Talk:jab

Use of 'Jab' in the US

The current 'vaccination' definitions for 'jab' are limited to UK/Australia, but recently US news is talking about "the jab"
Fox News: "I completely understand the pushback," she responded, adding that the COVID jab would not be the first vaccine to be mandated for institutions like public schools and the like – as polio, pertussis and other shots are already standardized. [1]
I don't know if this is an ephemeral linguistic phenomena or what. I get the sense that Americans grab stuff from UK/Australian English and make it common here, like "shrimp on the barby".
More: [2] @15:30 --Geographyinitiative (talk) 13:19, 31 July 2021 (UTC) (modified)

@Geographyinitiative: I don’t think it’s common. Yet. I still regard shot as AE, and jab as BE. Both are rather informal, or at least I would not expect either of them in any medical journal, but the more precise vaccination. Certainly international broadcasting of news is mostly BE, so it has an influence on journalists, or a global audience, but let’s monitor how usage changes in the general population residing in the US. Kai Burghardt (talk) 22:37, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

This is anecdotal, so probably not useful for Wikt, but some people I trust think that it's a phenomenon related to transnational disinformation initially aimed at the UK instead being targeted at the US, and people who took to the propaganda inflecting their speech to use the UK/Aus term. Ellenor2000 (talk) 08:33, 27 May 2024 (UTC)