Metaphors used to describe the Covid pandemic in New Zealand

What is it about?

In this paper, we explore two different ways that New Zealand Twitter users framed their experience of government COVID-19 measures during the first stage of the pandemic. When the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Aotearoa New Zealand during March 2020, the government quickly moved to eliminate community transmission of the virus through mandatory self-isolation. This led everyday citizens, ourselves included, to rapidly familiarize themselves with a range of new terms, such as lockdown—the state of (national) closure—and bubble—the household isolating together. These two terms—lockdown and bubble—are both metaphors of containment with previously established meanings that had now been expanded to contain new meanings specific to COVID-19. This led us to wonder: do language choices reflect and/or impact perception of government measures and, if so, in what ways?

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