loved ones'?
On a walk with a friend a couple of weeks ago, talking about the way that our language is seemingly changing without much question, we had both noticed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly over more recent months, I’ve noticed the term ‘loved ones’ used in the media coming out of the NHS, the care sector more generally and even in interviews with people who I hoped would know better. it’s generally used when talking about people who are dying or have died and to denote their close family and friends, and even the wider circle of people who know/knew them… And I’m completely sick of it, both in terms of being fed up of overhearing a term that I find irritating in its superficiality and manipulativeness, and in terms of the sense of nausea it evokes in me by the way it’s used and the implications implicit within it. The term has caught on in that thoughtless way that language does, and has quickly come to trump (can we still use trump as a verb?) ‘family and friends