Has the Pandemic Curbed Constant Whining?

A new study by a staffer at this column has highly refutable proof

By Ed Goldman

The head of research for The Goldman State, Delve S. Presley, reports there have been two semi-positive things that have emerged from the pandemic:

1. When you wear a mask people can’t tell if you’re smirking.
2. Whining has been trimmed by at least 73 percent in the United States. Delve admits this is anecdotal, and largely confined to his immediate family. 

“Ergo, the margin for error could be vast, Boss. By the way, I think you smirked when I said ‘ergo,’ but can’t be sure. Your eyes crinkled but that could also be attributable to your rapidly advancing age.”

Delve’s intuition, often fallible, is right on when it comes to item 1, which may make me enroll in a Smirk Management Course at the community college. In fact, I recently recommended to a Gen-Xer—gently, of course, as is my nature, especially when someone outweighs me and seems easily irritable—that he take the school’s EFL course (English as a First Language). He had just told me about some friends of his: “Him and her are getting married, irregardless of their religious differences.”

Anyway, the abatement of whining shouldn’t be underestimated as a benefit of this terrible virus. 

In her later years, my tough ol’ mom—a firefighter’s wife who’d given birth to four children and tragically, lived to see two of them die long before she did—began to think of hospitals and clinics as social destinations, the staffs her personal advisors. 

When she caught a cold it was always a “severe” cold in her self-diagnosis. Her occasional arthritis pain and paper cuts also ranked as “severe.” With the New York accent she never quite lost, it always came out “suh-VEEH,” which somehow added to the ominous nature of her discomfort if you didn’t know how strong she really was.

During the past year, people have been a bit afraid to whimper. For one thing, if you tell a friend so much as you’re feeling “a little under the weather,” watch how fast the friend hangs up the phone or—if you’re already in the middle of an in-person canasta-thon—how definitively the friend social-distances, perhaps relocating to a different zip code.

Then there’s the scale to consider. If you really do catch a common cold, what you used to consider absolute misery can now be relegated to an “inconvenience.” When you say, “I’ll be back on my feet in a couple of days, tops,” it may even make you seem downright peppy to friends who long ago wrote you off as a hopeless hypochondriac.

‘“Hey, whatever happened to that patient of yours who always thought she was sick?”

‘“Haven’t seen her in a while. Now she thinks she’s dead.”

SuhVEEHly, no doubt.