CBC Radio’s The Sunday Magazine is a lively, wide-ranging mix of topical long-form conversations, engaging ideas and more. Each week, host Piya Chattopadhyay takes time for deep exploration, but also makes space for surprise, delight and fun.
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In the final installment of our ongoing language segment Word Processing for this year, we get meta by looking at how we processed 2020 through language. Even dictionary writers didn’t hesitate to use “unprecedented” to describe the speed and degree to which our language changed to keep pace with the global health crisis. Piya Chattopadhyay speaks with linguist Lynne Murphy about the new words we coined, the old and specialized words that formed the new vocabulary needed to protect one another, and how to capture a time in words.