Missing Words | Frankly #30

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Science, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences

4.8 • 553 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2023

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last Friday we released Nate's annual Earth Day presentation for 2023: a reflection on ~3 dozen common English words which are semantically disconnected from what they really mean - paired alongside more biophysically accurate terms. Building on that theme, this week's Frankly is a thought experiment of which ecological and systems concepts do not exist in the English language - but perhaps should. All of this is to say, the semantics and connotations of our language are extremely powerful and have direct impacts on the way we think and act. Could shaping our speech to be more accurate, empathetic, and comprehensive cause our aggregate actions to do the same?

For Show notes and more: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/30-missing-words

To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/wDLTkAad3rY

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Greetings. Last week I did an Earth Day talk called Words of Our Lives, and it cataloged three dozen or so terms like fossil fuels that from a system's perspective actually have different meanings like flammable fossils, consumer, human,
0:26.6	economic growth, metastatic cancer. After reflecting on that exercise, it made me wonder what words in our culture don't exist, but maybe should.
0:42.3	And I just went for a hike with the dogs looking for morale mushrooms. All I found was some deer
0:50.5	ticks and wood ticks. But this is all fresh in my mind. So I'm just going to riff here on
0:56.4	some words that should exist in our culture. And when I say culture, I am a citizen of the world,
1:06.0	one of eight billion people alive today, but I am actually a citizen of the United States. So this is a reflection
1:13.6	on my culture in the United States, but also applies more broadly. For instance, there is a Swedish
1:20.6	word that's Lagom, which stands for enough or just the right amount.
1:32.6	We don't have legome in the U.S. cultural lexicon.
1:35.0	Okay, so here are some of my thoughts.
1:37.1	When we think about the future,
1:48.7	you can look at the future from a tech and normative money progress lens or from the vantage point of living during the carbon pulse and the ecology of the world. So what does that mean?
1:57.0	What is that vantage point? How do you describe those people that view the bottlenecks and the
2:05.6	opportunities and constraints of the 21st century from the lens of the carbon pulse, which requires
2:12.9	an energy understanding, systems ecology understanding, human behavior, etc.
2:19.3	So that's one word that I think would be nice to view the future from the carbon pulse
2:26.3	and all that entails.
2:28.7	Another concept is the future itself.
2:31.5	We don't have an emoji that represents the future of the thousands of
2:37.7	emojis you can find on your phone. There is no concept to represent the future. In our materials,
2:44.6	DJ White and I came up with a tea with an arrow through it to represent tomorrow. But the reality is, like the Inuit have 10, 20 words for different kinds of snow.
2:59.1	Our culture should have 10 or 15 words for different futures, horrible futures,
	...

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