Will “Glasgow” mean we screwed up our last chance?

Since 1971, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has elected an annual word-of-the-year, based on its global analysis of how the English language adapts to changing times. Recent notable examples are “post-truth” (2016), “toxic” (2018), and “climate emergency” (2019). It’s not that such words didn’t exist before. It’s more about the altered meanings we give to words, and how often we use them.

It’s not news to say that 2020 was an unprecedented year. It brought us the Pandemic, just for starters. But 2020 was unprecedented in another way. For the first time ever, the OED concluded that no one word could represent the rapid evolution of the English language demanded by such a wealth of unprecedented events. And so it took the unprecedented step of creating a Words of an Unprecedented Year report.

Of the sixteen words selected, many were pandemic-induced: Coronavirus, for example, and  lockdown. Social distancing. Superspreader. Some achieved renown through social and political tumoil in the USA: mail-in(ballot), impeachment, Black Lives Matter, cancel culture.

But the very first word-of-the-year, bushfire, was brought to us by the unprecedented reality of climate change, which can no longer be denied because it’s upon us. What with the pandemic having consumed so much bandwidth, it’s easy to forget the unprecedented Australian bushfires that started in 2019, and burned through March of 2020, killing 34 humans and over a billion wild creatures.

The OED’s final word of the unprecedented year that was 2020 was also environmental in origin: net zero. Emissions, that is. An expression of human ambition to address our climate emergency. Net zero wasn’t brand new, of course, but its use was on the rise, prodded along by China’s unprecedented September announcement of its goal to be net zero by 2060. The term’s popularity has continued into 2021. There’s even talk of net zero health care in some circles, though probably not within the Ontario government.

But despite all the exuberance generated within the English language in 2020, the word unprecedented itself won Dictionary.com’s People’s Choice for 2020.

All of this leaves me wondering what word(s) we will find to see us through 2021, and how and why they will rise to fame. Afterall, US politics has become so much more boring with the orange guy removed from the helm. And we’re all just sick and tired of the pandemic. Even the Olympics feel remote.

The weather, however, does remain a potential source of candidate words. The month of July alone has already brought us unprecedented heat, drought, and fire out west, and unprecedented flooding in Europe, all with immense impacts on the lives (and deaths) of our fellow humans. Could such events trigger a whole new level of meaning for the word danger, one that signifies and encompasses the risks we bring upon ourselves with our continued burning of fossil fuels?

At the Rio Earth Summit, way back in 1994, one hundred and fifty-four nations agreed to combat “dangeroushuman interference with the climate system”. Since then, twenty-five years of COP meetings have generated new English language meanings for the names of key cities. Kyoto: A 1997 treaty with legally binding emissions reduction targets. (Canada failed and dropped out.) Copenhagen: a heartbreaking 2009 event derailed by powerful vested interests.  And Paris, a sort-of-breakthrough agreement that hasn’t yet but might still reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases.

This November, the city of Glasgow will have its chance, as host of COP26, to give new meaning to its own name. In this make-or-break climate decade, will Glasgow come to mean “we screwed up our last chance”? Or will it become synonymous with “together, we preserved a healthy, safe, and livable planet”?

Personally, I’m rooting for the words Glasgow and COP26 to soar in usage and positive meanings this fall. In fact, I want them in the running for 2021’s words-of-the-year because what happens in Glasgow just might determine the ongoing health of my little patients. And that is my business, as a pediatrician.

Elaine Blacklock M.D., F.R.C.P.(C)