Dictionary friction

The challenge facing the people of Auckland is crushtocious. Delugical rain has brought panfusion to New Zealand's biggest city. A whole house lies flatcrested on a beach after slipghasting down a bank. 

This is not how the BBC reported the disaster. "Heavy rainfall has brought havoc," it said. But some believe such words are not vivid enough to describe what happened.

In 2014 two artists, Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott, set up the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. It invites people to invent words describing climate change and the way it makes them feel.

With a new vocabulary, they believe, we will be better at dealing with the situation.

One word the Bureau has produced is "nonnapaura". It is made up of the Italian words for "grandmother" and "fear". It came about when a woman told them she felt something she could not express.

"She said: 'I am terrified for my children... but I'm simultaneouslyAt the same time. wanting to experience grandchildren. I don't know how to share that with them,'" Quante explains.

Two other people wanted a word to describe an idea which they thought terrible: colonising other planets as an answer to climate change. The word they came up with was "marsification".

Some new words are rooted in particular places. The Bureau worked with people from San Francisco Bay whose houses were threatened by rising sea levels.

One new word was "mienterra", meaning "a false sense of solid ground beneath us". It is made up of the Spanish words for "lie" and "land".

New events have often changed people's vocabularies. Covid-19The official scientific name for the type of coronavirus that swept the world from March 2020. brought us the term "social distancing".

Some people believe that language affects the way we see and understand the world. For example, InuitGroups of indigenous peoples living in the Arctic and subarctic regions. people have a brilliant understanding of snow because they have 47 different words for it.¹

Does all change start with language? 

Yes: To change things we need other people to share our point of view. We can only do that by using words that they understand and that are forceful enough to persuade them, inventing new ones if necessary.

No: Most people are concerned about climate change not because they have been told about it, but because they have witnessed its effects. Language is an expression of what we already feel.

Or... Language may not be the immediate cause of change, but it certainly accelerates it. Once a term like "climate emergency" becomes generally accepted, people are far more likely to act on it.