“When we were looking through the evidence, it was clear that issues relating to the climate were running through all the different lexical items we were working with. It reflects a real preoccupation of the English-speaking world in 2019.”
The word(s) “climate change” has morphed into “climate crisis” and again into “climate emergency” in a remarkably short period of time, so much so that Oxford Dictionaries has named ‘climate emergency’ Word of the Year for 2019.
‘Climate emergency’ earned pride-of-place, if that’s the right way to describe it, from an all-environmental shortlist that also included ‘eco-anxiety,’ ‘flight shame’ — aka flyjskam in Sweden, where the movement started in response to the growing feeling of shame felt in that country, birthplace of the environmental activist Great Thunberg, by frequent flyers — ‘climate action’ and this site’s bugaboo word, ‘climate denial.’
Climate emergency joins “youthquake,” “toxic,” “post-truth,” and “fake news” in the Oxford lexicon of recent words or expressions “shown through usage evidence to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations [note use of the Oxford comma] of the passing year, and have a lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” An editor at Oxford Dictionaries told the New York Times that the selection panel’s unusual decision to focus on climate-related expressions reflects the demonstrable escalation in the public conversation during the past year about fast-accelerating climate events.
The Oxford Corpus, a database that includes hundreds of millions of words written in English — which on the face of it would appear to disqualify flygskam — showed that use of the term climate emergency has increased more than a hundredfold since 2018, with a month still to go in the present calendar year. Climate emergency is now the most common compound using the word ‘emergency,’ appearing more than three times as often as the next most-used, health emergency.
In part, this was because a handful of respected, high-profile mainstream news organizations like The Guardian have decided to prioritize use of the term climate emergency to describe what was until recently called climate change or climate crisis. The Guardian made a conscious decision to use the term climate emergency to better convey urgency of the situation.
Oxford Word of the Year choices are often
politically inflected, Martin told the Times, but that does not mean the selection panel made a deliberately political calculation when examining the cultural impact of words.
“When we were looking through the evidence, it was clear that issues relating to the climate were running through all the lexical items we were working with,” Martin said. “It reflects a real pre-occupation of the English-speaking world in 2019.”
The Chinese-speaking world, too, one would like to think, though the jury is still out on that one.
The selection panel’s decision to narrow the final choice down to an all-environmental shortlist was not a deliberate decision to focus people’s attention on the rapidly changing climate but rather a strict — if admittedly subjective — reading of the public conversation, based on “lexicographical evidence.”
If nothing else, Martin might have added, Oxford Dictionaries’ choice simply reflects the greater immediacy in the way we talk about the climate.
In just 12 months — or 11, if you want to be calendar-specific about it — the term climate emergency, defined as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it,” soared from relative obscurity to, in the panel’s words, “one of the most prominent — and prominently debated — terms of 2019.”
Humour can be an effective way to raise climate awareness, some argue — at least among those who haven’t been directly affected by climate events themselves — as the German climate site Die Klimashutz-Baustelle noted in a compendium of climate-related quips and witticisms. To wit:
Two planets meet. The first one asks: ‘How are you?’
‘Not so well,’ the second answers. ‘I’ve got the Homo Sapiens.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the other replies, ‘I had the same. That won’t last long.’
Touché.
©Niklas Pntk-Pixabay