Is it just me, or are the words popping up online a little confusing, lately?

I mean, what is “upperwear”, anyway?

I had heard of outerwear, underwear and even, overwear – but upperwear was an entirely new invention that found its way into one of my newsfeeds this week.

It turns out that the creative combination of “upper” and “wear” really means any type of respectable clothing worn from the waist up to look professional on a video conferencing call with colleagues or employers.

I guess whatever is worn from the waist down no longer matters very much nowadays.

Interestingly enough, the more I searched the internet, the more linguistic oddities kept surfacing.

The trend, and the speed with which these new words are trending on social media, is amazing to observe: instead of using paragraphs or sentences to describe their living conditions, many individuals are choosing to blend two words together to describe their feelings or their changes in lifestyle during these months of self-isolation.

Some of these “creombinations” are a display of hilarious linguistic comedy; others are nothing short of a confusing mishmash, a testament to the sweeping and unmanageable shifts in behaviour that have beset all of us, thanks to the unwelcome guest spreading chaos throughout the social fabric of the entire globe.

Here are some of the unexpected union of words that I’ve encountered so far:

• Doomscrolling/doomsurfing: A combination of “doom” and “scrolling” or “surfing”. This means constantly refreshing our feeds for the latest news about the pandemic
• Blursday: A combination of “blur” and “Thursday”. This means an unspecified day because of the lockdown’s disorienting effect on time
• Drivecation: A combination of “Drive” and “Vacation”. This means a vacation in an RV, parked in the driveway of a home.
• Coronacation: A combination of “Corona” and “Vacation. This means a vacation at home forced on people because of COVID-19
• Quaranteams: A combination of “quarantine” and “teams”. This means online teams created during a lockdown
• Quarantini: A combination of “quarantine” and “martini”. This means a martini or other alcoholic drink consumed at home to ease the pain of isolation
• Quaranbaking: A combination of “quarantine” and “baking”. This means the therapeutic act of baking (a lot) during a lockdown
• Spendemic: A combination of the words “spend” and “pandemic”. This means the increase in online shopping during the pandemic
• Infodemic: A combination of the words “information” and “pandemic”. This means an excessive amount of unconfirmed information about a crisis that spreads rapidly and uncontrollably which increases anxiety and public speculation
• Coronadose: A combination of “corona” and “overdose”. This means an overdose of bad news from consuming too much media while in lockdown
• Coronacoaster: A combination of “corona” and “rollercoaster”. This refers to a person’s wild mood swings while they are in lockdown: one minute the lockdown is heaven, the other the person is in tears because of the hell that they are living through
• Zoombombing: A combination of the words “Zoom” and “bombing”. This means when uninvited guests hijack a virtual meeting with offensive language or images (usually pornographic images)
• Zumping: A combination of “dumping” and “Zoom”. This refers to breaking up with a girlfriend or boyfriend over a video conferencing platform like Zoom.
• Goutbreak: A combination of “gout” and “outbreak”. This means when you fear that you’ve consumed so much beer, cheese, home-made cake and processed meat during a lockdown that pain and swelling set into your ankles or feet
• Iselation: A combination of “isolation” and “elation”. This means the secret, but very real joy a person experiences at not having had to go anywhere, speak to anyone, or do anything (not even change your clothes) for the past six weeks.
• Vapidemic: A combination of “Vapid” and “pandemic”. This means the outbreak of meaningless, tasteless and poorly-formulated opinionizing that always occurs in response to any new coronavirus development/statistic/forecast/press conference.
• Zoomongering: A combination of “Zoom” and “mongering”. This means ruining everyone’s spirits in an online meeting by telling them the latest predictions you’ve heard about how we’ll all be locked-down until 2028 at the earliest.

I wonder how many of these creative combinations will become new entries in the Oxford English Dictionary sometime in the not-too-distant future?  Time will tell.