Dictionary friction

The challenge facing the people of Auckland is crushtocious. After delugical rain that brought panfusion to New Zealand's biggest city, the streets are littered with torewisted trees and defloodfunctional cars. Landslides and sinkholesA hole in the ground formed naturally by a collapse. have made once-beauspirational neighbourhoods perilfactious. The ruins of a whole house lie flatcrested on a beach after slipghasting down a bank. 

This is not how the media reported the disaster. "Heavy rainfall has brought havoc," said the BBC, "downing trees, flooding homes and closing major roads." But while that paints a disturbing picture, some argue that the words are simply not vivid enough to describe what happened.

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

The idea is that if we can express our emotions through a new vocabulary, we will feel better able to deal with the situation.

One term the Bureau has produced is "nonnapaura", combining 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: "It was simultaneous hope and fear."

Two other people wanted a word to describe an idea which they thought terrible: colonising other planets as a solution to humanity's predicamentA tricky or dangerous situation.. The term they came up with was "marsification."

Some new words are rooted in particular places. The Bureau worked with people from San Francisco Bay to find terms describing coastal erosion and sea-level rises.

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

"The very real sense of urgency that is now upon us is reflected in our language," confirms Trish Stewart, an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. Between 2018 and 2020, use of the term "climate crisis" increased nearly 20-fold.

Language evolves more obviously in some periods than others. The Elizabethan era was a particularly fruitful one, thanks to gifted writers who enjoyed playing with words. A famous example is "incarnadine", meaning "to stain red", first used by Shakespeare in Macbeth.

Developments in religion, science and politics have also changed people's vocabularies. The word "evangelical" caught on during the ReformationA major movement in 16th Century Europe in which the Western Church split into Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church. to describe Protestants who believed faith was more important than doing good works. Covid-19 brought us the term "social distancing."

According to a theory called linguistic relativity, 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 better understanding of snow than others because they have 47 different words for it.¹

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 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.