The fate of the planet is in our hands. (Photo by Porapak Apichodilok from Pexels)
When Kermit the Frog of Sesame Street renown first uttered this line, he wasn’t talking about the Earth. However, he might as well have been, given that the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED’s) 2019 word of the year is climate emergency. (Okay, in my mind, it’s a phrase, but … technicalities!)
Climate change is a hallmark of our times and never more so than in 2019, the year that Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg famously chastised the ambassadors to the United Nations for their inaction, saying, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
A few decades ago, climate change was a serious concern; today, it has become a climate emergency. Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree that if we don’t take drastic action, the Earth’s surface temperature will likely increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030-2052, a level at which the effects will include irreversible changes such as more extreme weather events, sweeping migration and food shortages. The OED underlines the seriousness of our collective inability to take action by choosing climate emergency as its word of the year.
In its media release about its choice, the OED folks pointed out that the media helped turn the tide of language usage, stating:
“One high profile example of this language development is the changes made by the Guardian newspaper in its reporting of environmental news in May. The newspaper stated that instead of climate change, its preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis, or breakdown’ to describe the broader impact of climate change. The move prompted other media outlets to review and update their own policies and approaches to reporting on the climate.”
“The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity,” wrote the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katherine Viner.
Given the precarious state of the Earth today, all of the words on the OED’s shortlist of choices related to the environment. If that’s not a call to action, I don’t know what is!
supergrammarian 