f someone were to make a bingo card of terms popularized by the coronavirus pandemic, there would be at least a few obvious nouns and noun phrases to fill the squares: social distance, contact tracing, COVID bubble, virtual/remote [fill in the blank], mask mandate, PPE. Among the new verbs that have made their way into the pandemic argot over the past 16 months or so, the one that sticks with me the most is pivot. When the pandemic hit, we pivoted to remote learning and social distancing; as vaccine availability has become widespread and we’ve gotten the hang of our new normal, schools and workplaces and restaurants and retailers have pivoted again to in-person experiences and business as usual.
For me, at least, “pivot” was one of those words that, once I became aware of it, I started hearing everywhere (at the risk of dating myself, it called to mind an episode of the 1990s sitcom “Friends” in which one character instructs two others on the delicate art of maneuvering a large couch up a narrow stairway by barking “PIVOT!” at various intervals). A pivot is a very specific type of turn: not a subtle shift or minor adjustment, but a swift and decisive change of direction. As jargony as the term struck me at first, I soon realized there was no better verb to describe the shift of gears virtually all of us experienced back in March 2020. There wasn’t time to hesitate, to ponder options, to make small changes and hope they’d suffice. We all pivoted and started down a brand-new path.
Without a doubt, many — if not all — of you have made your own pivots during the last year and a half, some more demanding than others. I hope you find the stories here engaging and perhaps even inspiring as we continue to make our way toward what I imagine will be one of the most welcome noun phrases of all: the post-COVID era.
Editor-in-chief, UNH Magazine