With millions around the world getting sick and dying from a pandemic virus, the French Academy wants you to know that the virus is feminine: la covid 19, not le covid 19. Young and old, previously healthy or immuno-compromised, recently arrived from abroad or never been out of the hexagon, breaking quarantine or sheltering in place, it seems that the French have been treating the pandemic as masculine. But the rule makers at the French Academy want to put a stop to all that.
Here’s a chart of the frequency of the masculine le covid (blue) compared with the feminine la covid (red) since early February. You can see for yourself that the curve needs to be flattened before the Academy can relax the rules of grammar.
At the very least, in case any of the 40 immortals succumb to the disease—their average age is 78—they wanted to make sure that their death notices would be grammatical. The Academy’s new motto? Straighten up and die right.
And it’s not just the venerable Académie française (feminine). Radio-Canada is also on the case. In March their grammar guardians (les langagiers du Radio-Canada) sent a memo to broadcasters telling them to change all their le covids to la covids, on the grounds that the WHO, or more properly, l’OMS (l’Organisation mondiale de la santé), while sequencing the novel corona virus DNA, had determined that the gender of the virus was feminine.
This is confusing, Radio-Canada said, because the previous deadly disease, SARS, which is also a corona virus, is officially masculine: le SRAS (its official name en français is le SRAS-CoV-2).
Perhaps we are entering an age of pandemics whose official names will alternate genders, like hurricanes and tropical storms.
But in the absence of adequate testing, effective treatment, and a preventive vaccine, the French language police are telling us, “Wear a mask and disinfect your grammar before speaking or writing.”
And of course the French are responding to this directive in characteristic fashion by donning their yellow vests and taking to the streets.
