You Too Can Coin a Word

The Hidden History of Coined Words ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190466763.003.0020 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 244-260

Author(s):

Ralph Keyes

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

New Words

What literate person hasn’t dreamed of creating a word that others adopt, thereby staking their claim to verbal posterity? This is far easier to dream about than do. Creating a neologism is hard. Getting others to adopt it is even harder. A gap in our vocabulary is the best precondition for a successful coinage. We need new words to help us discuss changing circumstances: technology, climate change, pandemics. Even when addressing verbal voids, neologisms must strike a chord, capture a widespread sensibility with a word or phrase, preferably one that’s vivid. Terseness helps, as does alliteration, and use of forceful letters such as b (bubble, bunk), k (ok, knockout), and z (sizzle, Zoom). Anyone who successfully creates new a word and gets it adopted can join Jefferson, Dickens, and Seuss in the annals of successful neology.

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The New Materialism

Deep Time, Dark Times ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823281367.003.0008 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 96-106

Author(s):

David Wood

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Hybrid Model ◽

New Materialism ◽

Direct Impact ◽

New Words ◽

New Concepts ◽

The World ◽

Ways Of Thinking ◽

Better Than ◽

Post Humanism

Post-humanism throws up deep questions about agency and responsibility at a point in human and terrestrial history at which we most urgently need answers. Do new materialists—a cluster of contemporary thinkers influenced by Spinoza, Deleuze, and feminism—help us with such answers? Is it enough to speak of the agency of things? Or a hybrid model in which humans share agency with natural forces? Or to rethink agents not as independent beings but essentially relational, assemblages? Is new materialism any better than the old one? It offers ways of thinking and talking that attempt to overcome or displace patterns of thought that generate blind repetitions of empty formulae. Following Deleuze, new materialism attempts to overcome the ways in which we are caught up in reactive forces, which has a direct impact on how we respond to climate change. But it is less plausible as ontology, often falling into performative self-contradiction, and more significant as discursive innovation. It opens the world in new ways, refiguring matter with new words, new concepts. It wants to point to the resistance, recalcitrance, and powers of things, but much of the work takes place in transforming our discursive inheritance.

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Averting robo-bees: why free-flying robotic bees are a bad idea

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20190063 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (6) ◽

pp. 723-729

Author(s):

Roslyn Gleadow ◽

Jim Hanan ◽

Alan Dorin

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Computer Simulation ◽

Food Security ◽

European Countries ◽

Plant Interactions ◽

Plant Insect Interactions ◽

Native Habitat ◽

Insect Pollinators ◽

Insect Interactions

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.

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Modelling ecosystem adaptation and dangerous rates of global warming

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20180113 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 221-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rebecca Millington ◽

Peter M. Cox ◽

Jonathan R. Moore ◽

Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Warming ◽

Diffusion Rate ◽

Individual Species ◽

Genetic Evolution ◽

Rates Of Change ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Warming Climate ◽

Intraspecies Competition ◽

High Trait

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).

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Prologue to the Forum: Vocabulary Across the School Grades

Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools ◽

10.1044/2019_lshss-19-00007 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 50 (4) ◽

pp. 461-465 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Suzanne M. Adlof

Keyword(s):

Word Learning ◽

Vocabulary Instruction ◽

Elementary Grades ◽

Reading Disorders ◽

Vocabulary Intervention ◽

New Words ◽

School Grades ◽

Grade Levels ◽

Ability Levels ◽

Instructional Settings

Purpose This prologue introduces the LSHSS Forum: Vocabulary Across the School Grades. The goals of the forum are to provide an overview of the importance of vocabulary to literacy and academic achievement, to review evidence regarding best practices for vocabulary instruction, and to highlight recent research related to word learning with students across different grade levels. Method The prologue provides a foundational overview of vocabulary's role in literacy and introduces the topics of the other ten articles in the forum. These include clinical focus articles, research reviews, and word-learning and vocabulary intervention studies involving students in elementary grades through college. Conclusion Children with language and reading disorders experience specific challenges learning new words, but all students can benefit from high-quality vocabulary instruction. The articles in this issue highlight the characteristics of evidence-based vocabulary interventions for children of different ages, ability levels, and language backgrounds and provide numerous examples of intervention activities that can be modified for use in individual, small-group, or large-group instructional settings.

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