First there was NFL player Damar Hamlin suffering a cardiac arrest on national television; a week later Canadian reporter Jessica Robb had a mysterious ‘health emergency’ during a live broadcast; and last week Lisa Marie Presley died suddenly at the young age of 54. 

After barely a year and a bit of the world wide roll out of rushed to market COVID-19 experimental vaccines and already swarms of once committed woke left, who never questioned the jab, are beginning to distance themselves from the current thing. Now, a professor of English at Ohio State University has coined a term for this trend: Reflexxive.

“It’s not reflective,” pontificates the professor, who asked not to be named. “It’s reflexxive. A reflexxive person doesn’t admit that they were wrong, but are ready to pivot to the other side without being deemed hypocritical. It’s a tale of two cities!” he chuckles from his office on the Columbus, Ohio, campus.

Safe and Effective? Not in 2023

The OSU professor, who specializes in Charles Dickens, first came up with the term after watching Buffalo Bill’s player Damar Hamlin drop to the ground during a Monday Night Football game. “The bar went silent,” he tells GWU! “I immediately thought of the vaccine, as did many others in the bar. The next day after reading hundreds of Twitter posts I had a sick feeling in my stomach. And it wasn’t COVID, I’m triple vaccinated.”

He goes on to describe the feeling of turning against something he felt so strongly about. “Safe and effective. I was the first to encourage my students to get a vaccine, not that they had a choice, but now I’m not so sure. But I wouldn’t call myself Qanon for thinking that!”

Word of the Day

The prof proffers that the injury to Hamlin and more recently the death of Presley are all his students are talking about. “They’re not hypocrites or conspiracy theorists. They’re just being reflexxive, and in this confusing age one should be allowed to move between ideas, politics, especially with all this misinformation that the mainstream press is spewing.”

And while his new word hasn’t gone viral, yet, the editors at Merriam-Webster have already gotten in touch with the doctor of Dickens, but haven’t confirmed whether or not it will make the next edition of the dictionary. “No news is good news,” he frowns, “unless it has to do with vaccines.”

The Current Thingamajig

For Jenny Jacques, a star student at OSU, the idea that Black Lives Matter, the COVID-19 Vaccine, or even Biden stealing official documents seemed like things she’d never think twice about, but lately she’s started to question all of it.

“I see a news story, even in the New York Times, and I wonder if it is real. I agree with the vaccine and I’m glad I got it, but I wonder if it’s both safe and effective, and why the media isn’t discussing these stories. We should all be demanding real answers, whether pro-pharma or anti-vax.”

In the last two years, the world has been subjected to new terminology to help people make sense of decisions that they were being forced to make. The ‘new normal’, ‘safe and effective’, and ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ are just a few examples. “It’s a lot to take in,” says our great expectations wordsmith. “And people are starting to worry in this very Orwellian way. A term like reflexxive makes it easier for people to switch ideas without being negatively labeled by others.”

And more and more people are becoming reflexxive without having to succumb to the media’s bombardment of conspiracy theories and the dark web.

“Of course I know that not everything on social media is true,” adds Jacques, “but that also includes what the mainstream press is saying too. Added to that they’re not answering our questions.” She explains that tabloid reporters like Rachel Gilmore seem to be the biggest spreaders of misinformation on social media. 

Trolling Around

The professor, however, expects that 2023 will see more descent towards the flailing publications and that more people who feel reflexxive will be looking toward citizen journalism on Substack and alternative news sources like getwokeup.com to make sense of what’s happening out there.

“We’ve all seen the Twitter files, which Elon released and we know that contrary viewpoints and the truth are often censored and twisted by the very institutions that we are supposed to trust. A reflexxive outlook allows us to make healthy, intelligent choices that keep our friends and family truly safe.”