“I’ve been waiting for a book like this to come along, and Wayne got there first.”
—Douglas Coupland
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I began keeping track of new words and expressions as they appeared in the media and in our everyday speech, and my book Pandexicon is an arrangement of 73 essays based on those words and phrases. The entries range from “Before Times” to “After Times”, and from “coronavirus” and “quarantine” to “endemicity.” They form not only a kind of dictionary of the way we talk about Covid, but also build to a history of our common experience of the pandemic.
“Pandexicon would be our first real monument to the Covid-19 years — and erudite work of memory that brings together language, history and data.”
—J.B. MacKinnon