Merriam-Webster no doubt bristled the neck hairs of a lot of copy editors and grammarians when it chose “they” as its Word of the Year of 2019, noting that "English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years," Merriam-Webster's website states. "More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. There's no doubt that its use is established in the English language ..."
Add me to the folks who say of this: “about dang time.”
Over at the Oxford Languages HQ, however, they—plural—couldn’t keep their choice for the year contained in a single word: “climate emergency.” Too bad they have no way to get the print media to ensure that all-too-accurate expression appears always in boldface caps. The company publishes the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary among other language-oriented publications.
Oxford said, “Our research reveals a demonstrable escalation in the language people are using to articulate information and ideas concerning the climate. This is most clearly encapsulated by the rise of climate emergency in 2019.” Even last year, people usually picked "emergency" when talking about health issues, hospital trips, and other family situations requiring immediate action, Oxford stated in a post on its website. "With climate emergency, we see something new, an extension of emergency to the global level, transcending these more typical uses." Climate is now three times more likely to be heard in the context of "emergency" than health.
In fact, everything that made the shortlist for Oxford’s Word of the Year connoted environmental matters, the usage of each having made big leaps this year. That list: climate action, climate crisis, eco-anxiety, climate denial, ecocide, extinction, flight shame, global heating, net zero, and plant-based.
Oxford also the noted that references to climate have been changing in government, academia, and media circles. Six months ago, for example,The Guardian reevaluated its use of “climate change,” and decided to use "climate emergency," "climate crisis," "climate breakdown" or "global heating" in its stories. At its website, Oxford notes:
The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, who outlined the terminology changes, said: ‘We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase “climate change”, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.’
Language choice in scientific reporting on climate science has been influential in this shift during 2019. With the publication of careful scientific analyses presenting the various consequences for the world’s communities should people fail to take action – see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, for example – an increasing number of climate scientists have urged their peers to ‘tell it like it is’ when communicating their research.
A recent article published in the journal BioScience and signed by 11,258 scientists from 153 countries argued that ‘scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat’, and presented their research to declare ‘clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.’
Now, if we can just get more politicians onboard not just with more accurate climate language but with urgent action dealing with that emergency.