In my recent blog on the new words to have emerged during the Coronavirus pandemic, I concluded by speculating on what additional words might become everyday utterances by the end of 2020.

One which is increasingly doing the rounds now is the term ‘The New Normal’, the catch-all to describe what we think our lives are going to become once Coronavirus has passed. Or to be more nuanced about it, because Coronavirus is not simply going to be switched off one day in the near future, what shades of new normal we are going to pass through before finally settling on the ultimate new normal which life is going to become.

Of course, at this stage, while nobody can agree on what form the New Normal will take, most people have realised that the future we are moving to will not be the same as the life we have been living the last few years, and the arrival of a New Normal is a raging certainty. Talk about life ‘returning to normal’ carries the unfortunate reality underneath it that we are unlikely to ever truly go back. So we can expect to read an increasing amount of commentary about what form the New Normal will take.

But from a linguistic point of view, the New Normal by its very nature will have a short shelf-life. Once our new ways of living have bedded in, the New Normal simply becomes Normality. And the way we were living at the start of the year is no longer Normality. It then becomes ‘The Old Normal’.

So let’s hope that the new normal can take the best of the old normal, with a bit that we have learned during the lockdown thrown in, and when we look back on the old normal from the new normal in a few years time, we can conclude that we used this era to improve the way we conduct our lives and that the new normal which has emerged is an improvement on the old.