Cloudy with a chance of sentences
How much should we care about words?
What do words mean? There are a million ways to answer this question, but I’m interested in two specific ones. One is literal—what do individual words mean? (My subscription to Word Daily, for instance, has introduced me to such zingers as “bedizen” and “pococurante”). The other is more philosophical. What do words mean in the age of climate and AI?
In a recent post I wrote for the climate education platform Terra.do, I brought up the semantic wrangling that COP delegates engage in every year to craft a statement that reflects their priorities. This back-and-forth captures the world’s attention, forcing non-communications people to think about the meaning of specific words to a degree that they rarely do in day-to-day life. The ripple effects that the choice of a single word like “out” has on people across all walks of life, engaged in all sorts of occupations, living in countries that don’t even speak English, are incredible to consider. “Out” vs. “down” vs. “away”; “should” vs. “shall”—a matter of mere letters could influence people and flows of capital on a vast scale, could fundamentally alter the character and quality of Planet Earth as we know it, could potentially spell life or death for millions (billions!) of people.
I think of this example every time I get a bit pedantic about words. Does it really matter if an organization is consistent in its capitalization? Will it really make a difference if its employees use numerals for “1” and “2” rather than spell them out? Do minor, almost unnoticeable grammatical slips—take, for instance, a sentence like “climate change and the energy transition, whose tumult have captured the world’s attention, are continuing apace”—really knock a company from hero to zero? (Points to anyone who can spot the snafu in the previous sentence.)
Of course, grammar, usage, and style are slippery concepts, subject to various conflicting cross-currents, including institutional inertia, prevailing sentiment, and just plain “what feels right” (I am still blown away every time I encounter a word like “coördinator” in The New Yorker, which is the only major American publication I am aware of that places the two-dot diaeresis over the second “o”). In climate diplomacy, does “out” really mean “out”? What if no time horizon is given? In other words, the way people interpret words, and the way words act on other words, are often just as important as the meaning of individual words themselves.
If, by now, you feel like you’re choking on a word salad, I don’t blame you. I spend an inordinate amount of time debating in my head how we should, for instance, describe the process of what we’re doing with climate change. Do we “fight” it? Is it a “battle”? (Is that all a tad too violent for a corporate audience?) Maybe we should “resist”. No, that implies climate change has agency. Or “arrest”, “stop”, “halt”. But that implies we will let temperatures settle at their current unacceptably high level. Or “reverse” climate change—this one is a bit of a mind-bender, since from the perspective of pure semantics, the reverse of change is still, in fact, change.
I named my consultancy and blog “Word Clouds” because I wanted to merge two strands—communications and climate—in a clever, pithy way that embeds multiple meanings. The name came to me one night while I was lying in bed, potential monikers zipping through my head. What I wouldn’t have given to be an AI chatbot. Chatbots never agonize over words—to them, words are just the result of fancy math problems. Indeed, the tsunami of AI-generated words washing over the world is fundamentally re-contextualizing the meaning of words. Chatbots that can intelligibly predict the next word in a sentence based on the corpus of material available on the internet basically turn words into nothing more than medians, the center of statistical bell curves.
The truth is out there
What a vexing—depressing, even—future for humanity’s most fundamental tool. I’m sure I’ll have more to write about this in the future, but for now I’ll leave you with a scene from one of the greatest episodes of one of the greatest TV shows ever made: The X-Files, specifically the season three masterpiece “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’”. In it, Jose Chung, a crotchety, brilliant author, is discussing a mysterious and convoluted alien abduction case with Agent Scully. The following exchange (credit scriptslug.com) is worth keeping in mind for anyone—climate-minded or not—who has ever agonized over words.
