The Usage and Abusage of Lockdown

Lockdown. The clock ticks. Folks are stocked up on gak n' ganja and hoarding bog rolls in the larder. The message might be mixed from Big BoJo but the word 'lockdown' spells it out in B&W to We The Plebs. You are under mass quarantine. No need for stone walls and iron bars, Citizen Sicko. Just 'hunker down' and binge watch Netflix. You are confined to quarters. Until further notice. 

It's a global health crisis. Fair enough. But is lockdown the best word to whip us armchair epidemiolgists (I DUN ME REE-SEARCH!) into weeks and months of obedient hibernation? And why did the A-Z of nation states choose that noun? Its connotations are offensive because it's applied to the confinement of prisoners, not free people living in a free country. I associate 'lockdown' with doing bird in Kansas, NOT life in the UK. Jails and prisons get locked down, even American schoolchildren, but not the rest of us. Was it's implicit assumption that "we", the great unwashed were, and are, guilty for catching a virus? Discuss. You may use your own arguments...

"Lockdown" is relatively new fangled. An American prison term first logged by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1973. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) only added the noun in 2007. Now it's been revised for the now. According to the Merriam-Webster, lockdown is "a temporary condition imposed by government authority in which people are required to stay in their homes and refrain from or limit activities outside the home involving public contact." In the OED, it's a "term that covers measures placed on society to restrict movement and access to services."  Self-isolation. Social distancing. WFH. PPE. Still in gainful employment, the lexicographers have been very busy of late adding new Covid-19 related terms to the dictionary. 

There aren't many bores in the MSM bitching on the noun but the 'troublesome scribbler' and broadcaster Peter Hitchens is one of them. Christopher's right-wing brother went Sunday morning bonkers in the Daily Mail about the 'repulsive word' during the first U.K. lockdown in 2020. "We have become muzzled, mouthless, voicless, humiliated, regimented prisoners, shuffling about at the command of others..." Does Hitch's bonkers bruv mean us? He surely does! 

If the powers-that-be had not used the word 'lockdown', employing a more amorphous term, would people think and act differently? Hmmm. Perhaps not. It's like 'Global Warming', an abject failure of a term. Too cosy. Not ominous enough. How about 'Global Meltdown'? No. That's reserved for the financial markets, not the climate or the plebs. Lockdown it is. Lockdown it must be. 

Lockdown. Not curfew, quarantine (too many syllables?) "hunker down" or "stay at home order". Bit repulsive. Bit draconian. Bit strict. It's dodgy. Dicey. Dubious. But is "lockdown" the best and worst of nouns to whip us thick skulled Brits into obedient hibernation? The terminology used to corral the masses is spotty in the US of A. In Atlanta, Georgia, where I am, it's "shelter in place". But, up north in le Brooklyn, the natives call it "quarantine" (despite the queasy number of syllables). But forget the public health necessity of restricted living and tough by-laws, language has significant connotations and "lockdown" is a dodgy word to come into everyday parlance. It's a dangerous Americanism, one that even us Americans are wary of using in the land of mass incarceration, police brutality and civil unrest.  Why did they ever use that word in the UK? Tut-tut!  

What now? How long will it take to validate the usage and abusage of lockdown less? Perhaps like Winston Smith in 1984, I should learn to love it the way that he grew to love Big Brother. Fat chance. Then again, what's in a word, let alone a noun? Here's to another happy lockdown. It can't go on forever. It might even be over by Christmas (Ed. Note: didn't they say the same in 2020?) 

And we are still free. Until further notice.