Drowning in a Mill Pond

Woe! Doom! My Oxford Dictionary is out-of-date, and this means I am too. The (political) climate is changing and there’s no space for variety of meaning and experience in language anymore; language is full.

Take “pernicious”, which my old-fashioned dictionary propagandises as “the pernicious effects of the mass media”; a modern, objective, progressive Google search reveals this example has been improved upon, with “the pernicious effects of air pollution”.

Messaging in the metaverse is consistent and utilitarian. The working definition of “harmful” is that “the ozone layer blocks the harmful rays from the sun”, “effective” proposes, “effective solutions to environmental problems”, “environmental” reminds us that “acid rain may have caused major environmental damage”. And if these allusions to air, sunshine, and rain provoke an existential crisis, the online dictionary rewards you with the rhetorical question, “Does climate change pose an existential threat to humanity?”

My traditional dictionary defines “denier” as a unit by which the fineness of yarn is measured, but a quick search (expensive tights be damned!) reveals that “denier” is now a person who refuses to accept the truth of something despite general support of it. Of course, truth and popularity correspond, I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me before. There is even an evaluative example, “It makes no sense for an environmental watchdog agency to hire a denier of climate change.”

I’m not a denier. I’m a simple woe man. I sit here, bare-legged, praying, like those others who, “after several days of rain… were praying for sun,” praying for sun, while also praying that the ozone might save me from its harmful rays.  

Of course, I can burn my books (“natural gas produces the cleanest burn of the lot”) but how quickly can I close my mind to the myriad possibilities language opened to me before I knew better (and that “we’re hoping for better weather tomorrow”)?

He who controls language rules the world is a maxim attributed to tyrants, but they had general support, which makes it truth, and weren’t overly attached to human life, which is good for the planet. “Planetary air pollution and climate change” demand a global solution. Let’s hope whoever mastered definition can master the world, and that we don’t even have to notice. For surely it is better to drown sleeping in a millpond, than be swept away, resisting, in a torrent of acid rain.