The Proverbs of a Pandemic: The Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic Viewed through the Lens of Google Trends
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Heather A. Haas
The Proverbs of a Pandemic: The Early Months
of the COVID-19 Pandemic Viewed
through the Lens of Google Trends
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This article explores the possibility that Google search behavior (as summarized in
Google Trends output) may provide an informative lens through which research-
ers can view shifts in proverb search interest, and a way to see how those shifts
relate to particular sociohistorical events. In the application presented here, analy-
ses showed that just as internet searches for terms like “Wuhan,” “coronavirus,”
“pandemic,” and “flatten the curve” surged in popularity in the United States in
early 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so, too, did searches for
particular phrases (e.g., “keep calm and carry on,” “this too shall pass,” and “all
in this together”) that seemed to provide useful proverbial framings for the events
of this time. This analysis, then, offers an overview of the pandemic from a pare-
miological perspective and further illustrates the potential value of quantitative
methods in folklore scholarship.
Keywords
afs ethnographic thesaurus: Paremiology, proverbs, COVID-19,
coronavirus, pandemics, folklore, Google Trends, computational
folkloristics
Much as the COVID-19 virus quickly spread from one person to another in the
late winter and early spring of 2020, a folklore of COVID-19 also quickly spread across
social networks. Within months of reports of the first cases of the virus, researchers
had already described related rumors, legends, jokes, and folk remedies that had
begun to circulate (Deutsch 2020), chain letters that had been spawned (Belanus
2020), and associated conspiracy theories (Shahsavari et al. 2020). But just as rumors,
legends, and conspiracy theories gained traction as ways to make sense of the emerg-
ing crisis—and jokes, folk medicine, and chain letters emerged as ways to help cope
with it—it seems reasonable to suspect that the kinds of folk wisdom encapsulated in
proverbs might also have been relevant to people trying to determine the appropri-
ate interpretation of and response to the rapidly changing world. As we worked with
Heather A. Haas is Professor of Psychology at the University of Montana Western
Journal of American Folklore 135(535):26–48
Copyright © 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisHaas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 27
each other to make sense of the out-of-the-ordinary experiences that had suddenly
become our everyday lives, it seems possible that we might have turned to proverbial
wisdom in an attempt to frame the new in terms of the known.
The relevance of proverbial wisdom to this time of transition was evident in a
number of ways. Proverbs were incorporated into cartoons about the pandemic (e.g.,
a Joe Heller cartoon about self-isolating that read “HOME IS WHERE THE HEART
IS” with an insertion mark under the word “heart” indicating that during this time
of sheltering in place, home was also where the “store gym office school bank theater
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daycare church restaurant” was1). A CNN article titled “Inspirational Quotes to Get
Us through the Coronavirus Shutdown” included proverbial phrases like “keep calm
and carry on” and “this too shall pass” (Allan 2020). Shippers included proverbial
expressions of unity in boxes of COVID-19 supplies (Cheema 2020). All of these
examples suggest that people found traditional proverbial wisdom to be relevant to
this very unusual time.
Although these proverbial choices may have been idiosyncratic, it seems worth
exploring whether particular proverbial phrases might have captured the public’s
interest in more general ways, providing a more consensual framing of the crisis. As
folklorists are called to “sense small shifts in human behavior that others might at first
overlook or dismiss as unimportant” (Alvarez 2020), it seems worth asking whether
small shifts in individual proverb use might be paralleled by larger-scale shifts in
patterns of proverb interest measured across the population as a whole.
Several lines of research are premised on the assumption that internet search data
can provide a window into the current concerns of people in a given geographic
region and during a given time period. For more than a decade, for example, epide-
miologists have been studying whether internet search data can be used as a means
of disease surveillance (e.g., Flu Trends Team 2015; Ginsberg et al. 2009; Park et al.
2018; Polgreen et al. 2008). The extent to which these efforts have been successful
has varied across disorders (e.g., Cervellin, Comelli, and Lippi 2017) and geographic
regions, but results have been, nonetheless, promising enough to have generated
continued attention.
The results of so-called “big data” studies of this kind—whether in health and medi-
cal research, business and economics, or information technology (see, for example,
Jun, Yoo, and Choi 2018)—suggest that search query data may also provide a means
by which researchers can approach some questions within the realm of folklore. The
potential for this type of research within folklore studies has been called “big folklore”
(Tangherlini 2016), and the use of internet search data in research is consistent both
with folklorists’ recent interest in the web as a data source (e.g., Blank 2018; de Seta
2020) and with the emergence of the field of “computational folkloristics” (Abello,
Broadwell, and Tangherlini 2012; Tangherlini 2016).2
This article explores how Google search behavior in the United States (as summa-
rized in Google Trends) changed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic
(i.e., in the late winter and early spring of 2020). The analysis presented here suggests
that studies of online search behavior may provide an informative lens through which
researchers can view shifts in proverb interest in the population at large, and a way
to see how those shifts relate to particular sociohistorical events.28 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
Introduction to the General Method
One platform that researchers have often used to track patterns in internet search
behavior is Google Trends (www.google.com/trends). Google Trends allows users to
enter terms or phrases of interest and to see changes in the relative volume of search
activity for those phrases over time. Of course, not all internet searches are conducted
using Google, so observed trends may not be fully representative; that said, Google
is the current leader in search access, processing billions of searches per day (Google
n.d.), so surges in search interest on Google are likely to correspond to surges of
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interest in those topics in the population writ large. Although Google Trends data
are “not a perfect mirror of search activity” (Google n.d.), Google Trends nonethe-
less provides a broad-strokes index to population-level patterns of search behavior.
Google Trends results show relative rather than absolute levels of search volume,
with results scaled to provide a value between 0 and 100, with 0 indicating insuf-
ficient data and 100 representing the peak popularity of a search term (or the peak
popularity in a set of search terms) within the time period and location specified.
The correlations presented in this paper—which provide a mathematical measure of
the extent to which different search terms showed similar patterns of search interest
over time3—were based on these relative search volume (RSV) values, downloaded
from Google Trends.4
Proverbial Framings of the COVID-19 Pandemic
A Brief History of the COVID-19 Pandemic
According to a time line of events provided by CNN (CNN Editorial Research 2021),
cases of pneumonia began to be reported in Wuhan, China, in mid-December 2019,
and the first report of a death caused by the novel coronavirus was issued on January
11, 2020. On January 21, officials confirmed the first case of the novel coronavirus in
the United States, and the White House announced the formation of an associated
task force on January 29. After a Wuhan doctor who tried to sound the alarm about
the virus died from the disease in early February, related topics began to trend on
social media in China (see also You and Zhang 2022). The new coronavirus was named
COVID-19 on February 11 and declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. By April 28,
more than a million cases had been confirmed in the United States, a number that
doubled by June 11. By May 27, 2020, researchers reported that the virus had killed
more than 100,000 people in the United States; by February 22, 2021, that number
was more than 500,000. By April 17, 2021, it was estimated that more than 3 million
people around the world had died from COVID-19.
Method
A selection of phrases commonly encountered by the author in performance con-
texts (e.g., used in conversations about the pandemic or invoked in news reports
or press briefings) during the early days of the pandemic was first assembled.5 OneHaas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 29
set consisted of pandemic-related phrases that were not proverbial but that clearly
referenced important elements of the crisis as it unfolded in the United States. This
set included “Wuhan,” “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” “pandemic,” “Chinese virus,” “flat-
ten the curve,” “social distancing,” “shelter in place,” and “toilet paper.”6 The second
set consisted of proverbs (or other fixed-form idiomatic expressions serving similar
rhetorical functions) that were referenced in contexts related to the crisis. This set
included proverbs like “home is where the heart is” (invoked in the Heller cartoon
previously described), as well as “keep calm and carry on” and “this too shall pass”
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(drawn from the CNN list of “inspirational quotes” previously mentioned).
Once compiled, the list of potentially pandemic-related candidate expressions was
then checked for evidence of shifts in search interest using Google Trends. Except
where otherwise noted, searches for pandemic-related terms were limited to data
from the United States and to a period of time between December 1, 2019, and June
1, 2020, a 6-month period beginning before any cases had been reported anywhere
in the world and ending soon after most of the United States had begun to reopen.7
Because proverbial invocations do exhibit some variability despite the general fixed-
ness of form that typically characterizes proverbs (Doyle, Mieder, and Shapiro 2012;
Mandziuk 2017; Norrick 1985), an effort was made to search for key “kernels” or
“cores” to the proverbs considered (Norrick 1985; Rittersbacher and Mösch 2005); for
example, “silver lining” was searched as a core to the proverb that tells us that “every
cloud has a silver lining.” Where single words were searched, no quotation marks were
used; where phrases were searched, quotation marks were used. All searches were
conducted using “all categories” and “web search” filters only (rather than narrowing
results to, say, “news”). Only those proverbial phrases that did seem to show COVID-
related shifts in search interest are emphasized in the analyses presented here.
To check the stability of relative search volume for these phrases over time, RSV
values were obtained from Google Trends on July 11, 15, 21, and 25 of 2020. This is
important because any given output from Google Trends represents only a sampling
of all Google queries during the specified time period, so results may vary somewhat
when Google Trends queries are completed on different days. For the most part,
only search terms showing relatively stable results across these four search dates (i.e.,
average values at or exceeding r = .7) are emphasized in this article. The range of the
reliabilities obtained (comparing the values from one date with the values obtained
on the other three dates) is presented in the Appendix.
To determine how well shifts in search interest for the other pandemic-related
terms paralleled the trend for searches for “coronavirus,” correlations were computed
between the relative search volume values for each pandemic-related phrase and
the RSV values for “coronavirus.” Although results for two phrases are sometimes
presented in the same graph, the correlation coefficients are based on RSV values
obtained when each phrase was searched separately. Unless otherwise noted, the
graphs and correlation coefficients are based on RSV data obtained from searches
conducted on July 11, 2020 (5 months after the virus was named COVID-19 and 4
months after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic).
Information about the replicability of these relationships (see Memon, Razak, and
Weber 2020) is presented in the Appendix.30 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
1a) Wuhan 1f) "flatten the curve"
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0 0
1b) coronavirus 1g) "social distancing"
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100 100
75 75
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0 0
1c) COVID-19 1h) "shelter in place"
100 100
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1d) pandemic 1i) "toilet paper"
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50 50
25 25
0 0
1e) "Chinese virus"
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0
Figure 1. Patterns of relative search volume for non-proverbial phrases associated with the
COVID-19 pandemic (searched on July 11, 2020). Data source: Google Trends (https://www.
google.com/trends).Haas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 31
Results and Discussion
The line graphs in figure 1 show relative search volume for selected (non-proverbial)
pandemic-related phrases from December 1, 2019, to June 1, 2020. Early surges of
search interest are clearly evident for the topics of “Wuhan” (fig. 1a) and with respect
to interest in a “Chinese virus” (fig. 1e), although some early interest in “coronavirus”
(fig. 1b) is also apparent. Search interest in many pandemic-related topics, though,
did not peak in the United States until mid-March 2020, when both the federal and
state governments began to take action to try to slow the spread of the disease. These
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steps (including closing businesses and schools, and passing legislation that provided
stimulus payments of up to $1,200 as a way to help mitigate the economic hardships
many people experienced during this time) had immediate consequences for essen-
tially everyone living in the country. The mid-March surge of interest in the novel
“coronavirus” (fig. 1b) was largely echoed in the pattern of search interest observed
for “COVID-19” (fig. 1c, r = .87), although the term “COVID-19,” of course, showed
no evidence of search interest until February 11, when the World Health Organiza-
tion gave this designation to the new coronavirus.
Search interest in the emerging “pandemic” (fig. 1d) peaked when the World
Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on March 11. Google
Trends results clearly show a spike of search interest coincident with that designation,
although it is also clear that search interest in this term had begun to increase several
weeks earlier, even before the designation itself became official. Relative search volume
patterns for interest in the term “pandemic” also strongly correlated with RSV for
“coronavirus” (r = .85).
The early interest in a “Chinese virus” (fig. 1e) corresponded to early news reports
related to the illness, particularly after the first case was reported in the United States
on January 21. This phrase did not peak in relative search volume, though, until after
President Donald Trump and other politicians and news commentators (Chiu 2020)
began to use the phrase in high-profile contexts. This was particularly evident between
March 18 and March 20, following a press briefing in which President Trump opened
by saying, “I would like to begin by announcing some important developments in
our war against the Chinese virus,” and then defended the choice when a reporter
questioned the appropriateness of this phrasing, suggesting that it might lead to future
incidents targeting Asian Americans (trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov 2021; see also
Chiu 2020).
By mid-March 2020, government agencies were stressing the need to “flatten the
curve” (fig. 1f) and asking people to engage in “social distancing” (fig. 1g) and to
“shelter in place” (fig. 1h). In preparation for stay-at-home directives, many people
apparently decided to stock up on “toilet paper” (fig. 1i) and other supplies, and
shortages were widely reported. All of these phrases showed surges in relative search
volume by mid-March (fig. 1, column 2), again demonstrating parallels between
online search behavior and offline events and concerns. Search interest in each of
these topics was also strongly correlated with relative search volume for “coronavi-
rus” more generally (with interest in “flatten the curve” correlated at r = .93, “social32 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
distancing” correlated at r = .81, “shelter in place” correlated at r = .66, and “toilet
paper” correlated at r = .87).
Figure 1 clearly indicates that there were dramatic shifts in search interest for
pandemic-relevant terms at the time when the COVID-19 pandemic first began to
affect the lives of people in the United States. As people’s lives changed, so, too, did
their language. Another telling indication of this shift in language occurred with
respect to the idiomatic phrases “uncharted territory” and “new normal” (fig. 2).
At the beginning of March, the World Health Organization noted that we were in
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uncharted territory with respect to the virus, and that phrase was echoed in headlines
from a variety of news outlets (e.g., Berlinger 2020). But uncharted territory does not
remain uncharted for long. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, a new
kind of normal began to emerge, and that phrase gained traction both in headlines
(e.g., Sanchez 2020) and in online search behavior.
These changes to linguistic patterns and online search behavior also extended to
proverbs. Shifts in search interest for a number of proverbial phrases are evident in
the line graphs presented in figure 3.
As the potential impact of the pandemic became apparent, there seemed to be
some wisdom to the argument that we should “err on the side of caution” (fig. 3a),
and the pattern of relative search volume for this phrase tracked interest in “corona-
virus” generally during this time period (r = .63). Likewise, other caution-oriented
proverbs also showed evidence of increasing interest at this time as well, although
RSV for these phrases was relatively unstable across searches (see Appendix), so
no corresponding graphs are presented here. These phrases, though, suggested that
we were in “desperate times” when “desperate measures” might be necessary. This
sentiment was invoked several times by Greg McBride, the chief financial analyst of
Bankrate.com. For example, in his explanation of moves by the Federal Reserve, he
said, “Desperate times call for desperate measures and the Federal Reserve is throw-
ing out all the stops” (Bayly 2020) and “Desperate times call for desperate measures
and the Fed is doing just that in an effort to keep credit markets functioning” (Royal
2020). Likewise, it was apparently conventional wisdom that we might be better “safe
than sorry,” a phrase that frequently made headlines whether with respect to Boston’s
2a) "uncharted territory" 2b) "new normal"
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75 75
50 50
25 25
0 0
Figure 2. Patterns of relative search volume for two idiomatic phrases associated with the
COVID-19 pandemic (searched on July 11, 2020). Data source: Google Trends (https://www
.google.com/trends).Haas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 33
3a) "err on the side of caution" 3f) "one day at a time"
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3b) "keep calm... carry on" (US) 3g) "worse than the disease" /
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"worse than the problem"
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3c) "keep calm... carry on" (UK) 3h) "silver lining"
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3d) "this too shall pass" 3i) "light at the end... tunnel"
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3e) "it is what it is" 3j) "all in this together" /
"all in the same boat"
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0 0
Figure 3. Patterns of relative search volume for proverbs associated with the COVID-19
pandemic (searched on July 11, 2020). Data source: Google Trends (https://www.google.com/
trends).34 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
Logan Airport beginning to screen passengers for symptoms in late January (Dough-
erty 2020), Georgia Governor Brian Kemp warning people about coronavirus scam-
mers in early March (WRDW 2020), universities extending spring breaks and then
moving to complete the academic year online (Shuda, Stringer, and Hovorka 2020),
or surges in sales of guns and ammunition (Stunson 2020) as the country moved into
lockdown in the middle of March.
In spite or perhaps because of these desperate times, searchers in the United States
showed a surging interest in the proverbial admonition to “keep calm and carry on” at
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this time (fig. 3b). A number of modifications of this proverb also appeared, includ-
ing, for example, “keep calm and wash your hands,” “keep calm and stay home,” and
“keep calm and drink bleach” (a reference inspired by President Trump’s April 23
suggestion—whether facetious or serious—that bleach might be an effective treatment
for COVID-19).8 This surge of interest in keeping calm while carrying on paralleled
a surge in the United Kingdom (fig. 3c), where the phrase originated as part of an
unused advertising campaign during the World War II era (Irving 2014).9 As shown
in the two graphs (fig. 3b and 3c, with results for the United States presented first,
followed by results for the UK), relative search volume for this phrase was generally
low and relatively stable through the winter, and then surged in mid-March before
subsiding again.10 That this interest was related to concern about the virus is suggested
by the fact that in the United States, search interest in “keep calm and carry on” cor-
related with search interest in “coronavirus” at r = .73. The admonition to keep calm
while carrying on was echoed in largely concurrent increases for proverbial wisdom
assuring us that “this too shall pass” (fig. 3d), a phrase that was even more highly
correlated with the trend in search interest for “coronavirus” (r = .86).
By mid-March, search trends suggest that the public may have become somewhat
resigned to the inevitability of what was to come. There was a sense that “it is what it
is” (fig. 3e) and a shared resolve to take things “one day at a time” (fig. 3f), proverbial
framings that stayed elevated for weeks and that largely echoed the pattern of search
interest observed for “coronavirus” during this time period (r = .75 for “it is what it
is” and r = .65 for “one day at a time”).
Perhaps because of a sense that the hardest days of the pandemic would soon have
passed, President Trump posted a tweet (i.e., posted a short message on Twitter, a
popular social networking site) late at night on March 22, indicating that the shuttering
of businesses would soon be reassessed. Invoking proverbial phrasing he wrote: “WE
CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF” (Haber-
man and Sanger 2020; capitalization in the original). This framing clearly captured
public attention (fig, 3g) as evident not only in an increase in relative search volume
for the phrasing used by the president, but also in increased RSV for the alternative
phrasing that the cure can’t be worse than the disease, used in a televised interview
by the US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin (Haberman and Sanger 2020) and in
a statement by one of President Trump’s economic advisors, Larry Kudlow (Holland
and Mason 2020). It is not clear, though, that this proverbial perspective on the crisis
originated with the president or even those in his inner circle, as Google Trends data
show evidence of increasing relative search volume for the “ . . .disease” phrasing evenHaas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 35
before the president’s tweet. In part, this may have occurred because opinion pieces
invoking this proverbial wisdom were published in both the New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal on March 20. The New York Times incorporated core elements of
the proverbial phrase into the title of the article “Is Our Fight against Coronavirus
Worse Than the Disease?” (Katz 2020). In the Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins,
Jr. (2020), a member of the editorial board, argued that “in our coronavirus quandary,
the cure may not only be worse than the disease. The cure is likely no cure at all.” The
correlation between relative search volume values for “worse than the disease” and
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“worse than the problem” (when the phrases were searched individually) was r = .79.
Although relative search volume for these phrases dropped quickly, search interest
in these proverbial framings maintained at somewhat elevated levels for weeks or
even months afterward. Although these two phrases do show some correlation with
interest in “coronavirus” during this time period (r = .48 and r = .34, respectively),
the relationship is quite moderate, as we might expect if these proverbs relate more
strongly to the process of reopening than to more general public perceptions of the
pandemic itself.
By the end of March, search patterns suggest that the initial shock had begun to
wear off. People in the United States were starting to look for the “silver lining” (fig.
3h) promised by the proverbial wisdom that every cloud has a silver lining. New York
Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, used this phrase several times, including
during televised press conferences on March 23 and March 28, and search interest
in this phrase tracked search interest in “coronavirus” (r = .62). Likewise, an April
6 tweet from President Trump saying “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!”
(capitalization in the original) was followed by a brief spike of search interest in that
phrase (fig. 3i), possibly in part because the phrase was echoed in headlines in news
sources including the Washington Post, CNBC, CNN, and Fox News on that day
as well.11
The phrase “all in this together”—an often-heard mantra of the COVID-19 pan-
demic in the United States—also surged in relative search volume in mid-March and
maintained above-baseline levels of interest through the end of the search time frame
(that is, until at least June 2020, as shown in fig. 3j). Although the proverbial phrase
“all in the same boat” would seem to embody largely similar sentiments and did also
show increases in relative search volume during this time period, the former (r = .63)
seemed to capture the interest of the US public and the ethos of the early pandemic
response in a way that the latter did not (r = .20). After all, people were not all in the
same boat. The direct impacts of the virus varied dramatically: some people became
very sick while others stayed well or recovered quickly, and although many families
were not personally affected, others would never be the same. But even beyond the
direct impacts of the virus itself, different people’s lives changed in different ways.
Some people were required to spend vastly more time at home with family, while
others could not see family members at all and weren’t sure when they would be able
to. Some workers were forced to work from home or to adapt to dramatically different
work expectations, while others lost their jobs entirely. Some people had a financial
buffer and food in the pantry, while others had neither. The inequalities of the impact36 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
of the pandemic led British author Damian Barr to tweet that “we are not all in the
same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are on Super-yachts. Some have just
the one oar.” The first part of this post was then quoted in the Wall Street Journal
(Noonan 2020), and the phrase was adapted and re-applied in a variety of settings.
In some ways, though, Barr (2020) was just making explicit a distinction also evident
in the Google Trends data (fig. 3j). We were not all in the same boat; nonetheless, we
were all in it together and called to help when and how we could.
Given that proverbs have search histories that long pre-date the pandemic in ways
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that terms like “COVID-19” or “flattening the curve” generally do not, it is somewhat
remarkable that any contemporaneous shifts in proverbial interest can be discerned in
online search behavior at all, yet these data indicate that there were indeed population-
level shifts in proverb search patterns during the early months of the pandemic. It
is also important to note, however, that not all proverbs used in pandemic-relevant
contexts were equally successful in capturing the public imagination. As already noted,
this was true, for example, for the phrase “all in the same boat.” Likewise, despite Joe
Heller’s “Home Is Where the Heart (store gym office school bank theater daycare
church restaurant) Is” cartoon, home was apparently not where the heart was during
quarantine, as there was no clear mid-March surge in search interest for this proverb
(see fig. 4) during the early months of the COVID-19 threat.
A number of other proverbs invoked in public discussions of COVID-19 also failed
to catch on with the public, at least in ways captured by Google Trends data. These
included admonitions to “nip it in the bud” and New York Governor Cuomo’s repeated
observation (e.g., during press briefings on March 28 and April 4 and a CNN inter-
view on April 5) that “you go to war with what you have, not what you need.” The
"home is where the heart is"
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12/1/19 1/1/20 2/1/20 3/1/20 4/1/20 5/1/20 6/1/20
Figure 4. Pattern of relative search volume for “home is where the heart is” (searched on July
11, 2020). Data source: Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends).Haas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 37
relative search volume for these phrases was essentially uncorrelated with the RSV
for “coronavirus” during the early months of the pandemic. These phrases, then, do
not appear to have played a significant role in the larger societal discussion of the
pandemic in the same way that the proverbs highlighted in figure 3 did. The increased
interest in a few particularly appropriate proverbs during this time is consistent with
Lord John Russell’s observation that “a proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of
one” (Whiting 1932:300). While the initial applications of these trending proverbs
to the events of the pandemic may well have originated in witty individual invoca-
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tions, those framings may then have rippled out to become the wisdom (or at least
the search interest) of many.
The proverbial phrases that did not catch fire in the public consciousness (or at least
in Google Trends relative search volume data) serve to indicate, though, that the US
public, locked away at home, did not just take to indiscriminately Googling proverbs
for entertainment. Instead, the previously described trending proverbs apparently
served some special function for the public during this unusual time. As such, those
proverbs may help to tell the story of the COVID-19 epidemic as it was experienced
in the United States writ large.
Limitations and Future Directions
To what extent can proverb interest be affected by large-scale social influences (e.g.,
historical events or mass media coverage of proverb performances by political or
media figures)? Google Trends data provide us with a way to begin to answer that
question with a picture rather than a thousand words. The results presented here do
not tell the full story of how proverbs were invoked in response to the COVID-19
pandemic, but they do offer an interesting perspective on those events. Such a method
does raise questions about the ethics of using data obtained from individuals who
do not know that their behavior is being studied (Tangherlini 2016), but the fact
that Google Trends data are anonymized and aggregated also means that researchers
never access individually identifiable data, which protects privacy in a way that many
other methods do not. As such, the potentials of Google Trends analyses appear to
be worthy of further investigation. As has been previously noted, “computational
approaches can help make sense of the often-hidden patterns that characterize human
expressive culture at scale, alert us to research questions of which we may have been
unaware, and provide us with tools to tackle research questions that previously may
have seemed intractable” (Tangherlini 2016:10).
That said, there are several important limitations to the research presented here:
First, it is important to remember that each set of Google Trends results reflects
only a sampling of all the Google searches that occurred in a particular population
during a particular time period; although that sample is said to be “representative
of all Google searches” (Google n.d.), there is still some variability between results
obtained at different times.
Second, Google Trends results are representative only of Google searches. Although
Google was the dominant search engine in the United States at the time these data38 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
were collected, and a vast majority of the internet search queries in the United States
in the first half of 2020 were probably conducted using Google, not all Americans
had ready internet access and those who did might not all have been equally likely
to turn to search queries (versus, say, Facebook news feeds or texts to family and
friends) to get additional information on topics of interest. To the extent to which
Google searches were disproportionately conducted by users of particular ages, races,
or educational or socioeconomic backgrounds, the results presented here may present
a skewed picture of reality. Those concerns are especially relevant in the context of
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the analyses presented here, as racial disparities with respect to internet access have
long been recognized (e.g., Perrin and Turner 2019), and the COVID-19 pandemic
had disproportionate impacts on minority populations (Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention n.d.).
Third, although Google Trends presents a useful “bird’s-eye view,” it cannot provide
the more focused kind of analysis that would help answer other important questions.
We cannot determine, for example, the demographic characteristics of the searchers
beyond geographical region, and we cannot determine the searchers’ motivations for
searching. We cannot know, for example, whether searchers were already familiar with
the proverbs or whether the phrases were new to them, and we cannot determine
whether they were trying to determine the meaning of the phrase or its origin, or
to find news reports of a press conference in which they knew the phrase had been
invoked. We cannot even determine whether searchers agreed or disagreed with the
applicability of the proverbial phrases they searched.
Fourth, there may well be key proverbs that framed the public response to the
COVID-19 pandemic that were missed entirely or that, although considered,
were not selected for inclusion in this particular article. No claim is made that the
examples presented here are either exhaustive or representative. It is important to
note that the phrases analyzed were most often drawn from usages in the national
mainstream media; coverage of these events on social media platforms and at the
more local level may well have differed, and different sources of information may
well have provided somewhat different perspectives on people’s experiences of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must remember the academic proverb
“correlation does not prove causation.” Even when we see surges in proverb interest
that seem reasonably to coincide with particular public events, this kind of Google
Trends analysis alone cannot establish the extent to which those phenomena are
causally related. For example, the proverbial phrase “it is what it is” seems clearly
relevant to the coronavirus pandemic, and the trajectory of interest in the phrase
(surging in early March and staying elevated for months, see fig. 3e) is consistent with
that interpretation. Such an interpretation is complicated, though, by the fact that the
American musician Thundercat released an album called “It Is What It Is” on April
3, 2020. Interest in this album probably also played a role in the popularity of this
phrase at this time, and figure 5 clearly reveals a spike of interest in “Thundercat” on
April 3, coincident with the peak relative search volume for “it is what it is.” The most
that we can say, then, is that interest in the phrase “it is what it is” was more stronglyHaas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 39
"it is what it is" /
Thundercat
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75
50
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25
0
Figure 5. Pattern of relative search volume for “it is what it is” compared to relative search
volume for the artist Thundercat (searched on June 8, 2021). Data source: Google Trends
(https://www.google.com/trends).
correlated with relative search volume for the term “coronavirus” (r = .71) than with
relative search volume for the term “Thundercat” (r = .44) during the time period
considered in this article.12
As such, it is important to acknowledge that even apparently strong correlations
between search terms may reflect the influence of unmeasured and potentially largely
irrelevant factors. Consideration of alternative interpretations can only be done on a
case-by-case basis, and elimination of other possible interpretations may not always
be possible.
Likewise, even in cases in which it can be established that a political figure, news
commentator, or other public figure used a proverbial invocation at a time coincident
with a surge of online interest, we cannot assume that the public figure was necessar-
ily the originator of the framing. Instead, a particular proverbial framing may have
trickled up to the popular figure and out to the public simultaneously, or there may
have been multiple origins for a given framing, especially if that phrase was particu-
larly apt (see, for example, the earlier discussion of invocations of “we can’t let the
cure be worse than the problem/disease” in the days before President Trump used the
phrase). This caution also applies, for example, to the interpretation of the trend for “it
is what it is.” This phrase generated increased search interest even in the early days of
the pandemic, with evidence of increased interest by the second week of March, and
interest remained elevated through the end of the search period (see fig. 3e). That early
interest was dwarfed, though, by a spike in interest after President Trump invoked
the phrase in an “Axios on HBO” interview that aired on Monday, August 3 (see fig.
6). When interviewer Jonathan Swan challenged President Trump to explain how the40 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
6a.
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6b.
"it is what it is"
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75
50
25
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Figure 6. Weekly search volume data for "it is what it is" over the course of 2020 (fig. 6a, searched
on June 8, 2021) and daily search volume data for "it is what it is" searched between August 1
and October 15 (fig. 6b, searched on June 8, 2021). Data source: Google Trends (https://www
.google.com/trends).
COVID situation could be under control with a thousand Americans dying every
day, the president responded, “They are dying, that’s true, and you ha-. . . it is what it
is, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can” (Axios 2020; emphasis
added). The headlines that followed did not generally convey that the president had,
earlier in the same interview (Axios 2020), said “We saved millions of lives. . . . We
would’ve lost millions of people. Millions of people. One person’s too much. We’reHaas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 41
at 140,000 people” or the fact that he later (Axios 2020) said, “This is a very serious
thing. Do you think I—We have 140,000 people at this moment. . . . This is a very very
serious situation.” Instead, the headlines and a number of political cartoons (e.g., The
Week Staff 2020) repeated and re-circulated the apparent proverbial acceptance—“it
is what it is”—of those 140,000-plus deaths.
A second peak in search interest for “It is what it is” occurred on August 18 (fig.
6). This spike seems most likely to have been driven by Michelle Obama’s invocation
of the proverb in a speech on the first night of the Democratic National Conven-
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tion. In that speech (CNN 2020), the former First Lady turned the proverb back on
President Trump, saying (emphasis added): “So let me be as honest and clear as I
possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. . . . He cannot
meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what
it is.” Here again, a single proverbial invocation by a high-status figure appears to
have had a dramatic impact on public search interest. Yet it is also clear that public
interest in this phrase had been elevated since mid-March, so although the rhetoric
of politicians appears to have shaped the search interest in August, it is also possible
that the rhetoric of the public helped to put that particular proverb on the presi-
dent’s tongue, much as the president’s invocation set the stage for the former first
lady’s usage. The increasing convergence on this proverbial framing may also help
to account for the third clearly evident spike (fig. 6), which occurred on October 2,
2020, the date that the public learned that President Trump had tested positive for
COVID-19 and was being flown to Walter Reed Medical Center (see, for example,
Pitts 2020).
Although the apparent impact of these high-profile events is notable, it is also
notable that “as far back as 2008, we knew that most query spikes caused by news
attention tend to last for 3 to 7 days” (Copeland et al. 2013; see, for example, Rivera
et al. 2020), while some of the increases in search interest observed here appeared
to last for weeks or even months. Thus, despite the likely influence of media atten-
tion on the patterns described here, this timeline suggests that some larger concern
might also be contributing to the observed shifts in search interest for some of these
proverbial phrases.
Internet search trend patterns have been shown to have predictive value in other
disciplines, at least in regions where large portions of the population are web users
and where the internet is used as a first line of access to relevant information (e.g.,
Carneiro and Mylonakis 2009; Valdivia et al. 2010). Although search query tools
have been more typically utilized in endeavors like medical/disease surveillance and
economic/consumer surveillance (Jun, Yoo, and Choi 2018), it seems clear that this
surveillance function may sometimes be profitably extended to folkloric research
(see, e.g., Gordon 2021). Such a possibility is consistent with the observation that
“search traffic exhibits high correlation with social phenomena” (Jun, Yoo, and Choi
2018:71). Within months of the initial reports of COVID-19 cases, researchers were
attempting to track the disease using Google Trends (e.g., Ortiz-Martinez et al. 2020;
Walker, Hopkins, and Surda 2020), and in the analyses presented here, we can track
some of the social sequelae of the outbreak using that same platform.42 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
Conclusion
In the first half of 2020, the lives of people in the United States and around the world
were suddenly and dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although
these events may seem far removed from traditional paremiological research, the
results presented here suggest that proverb search trends may offer some insight into
public reaction to this pivotal sociohistorical event. Given the degree of resistance
to mask mandates and business closures in the United States in the second half of
2020, for example, it is interesting that the trajectory of “coronavirus” interest was
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more strongly correlated with relative search volume for “desperate times” than for
“desperate measures” in the early days of the pandemic. It is also notable that of all
the proverbial phrases referenced in this paper, the phrase that most strongly cor-
related with the trajectory of search interest for coronavirus in the early months of
2020 was “this too shall pass.”
As the pandemic loomed, Google users in the United States were captivated by a
philosophy arguing that we were “all in this together.” Although different segments of
the population were impacted in different ways, the social, occupational, economic,
and academic consequences were so broadly experienced that we were, almost all,
in one way or another, in it together. Such solidarity is not inevitable, however, and
proverbial wisdom also argues for self-interest. From the earliest days of toilet paper
hoarding, the early pandemic months might well have been framed as a time of “every
man for himself,” for example. The Google Trends data indicate, though, that this was
not the case (see fig. 7).
Instead, through at least those early days of shared uncertainty, the proverbial
wisdom of the moment both called on us to be one and reminded us that we were.
"All In This Together" vs. "Every Man for Himself"
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75
50
25
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Figure 7. Weekly pattern of relative search volume for “all in this together” vs. “every man for
himself ” over the course of 2020 (searched on June 8, 2021). Data source: Google Trends
(https://www.google.com/trends).Haas, The Proverbs of a Pandemic 43
Appendix
Stability of relative search volume (RSV) values of COVID-19 terms and correlations with
relative search volume values for “coronavirus” (December 1, 2019, to June 1, 2020)
Correlation with RSV for
Candidate Phrases “Coronavirus” on 7/11/20
Potentially Associated with Stability of RSV: Stability of RSV: and (in parentheses) 7/15/20,
the COVID-19 Pandemic Range1 Average2 7/21/20, and 7/25/203
Comparator Term:
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coronavirus all > .99 > .99
Phrases Included in Figure 1:
Wuhan all > .99 > .99 .44 (.44, .44, .45)
COVID-19 all > .99 > .99 .87 (.87, .87, .87)
pandemic all > .99 > .99 .85 (.85, .85, .85)
“Chinese virus” all > .98 > .99 .43 (.42, .41, .43)
“flatten the curve” all > .99 > .99 .93 (.93, .93, .92)
“social distancing” all > .99 > .99 .81 (.80, .80, .81)
“shelter in place” all > .99 > .99 .66 (.65, .65, .66)
“toilet paper” all > .99 > .99 .87 (.86, .87, .86)
Phrases Included in Figure 2:
“uncharted territory” .64 to .77 0.70 .61 (.67, .70, .62)
“new normal” .90 to .92 0.91 .30 (.29, .28, .33)
Phrases Included in Figure 3 and 4
(or Associated Discussion):
“err on the side of caution” .67 to .75 0.71 .63 (.57, .57, .58)
“desperate times”4 .48 to .59 0.52 .63 (.56, .58, .56)
“desperate measures”4 .35 to .42 0.39 .41 (.55, .37, .41)
“safe than sorry”4 .29 to .37 0.33 .50 (.45, .39, .45)
“keep calm and carry on” (US) .65 to .77 0.71 .73 (.62, .69, .72)
“keep calm and carry on” (UK) .85 to .89 0.87 .82 (.73, .78, .74)
“this too shall pass” .93 to .95 0.94 .86 (.85, .84, .84)
“it is what it is” .75 to .85 0.81 .75 (.76, .75, .67)
“one day at a time” .94 to .96 0.95 .65 (.65, .66, .65)
“worse than the disease” .87 to .92 0.89 .48 (.40, .45, .41)
“worse than the problem” .85 to .87 0.86 .34 (.38, .34, .38)
“silver lining” .71 to .84 0.76 .62 (.63, .66, .70)
“light at the end of the tunnel”4 .37 to .50 0.44 .27 (.24, .21, .28)
“all in the same boat”4 .33 to .57 0.46 .20 (.22, .13, .23)
“all in this together” .93 to .94 0.93 .63 (.63, .61, .61)
“home is where the heart is”4 .16 to .40 0.27 –.17 (.11, –.10, –.01)
1. Relative search volume values were compared to see how well the RSVs obtained on July 11, 2020, predicted
values obtained on July 15, 2020, July 21, 2020, and July 25, 2020, and how well the values obtained on each of
those dates predicted the values obtained on each of the other dates. These values represent the range of those
reliability estimates (based on Pearson product-moment correlations) across the six possible comparisons.
2. This value represents the average of the six stability comparisons computed.
3. Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the paper and discussion in the text are based on Google Trends results obtained
in searches on July 11, 2020. The values in the parentheses are included to provide a sense of the stability of
the correlations across the four search dates.
With the exception of “all in the same boat” searched on July 21, 2020, the correlations shown for phrases
associated with figures 1 through 3 were all significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) on all four dates, whether
tested with Pearson’s r or Spearman’s rho. The correlation for “home is where the heart is” was not significant
at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) for any of the search dates, whether tested with Pearson’s r or Spearman’s rho.
4. The RSV values obtained for these italicized phrases showed average stability values less than r = .70. As
such, these results should be interpreted with some caution.44 Journal of American Folklore 135 (2022)
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Steven Rouse and Mark Snyder for their encouragement and feedback on earlier drafts
of this manuscript, as well as to two external reviewers, Lisa Gilman, and the editorial staff at JAF for
their valuable feedback.
Notes
1. See “Home Is Where the Heart Is” cartoon by Joe Heller on the Cagle website (https://www.cagle.
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com/joe-heller/2020/03/home-heart).
2. The Winter 2016 issue of the Journal of American Folklore was a special issue edited by Timothy
Tangherlini. This issue was dedicated to an exploration of computational methods that provide researchers
with new ways to identify patterns in folkloric data.
3. A Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r), here computed using the CORREL command
in Excel and checked using SPSS, provides an index of relationship. A correlation of r = 0 would indicate
no linear relationship between two variables, while a correlation of r = +1.0 would indicate perfect pre-
dictive value. Although there is some disagreement about how the magnitude of the intermediate values
of r should be interpreted, correlations above r = .3 seem to be “large” in the sense of being relatively
uncommonly reported, at least in published psychological research (Gignac and Szodorai 2016; Hemphill
2003).
Although the results are not presented here, correlations were also computed using Spearman’s rho,
and the general pattern of results (in terms of statistical significance at the 0.01 level) was not affected.
4. RSV results can be downloaded in a CSV format. When Google Trends reported values of “< 1,”
those values were set to 0.5 for the analyses (and graphs) presented here, as a numerical value must be
specified in order for a correlation coefficient to be computed.
5. Although such an approach is no doubt idiosyncratic, as fieldwork often is (Tangherlini 2016), the
approach parallels efforts like Barrett Jere Whiting’s (1989) compilation of encountered proverbs into the
book Modern Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings (see Larry Benson’s discussion of Whiting’s method in the
foreword) and Doyle, Mieder, and Shapiro’s note that The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs was based, in
part, on their efforts at “heightening our own vigilance for ‘new said saws’ in the discourse and popular
culture surrounding us” (2012:xi).
6. In the early weeks and months of the pandemic, an effort was made to “flatten the (epidemiological)
curve” by asking people to take actions that would slow the spread of the virus. The goal was to avoid
overloading hospitals and other health care settings. One key strategy for flattening the curve was to
practice “social distancing” by staying at least 6 feet away from others. Another strategy for flattening the
curve was to ask people to “shelter in place” by staying home as much as possible and avoiding unneces-
sary social contacts, limiting the opportunity for the virus to spread from person to person and from one
geographic region to another. In preparation for this sheltering in place, many people decided to stock
up on supplies, and drastic shortages (of toilet paper as well as other goods) were reported around the
United States.
7. Approximately three-quarters of US states and territories issued orders for residents to stay at
home for all or portions of the period between March 1 and May 31, 2020, but only eight had orders that
extended beyond May 31, 2020 (Moreland et al. 2020).
8. Google Trends analyses suggest that this apparent endorsement led to increased search interest in
both drinking and injecting disinfectants the next day, and in increased interest in information about
poison control centers 2 days later (Rivera et al. 2020).
9. The phrase remained largely unfamiliar until a copy of the original poster was found in a British
bookstore in 2000 (University of London 2014).
10. The correlation of relative search volume for US searches with RSV for UK searches was r = .76
(based on RSV data downloaded on July 11, 2020).
11. Although relative search volume for this phrase was quite variable over the four search dates on
which this article is based, all four searches showed a clear spike in interest on April 6, 2020.You can also read
