Gentle Reader, the New Normal requires a new vernacular. In particular, some new verbiage to account for the little tics, quirks and idiosyncrasies that are bound to arise during a global pandemic. With that in mind, it is with pride that today I present to you…Coronavices!

Perfect for our current situation due to Covid-19, what better way to describe the bad habits we’re picking up while we stay at home than Coronavices?

For example, how many of us have adopted a Clothing Optional Policy courtesy of the Coronavirus? After all, when you have Zoom meetings with the office, your co-workers are only going to see you from the chest up, right?

A close kin to this Policy is the Grunge Effect, typifed by a lack of showers and hair growth in unusual places. And by unusual places, I don’t mean growing hair at Lego Land. Just hope your web cam isn’t Hi-Def. You don’t want your office mates distracted by thinking you’re half Sasquatch during the company budget review video conference.

Putting on the Coronapounds is a Coronavice of which to beware.

“Maybe I’ll have just one Oreo Double-Stuf,” you say to yourself. Two sleeves of cookies and a half gallon of milk later, you huff and puff as you push away from the dessert atrocity you have just committed, feeling guilty about the carnage you just rained down upon a defenseless snack.

Is the following anecdote foreshadowing to our current plight? You be the judge. A friend of mine was once asked by a couple of visitors to town whether we were a wet or dry county. He replied, “We aren’t just wet – we’re sopping!”

Which could be why a recent survey from American Addiction Centers found the average Kentuckian of legal age was drunk for almost seven workdays (50 hours to be precise) during the first 11 weeks of the stay at home order.

The sad part of that statistic is that it made the Commonwealth only one of ten states in the Union that were below 100 crocked hours during that period. The survey reports our Hoosier brethren and sistren spent 102 hours plastered during the same time frame. As bad as that number is, we’re all neophytes when compared to folks in South Dakota, who topped the list at 468 hours.

On the bright side, we drank more than Sin City. Las Vegas only clocked 33 hours of inebriation time to our 50. Be proud, Bluegrass State!

The quarantining has been eased a bit, causing a whole new form of Coronavice to arise – that of chewing out poor store employees who ask you to respect company safety policy and wear a mask while patronizing their establishment. From verbal abuse to throwing inventory around these businesses, give style points to these bastions of virtue – proving once again it will take more than a world pandemic to prevent some people from acting like jerks.

Try out “Coronavice” in your next conversion to see how it fits conversationally. Done right, it could become the nation’s new catchphrase. Like “big yikes.” And “lewk.”