Climate change has started to influence our language. Here's how

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Climate change isn't just affecting our planet, it's also shifting the language we use, as idioms take on new meaning and words are created to express the unique phenomenon.

Key points: New words are being created to describe climate-related events and feelings

Musicians and films are popularising some terms

A "public participatory artwork" was launched in 2014 to crowdsource new words

Some words have been popularised by musicians and filmmakers, while the rather grandly named Bureau of Linguistic Reality has started crowdsourcing new terms and definitions.

The Guardian media outlet also announced this month it was updating its style guide on climate, suggesting "climate sceptic" be swapped for "climate science denier", and "global warming" for "global heating".

"There are a lot of words and phrases that are coming into English that are becoming part of the new dialect," crossword creator and self-confessed word nerd David Astle said.

"It's looking at the fact this is a changing world, so what are the words we need?"

The new words

The term cli-fi might not be the most recognisable, but it's something many would be familiar with: climate fiction.

It refers to the barrage of books and films in recent years that usually deal with a world-destroying natural event and the desperate race for humans to survive it.

"Obviously it echoes sci-fi and it's a very particular type of sci-fi that is becoming more, scarily, plausible," Mr Astle said.

Notable film examples include Interstellar, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow — all of which depict catastrophic natural events that threaten to wipe out humans. While Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road explores what happens after an extinction-level event.

Meanwhile, musician Missy Higgins has popularised the word solastalgia for Australians after she named her 2018 album after the term.

Solastalgia was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 and is loosely defined as the distress you feel by environmental change to your homeland.

Other notable terms to have entered our discourse include:

Greenwashing: A form of marketing spin to make a product or business seem more environmentally friendly, even if it's not.

Green economy: Business and enterprise that is low-carbon, resource-efficient and socially inclusive.

Envirocrime [or ecocide]: Actions that have significant and damaging effects on nature or natural areas of significance.

Closed loop: A manufacturing system where waste or by-product of one process or product is used to make another, without creating additional waste or environmental impact.

Mr Astle said he hadn't just noticed new terms, but changes to existing idioms like tip of the iceberg, skating on thin ice, and moving at a glacial speed.

"You think about how icebergs were once these colossal things but they're melting now," he said.

"And glacial speed — now glaciers are actually moving at great pace, losing their mass.

"In the same way that 'to skate on thin ice' is the new normal, so to speak. Even permafrost is not so permanent."

The Bureau of Linguistic Reality

The Bureau is pitched as a "public participatory artwork" that was launched by two friends in 2014 in response to the changing environment and the ways we talk about it.

"[We are] experiencing a collective 'loss of words' as our lexicon fails to represent the emotions and experiences we are undergoing as our habitat rapidly changes due to climate change and other unprecedented events," its mission statement reads.

"To this end the The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is solemnly tasked with generating linguistic tools to express these changes at the personal and collective level."

The Bureau actively invites public submissions, and has already compiled a list of terms and definitions.

These include:

Blissonance: When an otherwise blissful experience in nature is wedded to or disrupted by the recognition that one is having an adverse impact on that place they are enjoying by being there.

Epoquetude: The reassuring awareness that while humanity may succeed in destroying itself, the Earth will certainly survive us.

Paleo-energetic: A way of describing an innovation or technology that has been forgotten by history but whose purpose is still much needed.

Morbique: The morbid desire to travel to places to experience them before they are radically altered by climate change or other manmade changes.

Empathetic blench: The visceral reaction of receiving a gesture of generosity that is fraught with environmental or social consequences, which the recipient may be more sensitive to than the giver.

Topics: climate-change, environment, languages, education, australia