Abstract/Summary

The naming of the novel coronavirus was notably one of the most politically sensitive aspects of the pandemic. After former US President Donald Trump began using the term “Chinese Virus” in March 2020, partisans with different tribal affiliations in various countries and regions rushed to formulate arguments for and against using geographically marked and racially charged labels when referring to the virus. Informed by the principles of critical discourse analysis, this article analyses the naming of the virus in the US and Hong Kong, where similar practices of naming served the interests of very different political tribes and ideological agendas. It focuses on different aspects of meaning, i.e. analytic and synthetic, and the argumentation strategies various interpretive communities used to legitimize particular naming practices. It argues that it is not just certain practices of naming, but also certain practices of reasoning about names that comes to index different tribal loyalties.