This term refers to a person video conferencing over Zoom who wears business attire on top and casual attire on the bottom which cannot be seen. This trend seems to have started during the pandemic when most office workers were working remotely. It’s sheer laziness to wear a jacket and tie for a Zoom business meeting and tracksuit bottoms below the waist which are not visible to the camera.
An article entitled “Lexicon for a Pandemic” published on July 20, 2020 describes a body mullet as “what most people wear on Zoom calls: a nice top and, below the waist, underwear or less” (Martel).
Body mullet: What most people wear on Zoom calls—a nice top and, below the waist, underwear or less. https://t.co/jLDY8zSbbm
The Urban Dictionary defines “body mullet” as “Business on top, party on the bottom. When working from home from waist up you appear professional but from the waist down you are wearing, pajama bottoms, shorts, underwear, nothing, etc” (Bolow399).
Check out this funny “Body Mullet” music video by Mike Begra.
Every generation has its nickname from Boomer to Zoomer, the latter is currently known as Gen Z, the cohort born between 1997 and 2012. During lockdown and quarantine, Gen Z attended virtual school and used Zoom to communicate with their teachers and classmates.
The Seattle Times published an article on February 26, 2021 that discusses certain words and phrases that have become part of the pandemic vocabulary including new words that uniquely describe the experience of living through the Covid era. The author acknowledges that some terms are a “couple of tongue-in-cheek additions that maybe aren’t used daily quite yet – but that certainly should be.”
Zoomer, n. | Definition: 1 Kids who’ve grown up in this age where every social interaction takes place over the video app Zoom. (See also “quaranteen”).2 Historical/archaic: Adults from the baby boomer generation who think they’re cooler than they are. Example: “Sorry I’ve been MIA at work lately, I’ve got two Zoomers at home and they’re using up all the bandwidth on group Zoom calls with their friends.”
Seattle Times
This isn’t the earliest article where the word zoomer is discussed in a pandemic context. That credit goes to Megan Gerhardt, a Miami University professor who published an opinion piece for NBC News on June 7, 2020 entitled “Coronavirus and Zoom have marked a generation. Let’s call them Zoomers.” Gerhardt discusses how life changing events can influence the naming of generations and some have suggested labeling Gen Z “Coronas” or “Gen P” for Generation Pandemic.
Gerhardt makes the argument that generations should not be named for “tragic disasters” because that label “saddles them with that burden of negativity for life. We didn’t call those who grew up in the late 1920s and early 1930s the ‘Depression Generation,’ nor was Gen X the ‘AIDS Generation’ or Millennials the ‘9/11s’ – those were things they survived, but not how they were defined.” She proposes using a name that honors what a generation has lived through and which captures the positive aspects, as she says “the best name is the one that captures the resiliency this generation will need to bounce back from the impact of the pandemic: The Zoomers. It’s a nod to the former moniker of ‘Z,’ a play on the ‘Boomers’ and an acknowledgment of the dramatic shift to remote communication that will shape the interactions of this generation.”
I decided not to include social media trends for “zoomer” since it has been used as early as 2016 and won’t accurately reflect a pandemic context.
When office workers were allowed to work from home during lockdown, Zoom became the #1 app for communicating with coworkers but it wasn’t just employees that benefited. Quarantined families could use Zoom to stay in touch with each other and for some events like funerals, Zoom was the only way to say goodbye to our loved ones. This situation was something I experienced when my grandmother died abroad and I could not travel out of the country to attend her funeral due to lockdown and quarantine restrictions in both countries.
An article published on April 29, 2020 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, by the Angry Grammarian, discusses how the pandemic has changed our language and how zoom, a video conferencing app, has become a verb (Barg).
-Mom: Son, go outside, it’s warm. Son: I can’t, Mom. I’m Zooming with my physics class” (Licensed_nerd).
Some turned Zoom into an art form. Rosetta, a painter who lives in Ontario, Canada, used her Zoom calls to paint portraits of her friends who also happened to be artists themselves. Check out the interview below:
courtesy of KnowYourMeme
Social Media Trends as of May 23, 2022
Because the Zoom app existed prior to the pandemic, I won’t get any meaningful social media results using the #zoom hashtag, despite its use as a verb. Google Trends showed negligible interest in the zoom search term until the second week of March 2020 when it started to go vertical and reached its peak during the first week of April that year. It’s no coincidence that lockdown was in progress then and people and employers were looking for video conferencing apps to stay in touch with family and coworkers. Zoom also happens to be free to use and requires little setup.
“My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing” – Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister.
The pandemic arrived in the United States in March 2020 which was quickly followed by a two week quarantine lockdown. State and local governments passed emergency mandates that required non-essential businesses to close. Establishments such as restaurants, gyms, salons and movie theaters were shut down and those who worked for them were out of a job. Knowledge workers such as those working in finance and IT were generally allowed to work from home and apps like Zoom became popular as a way for employees to stay in touch with management and coworkers. My office closed for two weeks till the pandemic had passed. We were instructed to take what we needed to do our jobs remotely. Two weeks became two months and then two years and I am still working from home.
For many, this “new normal” afforded them the opportunity to spend more time with their loved including their pets. No longer having to deal with office commutes, expensive lunches and difficult employees, the work life balance and quality of life improved for those working from home. There are many advantages as a remote worker. All those chores that may have waited till the weekend could be squeezed in between Zoom conferences. You could take the dog for a walk and do a virtual workout in your lunch hour.
After most people had been vaccinated and the pandemic had passed its peak and became endemic, there was a push to get people back to the office. Some who’d gone a long time without human contact looked forward to being back in the office but the majority of virtual workers wanted to keep remote working.
In some industries such as the financial sector, senior management felt their employees worked better in the office collaboratively. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, said “I do think for a business like ours which is an innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture, this is not ideal for us and it’s not a new normal. It’s an aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible” (McKeever). The British prime minister Boris Johnson said “We need to get back into the habit of getting into the office. There will be lots of people who disagree with me, but I believe people are more productive, more energetic, more full of ideas, when they are surrounded by other people.” Boris felt that workers were unproductive while working remotely and were more likely to spend their working hours drinking slow brewed coffee and hacking off pieces of cheese (Taylor).
Some employees threatened to quit if their company forced them to come back to the office and in the age of the Great Resignation there were plenty of remote working jobs out there. A few few were scared to come back to the office for fear of catching Covid-19 but most wanted to keep their work/life balance.
Not every company was so demanding. Many CEOs recognized the benefits of remote working and employees found they were more productive working from home. In order to meet remote workers half way, some companies proposed a hybrid working environment whereby employees would come into the office a few days a week and work from home the rest of the week. Apple Corp created “return to office plans” that allowed employees to work a hybrid schedule with some days in the office and the rest working from home.
Check out this funny YouTube video on “when meetings are no longer virtual” (Foil Arms and Hog).
The pandemic has changed the lives of office workers forever. Working Monday to Friday in the office from 9-5 is over. Hybrid and remote working schedules are here to stay.
Google Trends: “return to office” as a search term has been around for a while but its popularity peaked in August 2021 as vaccines became widely available and state and local governments decided that it was safe to come back to the office.
During lockdown when people worked remotely and used Zoom to stay in touch with their coworkers a new issue arose – Zoom bombing. This is where an uninvited person joins your video call over Zoom without permission.
An article published on the website How to Geek in April 2020 described the main cause of this: “The problem is how people handle public Zoom meeting links. These links are shared thousands of times between clients, friends, colleagues, classmates, and so on. Careless handling of them can result in a Zoom meeting being open to public access. Then, anyone who finds the link can join an in-progress meeting” (Gunnell).
Unauthorized persons who hijack Zoom meetings have been known to make offensive comments, throw racial slurs and bully people. There are many ways to prevent this from happening. If you must use links without a password don’t post them where they can be easily accessible or found by Google. In the Zoom settings menu you can disable the “Embed Password in Meeting Link for One-Click Join” setting and make it a requirement to have a password to join the meeting. Screen sharing can be disabled except for the host so inappropriate content is not shown. The “Remote Control” feature should be disabled if you don’t want other participants to control your computer. If you don’t want files to be shared you can disable the “File Transfer” option. For a full list of ways to prevent Zoom Bombing read the here.
Zoom bombing can also refer to the unexpected appearance of individual(s) in a video who weren’t supposed to be there. Prior to Zoom calls, the old term was video bombing. One humorous example of Zoom Bombing happened during lockdown during a live interview with the BBC. On May 15, 2021 The Indy100 website published an article titled “Jon Ashworth’s daughter is the latest kid to Zoom-bomb a TV interview.” The shadow health secretary was giving a live interview when his daughter made a cameo appearance. The interview went viral and appeared on Twitter.
A new victim of child Zoom-crashing tonight: shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth pic.twitter.com/ugieTUKWVW
Many of us working remotely are using Zoom for business, meetings, interviews and classes. One mom from New Hampshire zoom bombed her kids’ classes while wearing embarrassing costumes, such as a bear suit and an old man, and posted selfies on her local New Hampshire Facebook page.
Lexicon images: zoom bombing
Social Media Trends as of May 9, 2022
Facebook #zoombombing: 3,100 people are posting about this Instagram #zoombombing: 2,685 posts TikTok #zoombombing: 76.3 million views
Google Trends: zoombombing didn’t register until March 2020 when the pandemic arrived in the United States. The popularity of the term reached its peak during the week of March 29, 2020 which coincided with lockdown.
Lexicon images. “zoombombing concept represented by wooden letter tiles on a wooden table with glasses and a book” image. Adobe.com. File no: 344298530.
When the pandemic started in March 2020 schools were not prepared for the challenges that lay ahead. Lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and quarantines severely impacted students and teachers. An article published on AmericanProgress.org dated July 6, 2021 recalls that “there was a scramble to adjust to remote learning. Classes went online, school meal distribution became grab-and-go, and extracurricular activities and services were paused” (Ferren). Students were provided with Chromebooks (which were slow and difficult to use) – the more well off schools provided Apple laptops. Google Classroom, Canvas and Zoom allowed students to work remotely and provided face to face communication with each other and their teachers.
Some students found this new learning format difficult to cope with especially for students with ADHD. The photo below sums up the whole virtual learning experience. When I checked in on my teenager to make sure she was focused in virtual school, she was fast asleep under the covers while her Chromebook was logged in to a Math class and her cat got more out of the lesson than she did.
Under the covers – virtual learning during Math class
Google Trends: “virtual learning” took off in March 2020 during the initial outbreak of the pandemic, reaching its peak the week of August 16 that year as schools were making the decision to start the fall term off remotely.
