ˈænθrɒpɔːz

Anthropause: The period of reduced human mobility brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic

Over the past few months, many countries around the world went into lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19. Brought about by the most tragic circumstances, this period of unusually reduced human mobility — which we suggest be coined ‘anthropause’ — may provide important insights into human–wildlife interactions in the twenty-first century. Anecdotal observations indicate that many animal species are enjoying the newly afforded peace and quiet, while others, surprisingly, seem to have come under increased pressure.

Rutz et al. Nature Ecology & Evolution 22 June 2020

So there’s the coining of a new and useful word, happening before our very eyes, although in the quotation above the authors use the verb “to coin” in a way that’s still largely considered erroneous. The metaphor underlying coin is a reference to minting money—you coin a word or phrase by newly creating it. But there’s been a tendency of late, perhaps driven by the increasing obscurity of the metaphorical reference, for people to use coin in situations where the verbs name or dub would be the customary choices. That’s language for you.

The authors acknowledge that their new coining should really be anthropopause, from Greek anthropos, “human being” and the scientific suffix -pause, which usually indicates an ending of some sort. For instance, the menopause is the end of menstruation; the magnetopause is the outer limit of a planet’s magnetic field. But the authors seem to have been influenced by the common meaning of the noun pause—“the act of stopping for a brief interval”.

So there are things about this new word that are not quite right, etymologically speaking. It’s also a hybrid word, with mixed Greek and Latin roots, because pause comes to us from the Latin noun pausa, meaning “halt”. But nevertheless it seems like a name for something we needed a name for, and it seems to have been finding its way into scientific currency during the month since it was invented.

The Latin verb associated with pausa was pausere, “to halt”, which mutated into French poser. But poser doesn’t mean “to halt”—it means “to place”, “to put down”, “to rest” and, well, “to pose”. These meanings properly belong to Latin ponere. How did they get transferred to poser? Well, in the past tense ponere conjugates into a whole load of verbs beginning “pos-”, and that may have been the source of the confusion.

Whatever the reason, English acquired the verb to pose from the French. We also acquired, or built for ourselves, a whole batch of -pose words. To compose is to “place together”; to juxtapose is to “place side by side”; to dispose is to “place apart”; to expose is to “place away”, and so on through many others.

Now: anthropos.

The prefix anthropo-, referring to human beings, has been fairly busy in forming words, as has the suffix -anthropy. Anthropause is just the latest in a series of such words that refer to the human impact on nature. There’s also Anthropocene, which is a serious proposal for the name of a new geological period defined by human impact on the natural world; anthroposphere refers to that part of the world dominated by human activity (there’s even a magazine of the same name); and of course Anthropogenic Global Warming is the thing we were all preoccupied by before we became preoccupied by the anthropause. (In the nineteenth century, anthropogenic referred to anthropogeny, the science of human origins; only in the twentieth century did it acquire its present meaning of “caused by humans”.)

Anthropometry is human measurement, useful in designing tools and environments for human use. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human organisms or objects, and anthropopsychism is the attribution of human motives to these same things. Anthropotomy, literally “human cutting”, is a fine old word for the study of human anatomy, and anthroponymy is the study of personal names. Ananthropism is a lack of fellow-feeling for humanity, as is aphilanthropy; apanthropy is a love of solitude; anthropophobia is a fear of humans, as is phobanthropy; misanthropy is a hatred of humans; and crinanthropy is being judgemental about humans. Philanthropy is, of course, a love of humankind, especially a love expressed through aid or kindness to others. A gastrophilanthropist is one who expresses philanthropy by feeding others.

Unpleasantly, anthropophagy is the practice of eating humans, and anthropomancy is a supposed method of divining the future by inspecting human entrails. (This latter was, as you have guessed, invented by the Romans.)

Something anthropoid is in the form of a human—most commonly, the anthropoid apes (chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan). Anthropology is the study of humans, and palaeoanthropology is the study of ancient humans.

Palaeoanthropology has given us a whole crop of genus names for extinct humans, many now disused—Africanthropus was “African human”, now understood to be ancient Homo sapiens; Eoanthropus was “dawn human” (the classification of the famous Piltdown Man hoax); Sinanthropus was “Chinese human”, the genus to which so-called Peking Man was assigned, before being reclassified as a subspecies of Homo erectus; and Pithecanthropus was “ape human”, another Homo erectus subspecies informally called Java Man in less gender-neutral days. There are others, but you see how it goes. All of these long-dead humans are known to us by their anthropolites—fossilized human remains.

There is also an oddly detailed list of psychiatric states involving the suffix -anthropy, though I suspect few are in current clinical use. The overarching concept is of zoanthropy, in which a person imagines themselves to be an animal. But under that umbrella lurks a list of specific delusional creatures—boanthropy (ox), cervanthropy (deer), galeanthropy (cat), cynanthropy (dog), hippanthropy (horse) … and of course the grand-daddy of them all, lycanthropy (wolf). Only the final example seems to have made the transition from “delusion” to “supernatural creature”, the word lycanthrope now being used almost exclusively as a synonym for werewolf. (For whom the act of turning back into human form is anthropomorphosis.)

Finally, I offer you anthropoglot, a word that is usually defined as “an animal with a tongue resembling that of a human”. Puzzlingly, the illustrative example always given is a parrot. Now, parrots’ mouths do contain something that looks like a rather wizened and discoloured human tongue, but many mammals do a better job in that regard. What’s different about a parrot’s tongue is that it uses it to produce speech, in much the same way a human does. (See, for example, the splendidly named paper Vocal-Tract Filtering by Lingual Articulation in a Parrot, in Current Biology of September 7, 2004.) So I do believe that the real and original nineteenth-century meaning of this rare word was “an animal capable of speaking like a human”.