I swear this is true. One day, sitting at one of our regular in-the-park meetings, I heard one of the group say, “It could be your dongle, you know.”

Just like that. Out loud, in public.

A bit of context: we’ve known our friends-in-the-park, for 40, no wait, 50 years. They are the best of friends. We’ve watched our kids grow up. For Pete’s sake, now we’re watching them have kids and them grow up. Pandemic style, we try to meet one afternoon a week in a park, socially distanced and Doug Ford-compliant. When Doug says we can’t meet in person, we Zoom or something like it. Doug, by the way, would be welcome to join us, though he’d have to bring his own chair.

Why do we meet? There are lots of reasons; food (cookies), laughs (lots of them), support, and yes, conversation. We don’t however, generally comment on each other’s dongles.

Back to the dongle. It, in case you were wondering, is a little whoozit that you plug into your laptop to make it do something that it wouldn’t normally do, like project its tiny picture onto your smart TV. Like that. We should all have one, maybe two. Heck, the next political campaign could have “A Dongle in Every Home!” as its slogan.

Dongle and Zoom, you may have noticed, are not the first new words that have crept into our conversation, causing a new language to flourish. Let’s call it Pandemish, half English, half, well, you get the picture.

Here’s a little example of Pandemish in action. A few weeks ago when it was really chilly (Ontario was deciding whether it wanted to be a winter or spring province), one of our park-friends, said, “It’s going to be too cold to sit outside next week. Maybe we should Zoom.” It was Zelda, the dongle-lady, I’m pretty sure. It doesn’t really matter; all the names are made up.

“Nope, Zoom’s not so hot for us,” Billy-Chuck said, “We could Google Meet instead. That’d be fun. No FaceTime though. We don’t have a Mac.”

“What about Duo?” Wyatt asked.

See the creeping use of Pandemish in that little exchange? Ten years ago, nobody’d know what the heck you were talking about.

Fast forward to the next week and a small example of what one of our Zoom/Google-meet/video-whatever sessions go like. You’ve probably all been there.

Picture this: The park group is squeezed onto separate little boxes on a frame the size of a shirt cardboard. Billy-Bob’s laptop is balanced on his knee, keeps jiggling, finally falls off, showing us his ceiling (it is, I have to admit, a nifty ceiling). Wyatt is lying on his side, since he has us on his phone and — bless its heart — the thing won’t stay upright. Meanwhile, Raoul and Roxanne are too big for the picture and we get one half of each of their heads — Raoul’s left ear and Roxie’s right. They are perfectly fine ears, I’ll give you that. Iona can’t get her sound to work and spends most of the time gesticulating. Later, toward the end of our time, Wyatt can’t figure out how to sign off which sets us all off, him included. And we, the lady and me, are no better — we’re late, looking like two overstuffed cabbage rolls (minus the tomato sauce) sitting on a couch. Well me, anyway.

Welcome to the new, wonderful world of video-chatting. It’s where for the first time I heard the rallying cry of Pandemish, a kind of national anthem: “Unmute yourself!”

Pandemish isn’t finished taking over. You don’t need to video-chat with a group, you can also do it just, um, one-on-one. A bit of context here, too: it used to be that if you’d want to talk someone, you’d pick up your phone, look up their number and dial them. Or, this’ll take you back, you could grab a piece of paper and write them a letter. Want to communicate today? You go to dial your phone? Not so fast, Smithers: get ready for an onslaught of Pandemish.

You’ve got lots of choice. You could text or email the person. (Pandemish takes nouns and squishes them into verbs; you may have noticed.) Like the kids and grandkids, you could DM somebody on your Instagram or Messenger. Or you could post something to Facebook and LinkedIn. Or, God help us all, you could tweet them. “Tweet,” for Pete’s sake.

Or, tired of the whole being-with-others thing, you could turn on your smart TV, and livestream something on NetflixPrimoGem or whatever.

Though, come to think of it, maybe you’d need a dongle for that.