Tag: climate change

No Laziness on Climate Change

Nominations for words of the year are not just a sign that Christmas is around the corner – it reminds me that my stated aim to write regular Wordability columns has foundered once again. Clearly Laziness around my blog output should be my personal word of the year for 2019.

But one thing that is interesting about the choices for the UK’s two most prominent nominators is how similar their decisions are. Collins Dictionaries went first, picking Climate Strike as word of the year – Oxford Dictionaries has now followed with Climate Emergency.

Climate protestThis shouldn’t really be a surprise – despite the current UK fixation on Brexit and the ongoing election campaign, many are arguing that this focus on domestic issues  is distracting from the climate, which should be viewed as the single most important issue facing anybody at the moment. Collins and Oxford have tapped into the way that public events around the climate have really burrowed into public consciousness this year, and have come up with two sides of the same story as a way of summing up the year.

The reason that I was surprised though was that it has often felt like the dictionary makers are consciously vying with each other to choose different words, and that Oxford Dictionaries’ choices have sometimes seemed quite left-field. I’ve speculated in the past that they have suffered from being second off the blocks every year with making their decision. I was particularly struck by this in 2016, when Collins Dictionaries chose Brexit, which seemed to be the only word that anybody was using for those 12 months, and Oxford Dictionaries went with post-truth, which while apposite didn’t seem to me to quite hit the mark.

So this year I think that both dictionary makers have made decisions which are easy to agree with. And it has reminded me that while laziness around climate change is the thing which we all need to avoid in order to protect our planet, I will also be doing my level best to beat my blogging laziness and try to write more about the endless changes in the English language.

Why Fake News is Fake

Donald Trump was quick to deploy a familiar Fake News soundbite on his trip to the UK this week. When questioned in a press conference about the crowds in London who were protesting against his visit, his response was that he hadn’t seen the protests, and “a lot of it is fake news”.

It is increasingly obvious what Donald Trump means by the term Fake News – it means news that he disagrees with. There are countless examples of there being a documented fact on the one side and a condemnation of said fact as Fake News on the other, but there was something about the brazen dismissal of the protests, while the sound of them was audible during the press conference, which put the issue into technicolour. Dismissing something as false where there is immediate evidence that is is happening at the same time provokes the wider question of what the term actually means.

So Donald Trump says Fake News when what he means is news that opposes his world view, provided by the ‘Corrupt Media’, which is another one of his favourite Twitter go-to phrases. But it’s clever because for much of his base, I suspect this nuance is lost. When he says something is Fake, they take that on face value, and his world view is reinforced. It explains why he has a particular zeal when condemning something which is genuinely incorrect, as this can reinforce his wider usage. That probably explains this week’s overdone attack on Bette Midler as a “Washed up psycho” after she admitted tweeting out a Trump quote which wasn’t true. Seizing on instances of genuine Fake News allows the myth to be perpetuated that the instances of fakery are as widespread as the President would have us believe, and will add further belief to those who are prepared to take all of his utterances at face value.

And whatever daftness the President may spew out on Twitter, he will be well aware of how weaponising the term Fake News has allowed him to dismiss any or all attacks on him. He showed this week that he understands the value of words all too well. Speaking to Piers Morgan about climate change, he said: “I believe there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways. Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather you can’t miss.” What he is doing here is attacking the notion of climate change by suggesting that people keep on changing how they refer to it so that they can get the message across, therefore suggesting that it isn’t actually real because scientists keep having to sell it with a different word. He dismisses the science of climate change by focusing the conversation on the presentation of it, rather than the facts behind it. It is a very clever demonstration of how to use language to make your point, and affirms to me that he knows exactly what he is doing with the term Fake News.

Away from Mr Trump, it is also interesting that this week has seen two independent stories about dictionaries being asked to change definitions because of racial sensitivities, further demonstrating the impact that single words can have on the political and social spectrum. It is to dictionary-makers’ credit that changes are being made.

Dictionary.com is going to change the way it defines the word Black in response to the My Black is Beautiful campaign and the #redefineblack hashtag. The campaign has pointed out how some of the negative definitions of the word black can seem to co-exist with definitions of skin colour, leading to pejorative associations. Dictionary.com has now responded by saying it will swap the order of its definitions around, so that the definition which refers to people will now be above and not below the definition which reads “soiled or stained with dirt.” It said “While there are no semantic links between these two senses, their proximity on the page can be harmful. It can lead to unconscious associations between this word of identity and a negative term.” It’s a subtle change, but a subtle change which can make a more than subtle difference.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary has changed the meaning of the word Monolid, previously defined as ‘an upper eyelid without a fold, perceived by some in Asia to give an appearance of lethargy or laziness’. Following a complaint from a woman in Melbourne, Macquarie has updated the definition to ‘an upper eyelid without a fold, a characteristic of the eyes of many people of East Asian ethnicity’.

What does all this tell us? That the minutiae of word meanings matter, and that people are sensitive to them. And therefore, the games which people in power play with language have the power to cause genuine harm.

Time to Scrub Up

It’s not uncommon for advertising companies to coin new words in an effort to get their new product to take off, and many words and phrases from the world of advertising have done exactly what they say on the tin and entered common usage.

Whether the Axe male grooming range achieves this feat remains to be seen however, though you can’t criticise them for their efforts at least. Agency 72andsunny has created the word ‘Bathsculinity’, meaning to be confident in yourself inside and outside the bathroom, and is hoping that its series of adverts, starring actor and comedian Lil’ Rel Howery, will promote what it means to have bathroom self-confidence and will grow the Axe brand and cement the word in popular usage.

Adam Koppel, creative director at 72andSunny Amsterdam, said: “The purpose of the ‘bathsculinity’ campaign is to start a new conversation around masculinity in the 21st century about what it really means to be a man.” From a personal perspective, I find the word quite clumsy and not easy to say, which is always an indicator to me that something will struggle to catch on, while it is also not fulfilling a genuine semantic need. I don’t hold out enormous hope for Bathsculinity’s prospects.

The concreteberg (pic Thames Water)

Of course, if your thing is pouring concrete in the bath, then there is a word for you. We have become accustomed of late to fatbergs, enormous solid lumps being found in water systems which need to be destroyed. But this week, I read about a ‘concreteberg’ for the first time, as I suspect most people did, as Thames Water struggled to deal with a 100-metre, 105-ton lump of concrete in a Victoria sewer in central London. It is unclear exactly how it formed, though people pouring concrete down drains and sewers is a likely contributor. What is much clearer is that it will take around two months and lots of money to remove it.

While London is blocked under the surface, it has also suffered delays and hold-ups at ground level as well, as Extinction Rebellion has protested over the impact of climate change, bringing the name of this group into public consciousness. Separately, an interesting Swedish word is gaining traction on social media as a way of highlighting activities which have an impact on climate change. Flygskam, meaning flight shame, is increasingly appearing on postings as a hashtag to highlight the shame people are beginning to feel about the number of flights they take and the impact this is having on the environment.

As activists continue to insist that only fundamental changes to our lifestyles will arrest the climate damage now happening, it will be interesting to see whether Flygskam makes the leap across languages to become a de facto global term which people use when they are, or aren’t, flying.

And finally, an interesting tale from Australia, where Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore has suggested that the term disabled is insulting and should be dropped from society as it demeans disabled people, suggesting instead that they should be referred to as ‘access inclusion seekers’.

I am lucky enough not to be disabled, but can judge this fairly easily on the reaction of disabled people, which has been an almost universal dismissal of the idea and a suggestion that the new term is at best unnecessary but is actually patronising and insulting to boot. Clearly another new word which isn’t needed.