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Lex maniac

“Investigating changes in American English vocabulary over the last 50 years”

Tag Archives: climate change

December 31, 2023 net zero

net zero

(2000’s)

A term in statistics used to denote an equivalence of what is coming in and what is going out, “net zero” was in use well before 1970 in discussions of finance, physics, or any field where measurement and computation are necessary. The concept is deceptively simple: when two forces, streams, rates, etc. moving in opposite directions match each other perfectly, you end up with no discernible change and each side remains exactly the same. The word “net” permits us to get rid of superfluities and distractions, arriving at the number that matters, which in this case is not a number at all, strictly speaking, but the absence of one. Like the zero-sum game, “net zero” denotes a kind of stasis and has a strong binary bias; the more competing flows you have, the harder it is to envision all of them balancing out and producing a neutral state.

Now, “net zero” has come to be mated with energy usage and emissions (which we used to call “pollution”) to an extraordinary degree. It has become much more widespread as an adjective than before, followed by words like commitment, emissions, goal, journey (!?), operations, standard, strategy, target, or transition. The meaning hasn’t changed, but the field of operation has narrowed, and it may never widen back out. If so, another expression must come along to replace it, because we will continue to require a way to express that idea of parallel or simultaneous streams of activity effectively canceling each other, creating an even, steady state.

I remarked last week on our global habit of pushing the work of reducing emissions endlessly into the future, and “net zero” certainly pulls its weight in that endeavor. The numbing frequency with which the term recurs in talk of climate change has caused it to become a mantra or shibboleth of sorts, a way of faking seriousness about the problem while deferring action. If you say “net zero” often enough, maybe no one will notice that you aren’t really compensating for ongoing, or increasing, addition of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. One reason “net zero” is so attractive in such discussions is that eliminating fumes caused by extracting and burning fossil fuels seems unattainable, even to those who see it as necessary to our survival. It is easier to assume that we will continue to spew the gases but magically find ways to negate them.

Although I have covered a couple other expressions involving the word “zero,” I have never commented on the word itself. “Zero” has a certain mystical, liminal quality in language as in mathematics. It is the dividing line between positive and negative numbers, for one thing, so it can’t help being liminal. It’s where you turn from numbers that we encounter and work with every day to numbers that aren’t really there except as a convenience, or fiction. (When we go from having five apples to four, we do not say we have gained negative one apples but that we have lost one.) Its power increases when we rule out negative numbers from the outset. Then zero becomes an absolute barrier; passing through it requires pure transgression, an upsetting of the natural order. (Think of the portent of the title “Beyond the Zero” in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that takes full advantage of nothingness expressed as both mathematical and philosophical concept.) Going beyond the zero is not only unnatural, it is irrevocable.

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December 18, 2023 global stocktake

global stocktake

(2020’s | bureaucratese? journalese?)

“Global stocktake” smacked me in the face last week, turning up in several articles about COP28, the recently concluded UN climate conference. It struck me as entirely new, but it isn’t; the cognoscenti were using it as far back as 2015. (Sightings, or is that citings, before then were rare and limited to the Australian press.) In that year of the Paris climate conference, the world’s nations — well, almost all of them — agreed that they would be graded on their climate-improving performance by their peers, but not until 2023. I missed “global stocktake” that time around, but there’s no missing it this time around.

Granted that the phrase is not totally new. I notice mainly that it very lately began turning up unremarked all over the place in the U.S. press, as if we had been using it glibly for years. “Stocktake,” presumably a back formation of “to take stock,” means “inventory” or “evaluation.” The word is not familiar in American English; it seems to have arisen in Australia somewhere around 1980, mostly as a noun. To this day, it occurs primarily in British varieties of English. I do believe “global stocktake” marks the first time the word has come up in American English, at least in any density. We’ll make room for it, of course. The American will to take in immigrants waxes and wanes, but American English never loses its appetite for foreign words — even British ones.

The other odd thing about the recent use of the phrase is that it seems to have become more or less synonymous with the conference itself rather than the distinct process of judging how well various nations have met their pledges. “Global” does suggest a more general approach, but it also seems like a more rigorous accounting is in order. It’s all in the rear-view mirror now, and the conference issued a statement that was slightly more encouraging than the last statement, but it’s all theater, and we continue to defer serious action to reduce emissions. Ten years off, sure, but next year? Forget it. We still don’t know what it’s like to treat the planet to a significant reduction in heat-trapping gases — the air got cleaner briefly during the pandemic, but we reverted to the old ways as soon as we could — yet every year we say we’re going to try even harder to find out. The optimism provoked in some quarters by the new resolution may be the result of relief that any statement was issued at all, rather than a sincere belief that anything was accomplished. Somehow global stocktakes never lead to direct, immediate steps to keep temperatures from going up. Humanity remains in a greenhouse-cum-prison of its own making; perhaps “global stockade” would be more to the point.

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October 11, 2021 plant-based

plant-based

(1980’s | scientese | “plant,” “vegetable,” “vegetarian”)

Confirmed carnivore that I am, I’m always a little bemused by this expression — I concede that it makes sense, though “plant-rooted” might be more poetic. At its broadest, it means “made from things that grow out of the earth.” A plant-based diet means you eat predominantly, but not exclusively, fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, fungi, and things made from them. (Lovely Liz from Queens likes to quote Michael Pollan’s dictum, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”) The emphasis is more on avoiding animal products than on supplementing them. So it’s veganism with room for backsliding, but the foundation is clearly vegetarian. That would seem to warrant the firmness and solidity of “based.”

“Plant-based” existed in the seventies, but no one used it to talk about food. That was true as late as 2000. The first citation I found (1979) modified ethanol, intended to distinguish it from petroleum-based gasoline back when we started talking about using it as an additive. (No one was thinking about climate change in those days, just the fact that fossil fuels had gotten expensive and corn prices kept going down.) It might also be used for pharmaceuticals or vaccines, and it frequently modified “product.” It still does all that, and it may have an abstract use as well, as in “plant-based business” or “plant-based lifestyle.”

The beauty of the phrase is its sheer reach; just about anything can be plant-based. We tend to think of it first with reference to food, and it continues to have a strong bias toward products with animal counterparts — fake meat, fake leather, etc. After all, most plant-based products make no attempt to impersonate flesh or hide. “Plant-based” is also widely employed to imply that the product so described is safer and/or healthier to use and less harmful to the environment, and, if food, minimally processed — is a vegetable “plant-based,” or simply “plant”? — even if the details are not spelled out.

Much is made in some circles over the resources required to produce meat, and the point is well taken. Growing animals in order to slaughter and eat them is wasteful, shockingly so in some cases. Plants are more efficient, but they too are born of the earth; exploiting plants means exploiting the planet. Maybe we’ll wear our old earth out a little slower if we switch to plant-based diets, but we will still wear it out. The earth’s carrying capacity cannot be made infinite, no matter how good we get at extending it.

What will happen to this expression and its relatives if we, as a species, consume less and less of our fellow animals? It will last as long as we find it necessary to distinguish alternatives to animal flesh from the real thing, and such distinctions seem likely to be needed for at least a few more decades. If veganism becomes the norm, we may have to go the other way and start saying “animal-based” instead. Presumably, “veggie burger” will go extinct at that time as well. Anything that eases the ubiquity of the vastly irritating “veggie” is all right with me.

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August 30, 2021 baked in

baked in

(2000’s | financese? | “built in”)

In a literal sense, we use “baked in” to refer to an ingredient incorporated before cooking, meaning that it is inseparable from the other ingredients and inextricable from the dish as a whole (as “baked-in flavor”). When we use it figuratively, it means something more like “inevitable.” It seems to have originated among financial types in the seventies and eighties (LexisNexis records the great banker Walter Wriston dropping it in 1979), generally in the form “(already) baked in the cake,” i.e., predetermined because macroeconomic conditions now in place (not necessarily because we planned it that way) must result in certain consequences no matter what we do.

Nowadays “baked in” retains that air of inevitability, but an alternate connotation has arisen: there from the start (also inherent in the literal). It is unreasonable to expect to get rid of it because it was always there, and everything around it has changed to reflect its presence. Any strongly held tenet of a political stance, a social movement, a scientific process, or a hunch can be baked in — and the phrase is still used often to talk about markets and marketing. Take a sentence like “In America, racism is baked in,” a proposition obvious to anyone with a glancing knowledge of our history. It was there from the beginning, it’s impossible (so far) to get rid of, and it continues to loom over contemporary politics and events.

“Baked in” doesn’t have to refer to a flaw, but it usually does. Here are two in the same ballpark: “hard-wired” and “overdetermined.” They are all generally used to explain after the fact why something happened and to tell us we should have seen it coming. The relation to the older “built in” — which “baked in” has not to date displaced — is obvious; the connection to “half-baked” is more subtle. “Steeped in” is another old culinary metaphor that works the same crowd.

Even now, “baked in” usually comes after the (linking) verb and spends little time acting as verb itself. (You do see it occasionally, especially among techie writers.) It doesn’t act as adjective often before a noun, either, but it could. It seems noteworthy that it is much more common in a passive mood than an active, a significant trait that may change over time. Poetic justice favors its use in discussions of climate change, but that turn does not seem to have been fully taken.

The descent from “baked in the cake” to “baked in” reminds us how many new expressions arrive at their final form simply by having pieces lopped off, usually at the end. An elaboration deemed necessary when an expression sounds new and daring grows tiresome over time, and we retreat gratefully to the shortened version. As with “lean in” and others, the process has yielded a new phrasal verb, or rather made an old one more common, operating over a much wider field.

Lovely Liz from Queens has ventured “baked in” more than once, which means she considers it a good candidate for the blog. Dead-on as usual, ba-bee! I know you will set me right if I have erred.

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September 22, 2019 walkable

walkable

(1980’s | businese (real estate)? journalese? | “convenient”)

Before it applied to downtowns, “walkable” had a general meaning — of or pertaining to conditions that permit perambulation, or, suitable for perambulating (as a hiking trail) — and it could modify specific nouns, such as distances, surfaces, or even shoes — most often distance, with topography figuring in occasionally. “Walkable” as in “compact, pleasant, and safe (from traffic and crime)” carries over many of the old meanings, but adds a gemütlich touch that has lodged it in the vocabulary of real estate agents and city planners. The word still describes, as always, a place that lends itself to walking, but somehow it carries more promise. In the old days, “walkable” was a neutral term. Now just about everyone wants walkable areas and towns, and the word has acquired a pleasing sound. “Bikeable” is following in its footsteps.

While the notion of limited distance persists in today’s usage, it is less essential. When you talk about a walkable city (as opposed to neighborhood or community), you mean an aggregation of smaller areas, most of which are pedestrian-scaled. If an area is walkable, that doesn’t mean you can cover all of it in an hour. The word evokes a different set of attributes; larger areas and longer distances may merit the term than in bygone days.

“Walkable” goes with “traffic calming” and a host of anti-motor and pro-pedestrian measures — bicycle paths (and resulting removal of traffic lanes), entire blocks turned into plazas, restricted parking, delayed green lights, etc. — a slow-brewing rebellion against Robert Moses-style urban design, which sundered neighborhoods with highways and measured everything by motorized vehicles. The streets of New York have changed dramatically in the last 25, and particularly the last 10, years — traffic capacity cut significantly with wide bike lanes, bus-only lanes at the curb, crosswalks mid-block, and more. It took a while, but the human scale is winning at last. Reducing the flow of cars and trucks on New York streets is absolutely a net gain. It creates inconvenience for some, but it means less air pollution and aggravation, which benefits us all. And somehow the city still crawls along about the same as ever. Walkable is workable.

The model of everyone jumping into their cars and driving madly off in all directions is so mid-twentieth century. If we look back a full hundred years, the population was less spread out (of course, there was less of it), with most long-range transportation provided by mass conveyances. We got drunk on prosperity after World War II and decided that everyone should have his and her own private train to get around. Car culture is getting harder and harder to sustain, though we’re doing our utmost to keep it going. Yet younger people seem to prefer the older ways; millennials are said to desire small, dense communities where they don’t have to drive, even to go to work. Such customs seem quaint, downright pie-in-the-sky, to one of my generation, an idealistic phase that the kids will probably grow out of. But putting a car in every garage has obvious drawbacks, even before you find out what carbon dioxide does to the climate. Those damn kids are on to something.

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August 11, 2017 sabermetrics

sabermetrics

(1990’s | journalese (sports) | “percentage baseball”)

Few of my few devoted readers being baseball fans, it behooves me to offer some explanation of this odd word. (Don’t you always look for chances to use “behoove” in a sentence?) “Sabermeterics” refers to rigorous statistical analysis, which begins by establishing a reliable set of numbers measuring the performance of single players and entire teams and then reinterpreting them, taking them apart, recombining them, and generating new statistics, thought to be more revealing than the old ones. The word itself is an eponym, “saber” being derived from the acronym SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971 as a small organization devoted to using statistics to understand baseball history. Nowadays, sabermetrics attracts more attention as a way of helping executives and managers arrive at the most effective ways to evaluate and use their players, or decide how much they should be paid or traded for. Now other sports have been bitten by the bug, and the concept may even be familiar to non-fans; many baseball abstainers have heard of Michael Lewis’s book “Moneyball,” an account of the Oakland A’s under general manager Billy Beane, who adopted sabermetric insights wholesale and built a successful team with limited means. (If you missed that, there was a Simpsons episode in 2010.)

The term has always been credited to one of its leading practitioners, Bill James, who has — not single-handedly — revolutionized our understanding of baseball. (Full disclosure: my copy of his “New Historical Baseball Abstract” is pretty much disbound due to wear.) He began a one-man samizdat in the seventies, producing mimeographed collections of statistics and evaluations of major-league players; within a few years, the annual “Baseball Abstract” was picked up by a major publisher. Since then, he has written several compendious reference books that have laid out new frameworks for understanding how baseball works. In 2003 the Boston Red Sox hired him as a special advisor, a post he retains. He has indeed created some very complex and arcane statistics, but they have become common currency in discussions of baseball.

There are two inspiring stories here: James’s rise from outsider devoid of credentials to respected insider; and the triumph of empiricism and scholarship. The first proves that such storybook careers remain possible, but the latter, it seems to me, has wider cultural import. The SABR scholars, with little to offer except patient, unremunerated toil, have applied a version of the scientific method to baseball, emphasizing observation, data gathering, and statistical analysis in order to reach well-founded formulas for success. And to a great extent, it has worked. Baseball teams can no longer ignore sabermetrics; the insights of those nerdy statisticians — “statistorians” as a pre-James pioneer, L. Robert Davids, called them — have become so standard that ignoring them is a form of malpractice. It may give us a flicker of faith that in the face of a rising tide of obscurantism, that kind of work still proves its worth and compels respect, even in a game as anti-intellectual and tradition-bound as baseball.

Like the sciences, sabermetrics ultimately proves itself through successful prediction. Why is it that sabermetrics gets more credit than, say, climate science, despite the fact that the broad claims made by climatologists thirty years ago have been borne out? It’s a much smaller audience, for one thing; most people don’t care enough about baseball to set any store by ingenious statistical hermeneutics, but nearly everyone has an opinion about climate change. Baseball has a very long tradition of statistical study, and there have always been a few “figure Filberts,” as people like James used to be called; outside of baseball, most people don’t understand statistical analysis and don’t hold with it, unless it happens to confirm what they already believed. In baseball, the goal is to win, and winning is clearly defined and easily measured. That is much less true in the greater world, where a lot more people win by casting doubt on human-caused climate change than by taking issue with sabermetricians.

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November 14, 2012 new normal

new normal

(2000’s | therapese? | “how we do it now,” “the way it is now”)

This phrase has been bandied about quite a bit lately. Hurricane Sandy brought a flood of uses, as commentator upon commentator, including Gov. Christie of New Jersey, bemoaned the increasing frequency of destructive storms. An NBC sitcom of that title (with “The”) debuted this fall. Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire is riffing on the expression, using “Normal is going to change again” as an advertising motto. Perhaps most aptly, cantankerous cartoon duck Mallard Fillmore noted that “Chronic abuse of the term, ‘the new normal’ . . . is the new normal” (October 20, 2012 — before Sandy!). All right, all right. I hear America knocking, and I shall respond.

A short history of this expression: “New normals” is a statistical term meaning simply new set of norms or standards, against which observations are henceforth to be measured. It could be derived from theory, but more likely from experiment. It was used in the 1970’s in this sense and probably before. Then “new normal” had some life as an adjective phrase in the 1970’s and 1980’s — an example would be “new normal relations” in discussions of diplomacy — but rarely used on its own as a noun. Something happened around 1990. The phrase began to crop up as a noun in a specific context, that of a traumatic event like a natural disaster, a death in the family, or even a mass killing like the Oklahoma City bombing. It was startling how often the phrase recurred in LexisNexis after 1990 in that narrow set of contexts, and the usage was the gateway to today’s fixed phrase. In those early instances, the phrase could take the definite article, the indefinite article, or a possessive pronoun. You have to keep an eye on the article; now “the” is a set part of the phrase, but that wasn’t always so. (As lovely Liz from Queens observed, the ascendancy of the definite article was influenced by expressions like “sixty is the new forty” or “gray is the new black.”) 9/11 gave the phrase a boost; it hadn’t achieved cliché status yet, but it was well and truly out there. By 2005, the phrase sounded comfortable in many contexts — oil prices, baseball, web design — and the backdrop of tragedy no longer was required.

Every nuance in the history of the phrase sketched above hews to one basic idea: the new normal is always the result of an irrevocable change or dislocation. When you can’t go back, you have to find, or create, an everyday framework that allows you to function and move ahead. That was true, in a less than dramatic way, about the statistical usage, and certainly true of the post-traumatic therapese use that grew up in the 1990’s. It’s the same story when you use it to talk about climate change. There’s an unfortunate corollary to that underlying principle: since change is usually for the worse, the “new normal” is usually harder, uglier, or less pleasant than the old. The new normal is a new low.

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