Effective verbal and non-verbal virtual behavior in «new normal»

Language is still the main instrument for cognition and conceptualization. Languages inevitably reflect the latest shifts in human civilization. The article presents and illustrates the key linguistic processes caused by the pandemic in the Russian and English languages. The pandemic is coining new medical terms, actualizing already existing ones, assigning new meanings to words, and creating puns and memes. The author provides multiple examples chosen from Internet publications with the continuous sampling method. The COVID-19 lockdown has changed human communication modes and forced a shift from face-to-face to virtual communication. Observation, surveying and analysis help the author describe the main periods of changes in the current state of communication and suggests a trajectory for adaptation to a new communication paradigm. There are four periods: transition, «new normal», «new neutral», and effective virtual behavior. The article also describes new communication trends. Multimodal communication is one of them. This demands an ability to perceive, comprehend and create a multimodal message as well as to interact with it in an effective way. Multimodal communication has changed modern human thinking to a dynamic «clipping» one. The article presents tools necessary for effective virtual behavior now and on. They include new and traditional verbal and non-verbal tools, including paralinguistic ones. A trajectory for adaptation to a new communication mode implies learning new tools, confident command of them, augmenting them with traditional ones characteristic of live communication, gaining multimedia literacy, and polishing it.