Separated by a Common Language

I assume public health officials wouldn't say "quarantine" when talking about the general situation, because they're used to using it in the literal sense (and because it's important to distinguish being quarantined, as you are now, from merely being isolated/locked down).

Which makes me wonder if the reason it's being used so much more in the US than everywhere else is because everywhere else, the public health officials are leading the national conversation about COVID (and only using the word "quarantine" in the correct, literal sense), but in the US, they've mostly been sidelined, leaving the rest of us to misuse their terminology.

Here in the UK, I was happy to use "lockdown" to refer to the first ... what was it, a month? When virtually everything was shut down and everyone was under orders to stay indoors except for the most necessary reasons.

Since the restrictions began to be relaxed, I prefer to say "quarantine". It suggests that things aren't back to normal, there are still restrictions, but people are allowed to venture out and do more things. So it's not really a quarantine at all! But definitely not a lockdown.

I (an American) agree that 'quarantine' is probably the most used of the three choices (I think mostly at least because it implies a medical restriction rather than martial law), but the more common phrase would be something like "Stay at home order (at least in my state)." Finding a truly national term for this will be difficult in the US because the response has been led by state and local governments (and hence the predicament we are in) rather than that by the federal government.

Also to expound upon my previous statement, I'd tend to use 'quarantine' as a mandate to a specific person (for example if they tested positive or had been exposed), but the more general population shutdown was the "stay at home order." - I can even use the phrase for late March - early May as "during the stay at home order."

I was expecting you to say 'not by a long chalk', which is another British variant.

Here in the UK we felt the early shutting-down in China was draconian - even though it was effective, as we saw. Things got a bit more serious in early March when elderly (70+!) and sick people were advised to self-isolate, and in Scotland gatherings of more than 500 were forbidden. On March 15th the self-isolation order was imposed for twelve weeks - taking us in England to mid-June, which seemed a very long way off. Suddenly, on March 23rd, we entered 'lockdown', which seemed to echo the Chinese system, allowing once-a-week expeditions for essential shopping.
I heard someone refer to the intervening week (15-23 March) as 'herd immunity week'; unfortunately the infection rate soared and we were told that the NHS might be overwhelmed, hence the move into lockdown.

"AusE during iso (which follows a general trend for clipping in informal Australian English) might be common in speech, but since the sources here are news-related, they have only a handful of during iso and about 80 times more during isolation."

Lynne: I suppose clipping will always be less common in newspapers (online or otherwise) than in informal speech, but I thought I'd mention that clipping has been in vogue in the US off and on for the last quarter century at least. I recall a colleague at a job I had in the early '90s using the clipped "cazh" to mean "casual", and during the last year I've seen and heard instances of "deets" (short for "details", though not by much) and more recently, "inspo" (short for "inspiration"). Then there's "cray" and "cray-cray" for "crazy", with "cray-cray" making it clear that this is less a matter of clipping than it is of coming up with what would ordinarily be called diminutives. Speaking of which, in college I had a Russian girlfriend who came up with Russian diminutives for my own diminutive, Dick -- and these, too, seemed to be rather deliberately longer than need be. Examples I can recall are Dickooshka (sometimes shortened to the less effusive Dickoosh) and Dickoolinka.

Congratulations on your grant! I do hope you will be able to continue blogging about the "little words" - I have noticed that a Dutch friend, who speaks almost perfect English, does trip up on prepositions, referring, for instance, to "Hildegard from Bingen" rather than "Of Bingen".

As far as I can tell, we in the UK had a period of lockdown - which may or may not be reimposed if we see a spike in cases in our particular area - but those who have been exposed to the illness (or who are at a higher risk than the general population of having been so exposed) are required to quarantine themselves. Two slightly different things!

As an ESL teacher, the small words were the hardest to teach/explain. I corrected a non-native English speaker for saying "taking breakfast" instead of "having breakfast" because I thought he was translating directly from Spanish (tomar desayuno) then discovered that this is what IE (and perhaps BrE?) uses. Prepositions are nightmares as it varies even within the same region (standing on line vs. standing in line in New York State). I'm looking forward to your blogs.

BrE. Personally, I haven’t heard quarantine used much n the U.K. at all, even in tv news reports, except perhaps with reference to the terminology used in other countries. I tend to think of quarantine as a bit stronger than lockdown or self-isolation, which I hear at least as much as isolation on its ow. Quarantine conjures up visions of enforcement, with guards on the door, possibly armed.

Lockdown doesn’t make me think of jail so much as military establishments. In Stargate SG1, the base unde Cheyenne Mountain was life vied down every other episode, and it happens reasonably often in NCIS. Yes, I watch FAR too much American tv.

Sorry. Life vied down should be locked down, and there are other typos as well. Sometimes spellchecker goes a bit crazy.

I recently contacted Lynne by e-mail, to point out that the listed archives only went back to Nov. 2006, even although I could go further back than that via links in some of the posts. She got her “web guy” to sort things out, and I am now really enjoying the posts that I had missed, gong right back to the very earliest days of the blog. Sincere thanks to a very consistent derate hostess.

I’m SURE that “consistent derate” read “considerate” before I hit publish.

This is a digression. I'm an older speaker of BrEnglish, but I've never encountered the word 'oracy' before this morning. I had to follow your link to find out what it meant.

However, I suspect that part of the reason why (quoting AA Gill) "When Americans talk, they talk with ease and confidence. They seem more comfortable in their own mouths than the English do." isn't so much about 'oracy' as because from outside, it always appears that a lot more USians are extroverts compared with us.

I'm afraid the 'ease and confidence' doesn't always coincide with expressive competence. US media personalities, film people etc. being interviewed seem to be even happier opening their mouths and talking poorly expressed drivel about themselves than our native ones are - and many of the latter are pretty bad.

I'm really looking forward to "Small Words"! I didn't think much about them at all until I started teaching English in Japan, and was asked to explain, clearly, concisely, and precisely, just when one used "a" vs "the". And I began to think, "Man, you could write a book on 'the' alone."

Living in California, I only ever hear and say "lockdown" for the general restrictions. "Quarantine" has a more specialized meaning: restrictions placed upon people upon arrival in an new area.

Very surprised to see the corpus results indicating otherwise.

I have taken the online Contact Tracing course sponsored by John Hopkins. There IS a technical definition of Isolation and Quarantine.

"Isolation" is used on those who are known or clearly suspected (symptomatic but can't be tested, reason to doubt a negative test) of being infected.

"Quarantine" is used for those who may have been exposed to the disease but so far are not considered to actually be infected.

The other terms have less agreement. In my experience some people are using the term quarantine tongue firmly in cheek.

If you're looking at New Zealand, there was a lot of use of the word "bubble" in the messaging about the isolation/lockdown process. The idea being that everybody should be in their own little group of people, and the bubbles shouldn't mix. A bubble was generally one household, but might include the occasional extra people, for example one of my relatives included their elderly neighbours in theirs, and did all necessary shopping for them.

Anyway, I noticed that at least some of my NZ relatives and acquaintances were using "the bubble(s)" as a term for the lock down itself, at least for a while.

Quarantine was reserved for official, mandated and sometimes guarded periods after entering the country or having contact with known cases.

The second figure link is broken in the oracy article you link to. Couldn't see an easy way to flash it there so commenting here

As an Aussie, I'm surprised to see isolation/iso is more popular than lockdown. "Lockdown restrictions" is the official term for the government health directives asking everyone to stay home and socially distance, and I pretty much only hear people use lockdown in speech (occasionally someone will call it quarantine). I've hardly heard the term isolation at all - it is usually only used to refer to the 2 week isolation/quarantine period people exposed to COVID have to undergo.