever triggered in Wuhan became widespread. And this has unexpectedly/unprecedentedly become today's earth-shaking event, which not many people wouldn't prognosticate.
Let's go back my main topic. So, the frequently used keywords have changed spectacularly over the last few months due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Yes, before Feb 2020, I'd been reading so many articles relating to Trump's impeachment case, Brexit, climate change, Iran and so on and so forth. But since Feb, I realised that the vast majority of what I've been flicking through on a daily basis are 'Coronavirus'-related articles. I almost forgot about any other past trendy topic. I reckon most of you should've been overwhelmed with too much news relating to COVID-19 now.
Finally, I just want to quote this file, which includes many collocations relating to COVID-19. It's great to learn such collocations as they are quite useful for boosting your speaking/writing skills such as blog, read-aloud and self-talk.
We can learn so many useful nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs from the COVID-19 keywords and collocations. Let's absorb all of them!
That's all for today, thank you for reading!!
Have a nice day! Cheers.