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A clearly written, must-read piece of work for anybody interested in
how a pandemic not only affected our lives but also our own language.
An invaluable resource to discover the power of metaphor in unveiling
human thinking and creativity in different types of public discourse
(health, political, and informational) and contexts (social media,
advertising).
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, The University of Zaragoza, Spain

With their book, Collins and Koller fill an important gap in the vast
literature about Covid-19. They provide readers with an original, criti-
cally thorough, and yet accessible, inquiry into the way language has
been used in communicating the pandemic, highlighting the impact it
generally has in the perception of science in society.
Massimiliano Demata, University of Turin, Italy

COVID-19 has prompted much scholarship in the fields of linguistics

and discourse analysis. But Viral Language is unique in that the authors
use multiple points of entry to investigate the way the pandemic is
represented in various types of public discourses. This book not only
provides a thorough appraisal of COVID-19 as discursive construct
and social experience, but also initiates the reader into numerous types
of linguistic analysis, from speech acts, transitivity and multimodality,
to metaphor and lexical innovation. A very valuable book for scholars
and students.
Fiona Rossette-Crake, Paris Nanterre University, France


VIRAL LANGUAGE

Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication

and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health
communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches
informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic
across a variety of public contexts. In doing so, they demonstrate how
experiences of health and illness can be shaped by political messaging,
scientific research, news articles and advertising.
Through a series of case studies of Covid-related texts, the authors
consider aspects of language instruction, information and innovation,
showcasing the breadth of topics that can be studied as part of health
communication. Furthermore, each case study provides practical guidance
on how to carry out investigations using social media texts, how to analyse
metaphor, how to track language innovation and how to work with text
and images.
Viral Language is critical reading for postgraduate and upper
undergraduate students of applied linguistics and health communication.

Luke C. Collins is a Senior Research Associate with the ESRC Centre for
Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, UK.

Veronika Koller is Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK.

VIRAL LANGUAGE
Analysing the Covid-19 Pandemic in
Public Discourse

Luke C. Collins and Veronika Koller

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | Red Diamond
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Luke C. Collins and Veronika Koller
The right of Luke C. Collins and Veronika Koller to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-75668-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-75666-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16345-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003163459
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
CONTENTS

List of figures  viii

List of tables  ix
List of abbreviations  xi
Acknowledgements  xii

1 Introduction  1

2 Health promotion and public engagement on Twitter  13

3 Politicians’ use of metaphor  42

4 Key features of scientific writing on Covid-19  71

5 Investigating ‘the science’ in news discourse  98

6 Language change in news on the web: Lexical innovation

in response to Covid-19  126

7 Advertising in the time of coronavirus  153

8 Concluding remarks  181

Index  195


FIGURES

2.1 Number of tweets for each profile over the course

of 2020  23
5.1 Distribution of participant roles according to publication  116
6.1 Relative frequency values for ‘covidiot’ by ten-day
intervals  137
7.1 Corona beer meme, 29 January 2020  155
7.2 Still from Stella Artois’s ‘Help a restaurant’ commercial 173


TABLES

2.1 Number of tweets for each profile for each month

of 2020 22
2.2 Frequency and percentage of tweets containing
advice-giving utterances 25
2.3 Frequency and percentage of tweets containing
images/videos, hyperlinks and hashtags 30
3.1 Semantic fields, source domains (with the number
of examples) and metaphoric expressions (word stems
indicated by an asterisk) 57
3.2 Most prominent semantic fields 59
4.1 Frequency and relative frequency (per million) values
for the most frequent items in three corpora 81
4.2 Most frequent 5-grams from three corpora 82
4.3 Keywords in the CORD-19 corpus 85
4.4 Concordance lines for ‘viral’ in CORD-19 86
4.5 Concordance lines for ‘viral’ in enTenTen20 87
4.6 Collocates for ‘virus’ in CORD-19 90
4.7 Collocates for ‘virus’ in enTenTen20 91
5.1 Three lines of meaning in the clause 106
5.2 Frequency of ‘the science’ and related terms in the
NOW corpus 109
5.3 U.K. news sources with the highest number of
occurrences of ‘the science’ 110
5.4 Frequency of ‘the science’ according to participant roles 114


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x Tables

5.5 Frequency of process types 118

7.1 Sales and financial performance of the world’s largest
beer companies during 2020 (sources: AB InBev, 2020;
Carlsberg Group, 2020; Heineken N.V., 2020) 154
7.2 Overview of the data 161
7.3 Extract from the Budweiser video transcript 162
ABBREVIATIONS

ADS The American Dialect Society

AoIR Association for Internet Researchers
API Application Programming Interface
BAAL The British Association for Applied Linguistics
BNC1994 The British National Corpus (1994)
CCSARP Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project
CDC The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
CLAWS Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System
CSR corporate social responsibility
DHSC The Department of Health and Social Care (U.K.)
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals
FDA U.S. Food and Drug Association
HHS The Department of Health and Human Services (U.S.)
MI mutual information
MIP metaphor identification procedure
MWUs multiword units
NHS National Health Service (U.K.)
OED Oxford English Dictionary
POS part of speech
SAGE U.K. Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies
STS science and technology studies
USAS UCREL Semantic Analysis System
WHO World Health Organization
wpm words per million


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Pernille Bogø Jørgensen, Gavin Brookes and Bernard

De Clerck for their helpful comments on the draft versions of individual
chapters.
Images taken from an advertising campaign from Stella Artois and repro-
duced with the kind permission of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev).


1
INTRODUCTION

1.1 The language of Covid-19

In this book, we are concerned with health and illness as universal human
conditions that can be studied in language. More specifically, we write
this in the midst of a global health crisis, which we position as our central
focus and as a way to demonstrate some of the many topics and concerns
that can be included in studies of health communication. The Covid-19
pandemic was confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO) on
11 March 2020, on the basis that the impact of a novel coronavirus had
transcended national boundaries and necessitated a “whole-of-society”
approach (WHO, 2020a). In a press briefing, the director general, Dr Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, demonstrated his keen awareness of the importance
of language, acknowledging the significance of the word ‘pandemic’ and its
potential for causing fear or, conversely, leading to complacency if misused.
Likewise, the WHO was particular in its adoption of an official name for
the virus, “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)”,
and for the disease it causes, “COVID-19” (as a form of coronavirus disease
identified in 2019). While both were official labelling terms, ‘Covid-19’ or
simply ‘Covid’ became more widely accepted. Recognising concerns about
the implied association of the name of the virus with the severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic (2002–2004), particularly since this
was also first detected in China, the WHO provided the following statement:

From a risk communications perspective, using the name SARS can have
unintended consequences in terms of creating unnecessary fear for some

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163459-1
2 Introduction

populations, especially in Asia which was worst affected by the SARS

outbreak in 2003.
For that reason and others, WHO has begun referring to the virus as
“the virus responsible for COVID-19” or “the COVID-19 virus” when
communicating with the public.
(WHO, 2020b)

The WHO’s concerns about the naming of the virus and “unintended conse-
quences” were arguably borne out in the hate speech and Sinophobic views
that were inflamed by then-President Donald Trump’s label of the “China/
Chinese Virus” in March 2020 (as discussed by Lee, 2021). Lee (2021)
argues that critical approaches informed by linguistic analysis can offer a
way to expose strategies of online abuse and that by understanding how
those originate and spread, we can better counteract them.
Similarly, there have been legitimate concerns about the spread of mis-
information and disinformation1 with respect to Covid-19 countermeas-
ures. In the context of a global pandemic, it is all the more important that
health communication is informed, accurate and timely. Receiving up-to-
date and accurate health information has been shown to be related to lower
reported levels of stress and anxiety (Wang et al., 2020), while belief in dis/
misinformation is negatively associated with protective behaviours (Hornik
et al., 2021). In February 2021, Professor Stephen Powis, the national medi-
cal director for NHS England, rebuked the (unproven) advice on coping
with ‘long Covid’ provided on the blog of Gwyneth Paltrow, an actor and
businesswoman, emphasising that “[l]ike the virus, misinformation carries
across borders and it mutates and it evolves” (Weaver, 2021). A Reuters
Institute report on the main types, sources and claims of Covid-19 dis/mis-
information found that the majority (88%) of instances appeared on social
media and that while false information from politicians, celebrities and other
prominent figures made up just 20% of instances, their content was highly
influential – accounting for 69% of engagement (i.e., likes, comments and
shares) (Brennan et al., 2020). The largest category of dis/misinformation
claims related to the actions or policies of public authorities (governments
and international bodies, such as the UN) (39%), demonstrating the signifi-
cance of having clear, accessible messages from institutional bodies. In fact,
the dissemination of information about the pandemic has demanded that
social media platforms update their guidance on combating dis/misinforma-
tion, and as early as March 2020, certain social media posts from Brazilian
president Jair Bolsonaro and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro were
removed from Facebook and Twitter, respectively, on this basis (BBC, 2020).
In addition to the need to prioritise information that ensures the public’s
well-being, increased monitoring and state-imposed restrictions are entangled
with testing rates and compliance on the part of the public. At the heart of
 Introduction 3

these relations is communication and the need to effectively convey what is

required in terms of restrictive behaviours; the value of relinquishing certain
citizen freedoms (e.g., the right to travel); and the significance of sharing
personal health information, by way of Covid test results. In England, the
announcement of 19 July 2021 as a ‘freedom day’ (U.K. Government, 2021)
marked the government abandoning legal restrictions and subsequently
relying upon individual citizens’ assessment of risk and responsibility for
‘living with Covid’. However, in order to exercise such judgement, the public
was still reliant upon the information and guidance they had been receiving
– principally from the government – through the media. Alternative sources
of information include national health services and scientific research, which
along with the media, demand literacy in what are specialised genres of
communication. This emphasises the significance of being able to access,
critically evaluate and understand the various messages related to Covid,
as well as the importance of constructing those messages in a clear and
coherent way.
We can learn important lessons about language and communication
from previous responses to large-scale health challenges; Powers (2008, p.
2) made the prescient observation that from a communications viewpoint,
the handling of the SARS pandemic “provides important lessons that can
better prepare us all for the much larger pandemic that many in the health
community are predicting will occur in the not-too-distant future”. The first
lesson is that “the way people communicate about a topic largely determines
how they are likely to understand the topic and behave toward it” (Powers,
2008, p. 2). In the case of SARS, the association with the handling of wild
animals forged by the Chinese media while it was still relatively contained
led many to believe they were not at risk if they did not indulge in this
‘unhealthy’ practice. Other studies in the volume The Social Construction
of SARS (Powers and Xiao, 2008) provide lessons about communicating
during a health crisis, with varying degrees of success. For example, Xiao
(2008) highlights that in adhering to a strictly scientific narrative of its
actions, the public officials in Hong Kong failed to give the public a ‘hero’
story to boost morale – the likes of which were seen in Singapore and China.
Indeed, Weber, Yang and Shien (2008) argue that tapping into a national
mythology of “triumph over adversity” helped the Singaporean government
to rebuild its flagging image. Hudson (2008) offers a more critical view of
Singapore’s ‘war on SARS’, in that the WAR metaphor did introduce fear,
heroes, victory and national pride but also obscured increased surveillance,
militarisation and authoritarianism. This example demonstrates the power
that metaphors have in shaping people’s understanding of complex and often
abstract concepts. However, rather than obscuring matters, researchers have
also found that metaphorical language can aid comprehension (Thibodeau
et al., 2017). Metaphor is multifunctional and pervasive in public discourse.
4 Introduction

Indeed, the label ‘coronavirus’ itself is based on the shape of the virus, which
appears like a ‘corona’ (in the stellar sense) – the Latin word for ‘crown’.
Furthermore, this is realised across languages, with the Chinese 冠状病毒
(Guānzhuàng bìngdú) more directly translating as ‘crown virus’.
Studies of the SARS pandemic have demonstrated the significance of
investigating localised responses to disease outbreaks, in order to draw
on the more immediate contexts in which health communication takes
place. There is already a body of research that has begun to document the
impact of Covid-19 and how it has been communicated and understood
across various contexts. There is clear evidence that the pandemic has had
a greater impact on some communities than on others. Lupton (2022, p.
37) offers a Marxist-based critique to highlight the social determinants of
health and healthcare, ultimately showing “how neoliberal and free market
capitalist systems have been called to account and disrupted by the COVID
crisis but have also operated to protect the privileged”. An important issue
contributing to this inequality is the availability of quality health information
in various languages; for instance, Chen (2020) has highlighted imbalances
in the language resources made available for minority indigenous language
communities in Taiwan, particularly those reliant on the tourism economy.
Meanwhile, Hua (2021) visually documents the signs that appeared in shop
windows following lockdown in the U.K., highlighting the “sensibility” of
hand-written signs appearing in English, compared with the informational,
printed signs appearing in other languages. The mode of communication
has also been shown to be significant, with Bai (2020) discussing Mongolian
fiddle stories in response to Covid-19 as a medium through which solidarity
and identity are reaffirmed. Music as a means of spreading information is
also at the centre of Abubakari et al.’s (2021) study on how Covid-19 health
protocols were communicated in rural northeast Ghana, while Zhang and
Zhao (2020) report how Chinese vloggers invite followers to co-construct
an emotional experience that brings together the global Chinese-speaking
community.
We can also see that other social factors have an influence on what aspects
of the pandemic are discussed. Investigating discussions of Covid-19 via the
social news aggregation platform Reddit, Aggarwal et al. (2020, p. 5) found
that men more often discussed economic and political issues, compared
with women, who focused more on social topics. Despite differences in
the amount and type of health information made available across various
languages and platforms, Covid-19 has precipitated rich language innovation
as communities have navigated the impacts of the pandemic in clinical,
social and professional contexts. Popular articles documenting the ‘language
of Covid-19’ attest to its productivity in English (Lawson, 2020), German
(Young-Powell, 2021), French (Lenuzza et al., 2021) and Spanish (Gutiérrez,
2020), for example, and research is beginning to show regional differences in
 Introduction 5

how these innovations impact everyday communication (such as in Pakistan;

see Ahmed and Islam, 2020). This suggests that while access to language
(i.e., as information) can restrict people’s experiences of global health issues,
equally people can create the linguistic and communicative resources they
require in order to express and make sense of those experiences.
It may seem that questions of health are fundamentally biological,
favouring a positivist theoretical approach in which there are objective
signifiers of well-being and illness (e.g., symptoms) that can be documented,
tested and verified through the physical body. In other words, there is an
appeal to thinking of ‘health’ and ‘illness’ as distinct realities, with one
precluding the other. However, there is increasing awareness that many such
biological ‘realities’ are more complicated than traditional categorisations
have prescribed and are, in fact, determined by socially, culturally and
historically situated ideas about what it means to be, for example, ‘female’
or ‘male’ (Sveinsdóttir, 2013). Burr (2015) cites the changing attitudes
towards excessive alcohol consumption as an example of behaviour that was
historically admonished and met with imprisonment in some cases, but more
recently – following temperance movements in nineteenth-century U.S. and
U.K., for example – has been understood in terms of addiction, for which
the appropriate responsive measure is therapy. In a social constructionist
approach, we “take a critical stance toward our taken-for-granted ways
of understanding the world and ourselves” and recognise that shared
knowledge is negotiated through daily interactions between people in the
course of social life (Burr, 2015, p. 3). It is on this basis that we here present
our investigations of the construction of public discourses on the Covid-19
pandemic – and responses to it – thus far. We talk about ‘viral language’
both as communications that have been generated in a historical moment
defined by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 as well as
in acknowledgement of the ways in which language and communicative
practices, ways of speaking and subsequently knowing are transmitted and
spread rapidly and widely, like viruses. We present our observations of data
collected during 2020, capturing the emergence and impact of Covid-19
in the lead-up to the earliest vaccination treatments. We offer details and
applications of a variety of linguistic approaches that readers can adopt in
the continued investigation of Covid-19 and wider exploration of health-
related issues.

1.2 Constructions of health in public discourses

The Covid-19 pandemic represents the latest iteration of large-scale disease
outbreaks, which, as Lupton (2022, p. 14) writes, “are always accompanied
by significant sociocultural and political disruptions and transformations”.
Furthermore, responses to such disruptions typically bring to the surface
6 Introduction

hidden, unacknowledged or long-established beliefs and practices (Lupton,

2022). Our approach to identifying and interrogating such beliefs and
practices is to investigate how they manifest in public discourses. Fairclough
(2013, p. 11) tells us that ‘discourses’ are “semiotic ways of constructing
aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) that can generally be
identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of
social actors”. In this way, we can examine semiotic resources – language,
images, sounds etc. – as having been produced by particular individuals or
groups in particular contexts, for particular audiences and communicative
purposes. Working to understand the use of such resources in context offers
insights into how they are chosen to achieve those purposes (successfully
or otherwise) and how they reflect the nature of the relationship between
the communicator and their audience. Any given communication, therefore,
can indicate interpersonal dynamics and structures, expressing aspects of
identity and exposing the often subtle enactment of power by institutions,
high-profile individuals or, conversely, the subversive power of ‘ordinary’
people (Fairclough, 2013, p. 15).
While a single instance of communication alone would not constitute
a discourse, discourses are formulated through the accumulation of the
numerous communications that occur in relation to any aspect of the world.
Discourses involve “patterns of belief and habitual actions as well as pat-
terns of language” (Johnstone, 2018, p. xviii), and these are typically co-
constructed by numerous participants, engaging in the reification of often
quite abstract concepts. In 2022, Musolff et al. (2022) published an edited
collection of Pandemic and Crisis Discourse, focusing on communica-
tions around Covid-19 and organising the compendium around discourses
of authority, crisis management, ‘war’ against the pandemic, discourses of
judgement and rivalry and, finally, the discourse of empathy and encour-
agement. Such discourses necessarily involve participants across a range of
social, professional and even political contexts. Those studies are comple-
mented by a collection of edited blog posts (Jones, 2021), which addition-
ally compare media representations in different countries, investigate both
public signage and multimodal creativity online, and discuss what meanings
are created by (not) wearing a face mask.
In studying public discourses in this book, we prioritise the mainstream
ideas that pervade wider society. Our approach is therefore not exhaustive of
the various points of view that might be found in more private discourses, or
held by minority groups. Nevertheless, by studying resources that are available
publicly, we include texts that are – in principle – accessible to anyone, and we
can also make observations of whose voices are made public, i.e., which beliefs
and practices are amplified on the basis of the power held by those who pro-
mote them. Our case studies explore texts produced by politicians, scientific
 Introduction 7

researchers, journalists and companies, scrutinising the representations they

offer of various aspects of health, as manifested in their representations of the
Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, while the pandemic has prompted many
to adopt and adapt to new forms of communication, our studies involve rela-
tively well-established modes, in the form of research and news articles, adver-
tising materials and Twitter posts. We maintain that the approaches we have
introduced and outlined can be adapted to the study of alternative and emerg-
ing modes; we encourage readers to test that proposition.
Analyses informed by linguistic theory can provide the vocabulary and
the perspectives for making precise observations of how patterns of belief
and habitual actions are evidenced in language use. In the introduction to
their edited collection, Musolff et al. (2022, p. 1) provide a view of the
breadth of ways in which Covid-19 can be studied as a question of language,
writing that:

The public debates about the pandemic have articulated a vast range of
critical reflections on communication: agenda-setting, categorization
and metaphorization of the illness and the administrative responses to it,
perceived ‘performances’ of specific governments and administrations in
dealing with it, as well as empathy (and lack of it) in the communication
of doctors, carers, patients, patients’ relatives, public services, and further
social institutions involved in dealing with the crisis.

Contributions to the collection on Pandemic and Crisis Discourse include

explorations of press conferences, webpages, children’s books, political
speeches and news coverage, to name a few. Researchers have shown how
direct and indirect references to Covid-19 have become part of a linguistic
landscape that resides in public spaces such as shops and restaurants on a
northwest London high street (Hua, 2021) and on billboards and window
displays in Germany (Mundt and Polzenhagen, 2022). Such work draws on
a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, demonstrating that
attempts to document, understand and respond to the pandemic benefit
from bringing together different expertise and ways of thinking.
In this book, we similarly refer to the Covid-19 pandemic as a wider case
study to demonstrate a range of linguistic approaches that can be repurposed
and applied to study different aspects of health communication. As such, we
aim to equip readers with the concepts, vocabulary and knowledge of the
methodological procedures through which emerging health concerns can be
critically studied as forms of communication, which have implications for
how we define and interrogate health and illness as personal and collective
experiences.
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8 Introduction

1.3 Organisation of this book

The chapters of this book can be thought of in terms of addressing three
broad areas:

1) the instructional use of language, as it is used by governments discussing

Covid-19
2) informational discourses, as produced by scientists and popularised in
news reports
3) innovation in response to Covid-19, as businesses and other language
users adapt to the global pandemic.

We therefore attend to some of the different functions of language as well

as the human experience of health and illness, emphasising the need for
information and the organisation of large groups of people but also the
creativity that helps us to navigate challenging times (see also Pérez-Sobrino
et al., 2022).
Our first examination, in Chapter 2, focuses on the Twitter profiles of
state health departments in five different English-speaking countries, posit-
ing social media as an important resource in crisis communication. This
collection of timestamped messaging provides a record of the changing pri-
orities of each government, reflecting the different impacts of the Covid-19
pandemic in various parts of the world over the course of 2020. We intro-
duce analytical concepts from the field of pragmatics, namely speech acts
and politeness, in order to facilitate an investigation of advice-giving. Our
case study offers a practical demonstration of how to collect and analyse
social media data, and we discuss key ethical considerations for working
with this type of data. In our analysis, we consider the different strategies
for getting people to follow advice while maintaining good interpersonal
relationships, which we discuss in terms of directness. We demonstrate how
different degrees of directness are realised in particular linguistic features,
relating to grammatical mood and evaluative lexis, for instance.
In Chapter 3, we continue to focus on political discourse, investigating
ways that the JOURNEY metaphor is used by politicians to describe vari-
ous aspects of the pandemic and responsive measures. We introduce the
#ReframeCovid project, which brings together metaphoric expressions in
various languages and is available as a dataset that showcases the efforts
to translate different Covid-19 experiences into supposedly more familiar
scenarios. We discuss procedures for systematically identifying metaphors
and subsequently analysing them as a fundamental feature of wider health
discourses.
Chapter 4 marks a shift towards informational discourses, by looking at
scientific articles as a distinct register of English. The methodology discussed
 Introduction 9

and applied in this chapter comes from corpus linguistics, and we describe
a range of adaptable procedures that facilitate the rigorous investigation of
large datasets, with the aid of specially designed software tools. As such, we
provide a demonstration of how readers can explore their own collections
of health-related texts to determine what is characteristic about their form
and content. Through the identification of recurrent linguistic patterns, we
highlight some of the key features that distinguish scientific writing from
other types of communication and show what aspects of Covid-19 are
prioritised in scientific reporting.
In Chapter 5, we turn this focus around to consider how ‘the science’ itself
is discussed in a selection of U.K. news publications, particularly in relation
to how the government involves scientific research in policymaking. Our
methodological approach in this chapter is informed by systemic functional
linguistics (SFL) as the basis for critical discourse analysis, investigating
representations of ‘the science’ as an active participant in decision-making
related to social restrictions as a result of Covid-19. We establish the concepts
and procedures involved in conducting a transitivity analysis, of a way
of talking critically about representations of people (and objects) and the
actions they are ascribed in order to highlight the impact they are reported
as having. We find that there are many agents involved in the creation and
dissemination of ‘the science’, emphasising that scientific processes and
scientific research take place in particular socio-political contexts, which in
turn influence what ‘the science’ is.
As our attention shifts to language innovations, we review the literature
on lexical innovation and neologism in Chapter 6, documenting the creative
side of the way Covid-19 has been discussed in public discourses. We
outline established patterns for word formation and summarise the breadth
of vocabulary that was recorded in blogs and articles in the early part of
2020. We implement an approach that enables researchers to document such
changes, thereby offering a systematic way of capturing lexical innovation.
Using a corpus of news articles on the topic of Covid-19, we show that many
of the innovations associated with Covid-19 were short-lived, though there
were examples of existing terms being repurposed in relation to Covid-
related experiences. We also show that documenting terms that undergo
rapid changes in the frequency of use helps to capture shifting priorities in
the response to the pandemic. Furthermore, we consider the role of high-
profile individuals and the attention given to them by the media in bringing
about lexical change.
In our final case study in Chapter 7, we explore creativity in a commercial
context, investigating advertisements that were broadcast early on in the
Covid-19 pandemic, in April 2020. We focus on commercials for beer brands,
prompted by the change in lifestyle that resulted from restrictive measures and
posed a major threat to the drinks industry. Our methodological approach
10 Introduction

uses frameworks for multimodal analysis, demonstrating how readers can

discuss the interaction between semiotic modes (e.g., text, image, sound) in
health-related texts.
In Chapter 8, we offer some concluding remarks from our analyses,
contemplating how we have captured some aspects of the first year of the
pandemic and what other dimensions there are to consider. We reiterate that
we have demonstrated a range of techniques that can be transferred to various
health-related research projects and that we have illustrated the fundamental
importance of language and communication to our experiences of health
and illness. We suggest some areas for future research, in part prompted by
continuing challenges resulting from Covid-19, and highlight other research
efforts towards understanding the impacts of the pandemic and navigating
our way through those challenges.
Readers can approach each chapter as a distinct case study which provides
details of how to apply specific analytical procedures. There is also value,
we would argue, in engaging with the breadth of topics, as a reflection of
the extent to which Covid-19 has pervaded global society and as a way
for readers to familiarise themselves with an array of approaches for the
continued investigation of experiences of health and illness.

Note
1 Misinformation refers to sharing wrong information which a speaker believes to
be true, whereas disinformation means the deliberate and conscious spreading of
falsehoods.

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 CHAPTER XL
A ROOM OF TORTURE

P hil was awakened in the morning by the creaking of his prison

door, and opened his eyes to behold the jailer of his midnight
imprisonment advancing toward him. He observed now, as he had
not noticed when he first saw him, that this fellow wore a military
uniform.
With a few words in German and expressive movements of his
hands, the jailer indicated to the boy an order to come with him, and
the prisoner obeyed. Up the stairs they went and into a very strange
room occupied by that very strange man, “Count Topoff.” Strewn
about in the apartment were a dozen or more remarkable
contrivances, a few of which indicated the probable general
character of all of them. One was plainly a pillory with holes for the
head and the hands, but within the hand holes projected many
sharp metal points, while on the stand for the undoubtedly
barefooted pilloried victim were a hundred or more sharp metal
points projecting upwards. There were also hanging on the wall
numerous straps and belts, some of them crossed and riveted here
and there until they bore the appearance of elaborate body-brace or
harness, while from various ends hung numerous sharp-toothed jaw-
clasps. Overhead, suspended on a pulley by a long rope, was what
appeared to be a head harness. The other end of the rope was
caught around a cleat over against the wall.
Phil shuddered at the sight. Here was cruelty apparatus of the
most fiendish ingenuity. And there could be no doubt that it was
intended to be used and that “Count Topoff” was the very fellow to
use it with frigid glee.
The prisoner was aroused from his secretly shrinking
contemplation of the prospect before him by the voice of “the
count,” who addressed him in English, thus:
“You see, most foolish American, what is in store for you unless
you give me a true explanation of what took place this side of
Chateau Thierry. Now, I’ll give you one more chance before the
course of persuasion begins. By telling me the truth, you can escape
all that you see before you.”
His voice was more repulsive than it had been at any time before
in Phil’s hearing. The high-pitched, tripping near-stutter, if the
speaker had spoken from a position of concealment, might have
caused any hearer to suspect that the utterances popped forth from
the lips of a bully of imp-land.
“But,” Phil protested, hopelessly, it is true, “I have already told you
the truth. You surely don’t want me to fabricate a yarn just to
escape your cruelty.”
“No,” thundered the big fellow. “I want the truth. If you lie, I’ll
know it at once and something worse will follow. Orderly, knee-
splints, toe-thumb.”
The direction was given in English, but it evidently was
understood. The orderly picked up two pieces of pine board, about
three inches wide, an inch thick and a little more than two feet long.
These he proceeded to strap to Phil’s legs, behind, so that the
prisoner was unable to bend his knees. Then he tied a string to each
of the boy’s thumbs and with the persuasive power of a strong pull
drew those digits down against the victim’s great toes and tied these
two extremities together.
“There,” rattled the boche military ogre, as he viewed the plight of
his prisoner with evident enjoyment; “when you decide you’re ready
to tell the truth, send for me.”
“I don’t know what to tell you besides what I’ve already told,”
replied Phil desperately, for the pain of his cramped position was
already testing his endurance.
“Think, think hard!” advised “the count” as he left the room.
The orderly also departed, and the victim was left alone in his
misery. The latter twisted and squirmed into every possible position
to relieve his distress. The strain on his legs, back, thumbs and toes
was so uniformly painful that he only increased his misery when he
added tension at one point or portion to relieve the others.
Anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour after Topoff and the
orderly left, another man in coarse tattered civilian garments
appeared, bearing a tray of steaming food. As he set it down before
the prisoner, he startled the latter with the following speech, scarcely
above a whisper:
“This is not intended for you to eat, only to look at. If you try to
eat it, you’ll find it full of the hottest of red pepper. By the way, I’m
an English spy and want to give you a little advice. Think up some
kind of plausible story and tell it to ‘the count’ in the place of the one
he refuses to believe. Grit your teeth, stick through your torment, for
help is on the way, I hope. As soon as you think up a story that you
think will stand a test of reason, yell to the orderly and tell him that
you’re ready to give in.”
“He can’t understand me, can he?” Phil returned.
“Oh, yes, he can understand a good deal, although he pretends to
be contemptuously ignorant of the hated English tongue. Good-by,
now, I must go, but I’ll keep my eyes open and will do everything
that I can for you.”
The spy glided swiftly out of the room, leaving the tray of food
setting on the floor.
Encouraged by the fact of the nearness of a friend and the
assurance that there was reasonable hope of rescue, Phil cudgeled
his brain hard for an inspiration to think up a plausible story to tell
his tormentor. The strain of pain and necessity helped him
wonderfully, and in a short time he was yelling at the top of his voice
to the orderly. The latter strolled in in leisurely manner after the boy
yelled two or three minutes.
 “Tell ‘the count’ I’m ready to tell the truth,” Phil announced in
pleading tones, which were genuine enough, in spite of the fiction
plot behind them.
Without a word the orderly went out of the room and soon
returned accompanied by “Count Topoff.”
“Ready to tell me the truth?” snapped the latter, addressing the
suffering prisoner.
“Yes, yes,” cried Phil, designedly making no effort to conceal his
distress.
Topoff gave the orderly directions in German, and the latter
proceeded to cut the strings that bound the boy’s thumbs and great
toes together.
 CHAPTER XLI
THE “SUBTERRENE”

T he first impression that struck Phil forcibly as “Count Topoff”

entered the room was the fact that he had been drinking. This
reminded him of the drink-fest that had incapacitated “the count”
and his command of guards, in a French inn a few weeks previously,
to prevent the prisoners in their charge from turning the tables on
them.
“It’s probably lucky for me that he was too much under the
influence to remember the trick we played on them when we saw to
it that every ‘drunk’ among them was super-drunk,” the boy mused
after the strain of his torture had been relieved by the cutting of his
thumb-toe bonds.
Topoff wasted no time in the carrying out of the portion of his
program now due. Although plainly flushed with the liquor he had
drunk recently, there was nothing maudlin in his manner, and he had
full command of his usual wits.
“Well, go ahead with your yarn,” he ordered, sitting down in an
armchair ancient enough in appearance to have belonged to the
days of Charlemagne. “But hold on. Do you realize what is going to
happen to you if you lie? You’re going into that pillory, with your
bare feet on those sharp steel points. Now go ahead, but you’d
better not talk at all if you’re thinking of telling me another string of
lies.”
Phil’s resolution was almost shattered at this prospect, and he was
on the verge of confessing the untruth of his purpose, when it
occurred to him that torture on the puncturing pillory could hardly
be worse than the agony he suffered in the unendurable attitude
from which he had just been released.
“If I have to die or torture, I don’t see that there’s much choice
between these two ways,” he concluded. “So here goes, hoping I’ll
be able to pull the wool over his eyes.”
“The truth is this,” he continued aloud with a camouflage of
desperation, “and may my native land never know of my traitorous
act. There’s really no need of my begging you to have mercy on me
after you’ve learned the truth from me, for I shall be so ashamed of
my cowardice that I shan’t be satisfied until I find a place where I
can hide my face from every other man on earth.”
As he spoke Phil covertly watched the countenance of Topoff and
was gratified with the evidence of growing and expectant interest
that he saw there.
“You people,” he continued, looking his captor straight in the eye,
“perfected the submarine and used it as a most destructive war
engine. America has just completed her invention of the subterrene,
and will soon be able with it to undermine any battle front you may
be able to establish.”
“What is the subterrene?” demanded “the count,” leaning forward
eagerly.
“The word, I think, will explain itself to a man of your learning,”
replied the boy, recalling his flattery weapon. “It’s a machine that
bores a hole seven or eight feet in diameter right through the earth
at the rate of about a mile a day. It was through the first tunnel of
the first machine delivered at the battle front that I led a company of
soldiers into the basement of one of those buildings behind your
lines near Chateau Thierry.”
“And who invented that machine?” inquired the now excited and
somewhat bewildered Topoff.
“Thomas A. Edison,” Phil answered, uttering that magic name with
a swelling of hero worship and national pride.
The count meditated a few moments. It was evident that he was
deeply impressed with his prisoner’s story.
 “How many of those machines has the American army?” he asked.
“Of course, I can’t say as to that,” Phil replied slowly. “But there’s
only one at the part of the front with which I’m familiar. However, I
understand they’re being made as rapidly as possible to be rushed
all along the American, English, and French fronts.”
Again Topoff lapsed into meditation. This time he was silent longer
than before. Then suddenly he looked up sharply at his “fabulizing
informant” and said:
“Here is an important question that needs more than any other to
be answered: What becomes of the excavated earth as the tunnel
advances?”
This was surely a “stunner of a question” and tested Phil’s
ingenuity to the limit. When it first “hit” him it made the boy’s head
swim, but he clenched his fists and gritted his teeth with desperation
and thought as he had never thought before. An answer came, such
as it was, and Phil communicated it with all the aplomb that he could
command.
“I’m not very familiar with the mechanical working of the
contrivance,” he said, “although I’ve seen it operate. The question
you ask, of course, involves the problem of the great principle of the
invention. The way I get it is this: It seems that Mr. Edison, in
working out his scheme, applied a new scientific discovery of his,
electro-chemical, they call it. By means of this new process they
seem to be able to convert the excavated earth into gas and a small
amount of powdered refuse. The gas is piped back through flexible
tubes, and the refuse is carted out in a low, narrow auto-truck.”
Phil had good cause, as he proceeded with this explanation, to
congratulate himself on the training he had received in a
Philadelphia technical school. But he never knew with what degree
of credence the latter part of his ingenious fabrication was received.
He had scarcely finished the statement last recorded, when sound of
the hurried tramping of many feet reached his ears. It reached the
ears also of “Count Topoff,” who sprang to his feet in bewildered
alarm. Then the forms of half a dozen armed men rushed into the
room.
“Marines!” gasped Phil in amazement. “How in the world did they
get here?”
 CHAPTER XLII
RESCUED

“C ount Topoff” undoubtedly did not appreciate the situation, or

he would not have acted so rashly. He drew a pistol and fired
point blank at the soldier in the lead. This was a signal for the
Americans to answer in a business-like manner, which they did
without ceremony, and “Mr. Boaconstrictor” dropped dead with
several bullets in his body. Two of the Marines were wounded by the
one shot fired by the mysterious “relative of the kaiser,” but not
seriously.
This was the extent of the battle. The soldiers had taken
possession of the chateau without other resistance. The British spy
had prepared the way for the raid, having managed to get
information to the allies of conditions at the century-old castle. He
did this by means of Morse-code signaling to a fleet of American
aviators just returning from an air raid over enemy territory, and it
was answered with assurance that they would return prepared to
raid the place.
There were only six prisoners in the chateau, but three of them
were French and American spies with information of great
importance. There were also only half a dozen boche guards in the
place, including the orderly who had acted as Topoff’s personal
servant. All but the latter were men of advanced age, too old for
military service, and, as the fleet of aeroplanes that had arrived with
a score of soldiers, could not carry the released prisoners and the
captured boches very well, the latter were given their freedom as
the raiders flew away, back behind the American lines.
 On the way Phil rode in a large machine with the British spy,
whose resourcefulness may have saved him from further untold
torture and, it may be, death, for Phil subsequently grew extremely
doubtful of his ability to make his “subterrene yarn stick.”
The spy’s name was Roscoe Chance. He proved to be an excellent
type for impersonating almost any Caucasian nationality, and as he
had studied German at college and spoke the language fluently he
had been chosen as specially gifted to handle the secret service
work that was consummated by the air raid which resulted in the
rescue of Phil from the most fiendish torture.
Before they started on their return to the American lines, Chance
gave Phil the following brief account of the history of the mysterious
“Count Topoff”:
“He was a Prussian spy in France for twenty years, owning the
chateau in which he lived. He pretended to be a great friend of the
French cause, had even become a citizen of France to camouflage
the real nature of his business. But an English spy in Berlin heard a
rumor that Topoff was a relative of the kaiser and reported this to
his government. I was therefore sent here to find out what I could.
“But it seems he was on guard against the very thing I was after,
and I was unable to detect a suspicious look or act until after the
last big drive of the enemy. Meanwhile I had managed to convey to
him the idea on a number of occasions that my sympathies were on
the other side of the Rhine, so that I was in a position to take up the
role of a boche when he revealed his true colors.
“I made quite a hit with him, and found that he was in constant
secret communication with Berlin. His second lieutenancy was a
mere camouflage, for he was high up in secret service rank. I got
considerable corroboration of the report that he was a relative of the
kaiser, but no direct confirmation.”
“There’s just one peculiarity about him that I’d like to understand,”
said Phil. “Why did he run so much risk of being killed by mixing in
infantry battles right at the front?”
 “There’s only one reason I can give for that,” Chance replied, “and
I think it’s the true one. He was a clever, shrewd rascal, but also a
brazen daredevil. There’s no doubt he had lots of courage, and it’s a
wonder he wasn’t killed long ago. In spite of his misshapen physique
he was powerful and quite active. He seemed to have almost a
mania for proving that his big girth was no obstacle to his putting up
just as good a fight as a slender athlete could put up.”
The squadron of aeroplanes made the return trip without
encountering an enemy plane. No doubt there were boche air-
fighters within sighting distance, but it is also probably true that they
could not muster sufficient available force to meet the Yanks, so they
remained in hiding. Two days later Phil met Tim, who had been
transferred temporarily from trench duty to Headquarters messenger
service, and they had a half hour’s conversation over their recent
experiences. He met also Dan Fentress and Emmet Harding, two of
the twelve Marines who made their escape from the boche prison in
advance of the remaining 240. They had managed to get back with
the American army in a manner similar to the scheme worked by the
larger body of prisoners. The other ten, Phil learned months
afterward, were recaptured by the enemy and finally were returned,
after the armistice, as released prisoners of war.
And, oh, yes, by the way, before the signing of the armistice,
which meant virtually the end of the war, Phil was wearing the bar of
a lieutenant, and Corporal Tim became a sergeant.
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained
as printed.
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