Intensification of medical terms in the media: from COVID to military period

Abstract

The article outlines the communicative capabilities and stylistic functions of medical terms that are determinologized and metaphorized in modern media (we are talking about the COVID period as an objectifier of the functioning of medical terms in the media and the military period as a relay of new meanings of war using metaphorized medical terms in mass communication). The intensification of the functioning of medical terms in the media is motivated by several factors: (a) the proximity of this layer of medical vocabulary to the mass recipient; (b) the "mainstream" nature of its use in connection with constant cataclysms related to medicine – "bird" flu, African virus, COVID pandemic, etc.; (c) the flexibility of medical terminology to be included in semantic and stylistic processes (epithetization, metaphorization, phraseology, etc.). The COVID period became an impetus for the functioning of professional (medical) terms and their terminological phraseology in the media, and also helped the formation of neologisms in mass communication such as 'коронозалежний, ковідіот, ковідодипломатія, ковідолихоманка, ковідомісія, короналекція', etc. The military period (war as an extralingual factor) becomes an intensifier of the secondary nomination of medical terms – verbal illustrators of modernity: 'ампутація територій, вакцинація від ворожої пропаганди, реанімація війни, вірус сепаратизму, травматичні території, метастази війни', etc.

The paradoxical functional possibilities of the term outside the medical system were clarified in the media material: semantic expansiveness, contextual accuracy, manipulativeness, ability to create neologisms, the appearance of phraseological collocations, etc. The communicative background appears as a kind of "mirror" of current problems, in which the secondary nomination of medical terms helps achieve the main tasks of Ukrainian-language media – not only to inform recipients, but also to influence their mass consciousness.