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).
Zooming appears in the Urban Dictionary as “the act of holding a conference call using the Zoom app during the Coronavirus pandemic.
-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:
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.
Sources:
Barg, Jeffrey. The Angry Grammarian. “How coronavirus made ‘zoom’ a verb and other ways the pandemic has changed our language.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. April 29, 2020. URL: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/coronavirus-covid-zoom-pandemic-words-linguistic-20200429.html.
CBC News. “Painter turns pandemic Zoom calls into art.” YouTube. March 11, 2021. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlwyjEz5U2M.
“Finally understood what Zoom meetings remind me of. ” Know Your Meme. May 14, 2020. URL: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1850422-zoom.
Licensed_nerd. “Zooming.” Urban Dictionary. March 25, 2020. URL: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zooming.