New York City, we are continually told, is now the \u201cepicenter\u201d of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Italy is the world\u2019s \u201cepicenter.” This term is used all the time in the news and was recently deployed by our mayor here in NYC.<\/p>\n
I’m following up on a February 15 Language Log<\/i> post<\/a> by Mark Liberman about why this term is being used in this way. Rather than asking why<\/i> people are using the term, I\u2019m going to discuss how this word influences our thinking. \u201cEpicenter\u201d leads us to think about the current global pandemic in some unhelpful ways. Although less exciting, simply saying something like \u201cNew York City has the worst outbreak\u201d would actually improve our conceptual understanding of this crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cEpicenter\u201d (on the center) literally means the point on the surface of the earth nearest to the focus of a (below-ground) earthquake. It can be used figuratively \u2014 Sam did not keep the apartment very tidy; Upon entering the kitchen, we found that it was the epicenter<\/i> \u2014 but there\u2019s only the one literal meaning.<\/p>\n One effect of the term is a sort of morphological pun: There\u2019s a COVID-19 \u201cepi-center\u201d because this is an \u201cepi-demic,\u201d a disease which is \u201con the people.\u201d But on March 11, the World Health Organization said that COVID-19 is worse than an epidemic, it\u2019s a pandemic.<\/a> Indeed, it is a global pandemic,<\/a> spreading everywhere. So what might have been a useful pun back in February is now an understatement.<\/p>\n Beyond that, \u201cepicenter\u201d is metaphorical in the sense of directing us to a particular conceptual metaphor (see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson\u2019s Metaphors We Live By,<\/i> 1980, and Lakoff\u2019s article \u201cThe Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,\u201d 1993). This sort of metaphor is not just a rhetorical figure or flourish, not a surface feature of language like the \u201cepi-\u201d pun. It is a fundamental way of understanding a target domain (the pandemic) in terms of a source domain (an earthquake).<\/p>\n To give this complex metaphorical mapping a name, we can call it A HEALTH DISASTER IS A SEISMOLOGICAL DISASTER or more simply A PANDEMIC IS AN EARTHQUAKE. But these are just names; we’d need to explore what is being mapped from our earthquake-schema to our pandemic-schema to really think about what\u2019s going on there.<\/p>\n I will note that this metaphor usefully emphasizes some things about the pandemic: its unexpected onset, the extensive devastation, and the cost to human life. While such mappings are always incomplete, if we try to make a more extensive mapping, we can find ourselves more confused than helped.<\/p>\n Earthquakes are localized to a certain place (unlike a global pandemic) and they occur during a short period of time (unlike a global pandemic). So the metaphor incorrectly suggests that our current disaster is happening once, in one place, and thus we will be able to clean up from this localized, short-term event with appropriate disaster relief.<\/p>\n The most critical aspect of our current crisis is not part of the earthquake metaphor at all. There is no entailment or suggestion from the earthquake metaphor that we are dealing with something that can be transmitted or is communicable. Instead of rallying to an earthquake meeting point, we now need to remain apart from each other to slow the spread of disease.<\/p>\n I\u2019d going to go even deeper in thinking about the \u201cepicenter\u201d concept. Why does a global pandemic (a disease affecting \u201call the people\u201d) have any sort of center at all?<\/p>\n