Many have noticed that the language we have available to us isn’t sufficient to convey the things we’re experiencing in recent years. There is plenty of warning that humans, at least, are headed straight for a climate-induced apocalypse. But “apocalypse” evokes big, violent, sudden disasters. This is not going to be that, exactly. It’s going to be more of an ennuipocalypse: “a doomsday that occurs at an excruciatingly slow day to day time scale.”
That coinage, and more, are from the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. It’s a “a public participatory artwork by Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott focused on creating new language as an innovative way to better understand our rapidly changing world due to manmade climate change and other Anthropocenic events.”
It’s not just public but international. For example, teuchnikskreis is an adaptation of the German teufelskrieis, or catch-22. This one means “using new technologies to tackle environmental symptoms and byproducts caused by other (possibly older) technologies, which will in turn eventually produce their own unintended by-products and problems— for which newer technologies will then need to be produced. Teuchnikskreis is characterized by a sense of being stuck in a vicious cycle or spiral, thinking technology will be the solution to the problems created by technology.”
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is also a lovely website; have a look.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.