Abstract
"The threat was almost invisible in the beginning of the pandemic: without a microscope, humans cannot see the virus with their own eyes. For the most part, people have to rely on what has been said, thus being largely dependent on the regimes of speaking about the virus.
It was those very regimes that allowed them to "see" the threat. The virus was constructed and reflected by slightly different regimes of speaking that (re)produced different, and socially unevenly distributed, meanings and imaginings - both within and across varied speech communities.
I shall compare several factors contributing to the fluid linguistic constructions of the "coronavirus" as produced by Czech and German public service media in the first phase of the pandemic. If intersubjectivity defines the ontological status of any given language, then, I will argue, there was not one and the same objective virus but rather several intersubjective variants - or semantico-pragmatic mutants - of it circulating in public spaces already at the start of the pandemic.
Thus the intersubjective variants of the virus predated the objective ones - at least in public media discourse." A paper presented at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology conference "Vox Populi Visegradiensis: The Anthropology of East-Central Europe" held at Ringberg, Germany on 14 - 17 July 2021.