On September 28th, Greta Thunberg takes the stage at the Youth for Climate meeting in Milan, Italy. She readjusts the microphones, commenting that she is too small to talk at the same height the previous speaker did, and starts her speech.
Her talk, straightforward in the style Greta is known for, highlights possibilities linked to a sustainable transition and urges leaders to act now. The recordings of her go viral, not due to her call to action, but her blatant criticism of world leaders who and I quote Greta, only say: “Blah, Blah, Blah” (Thunberg, 2021).
She elaborates further, saying: “Build back better, blah, blah, blah. Green economy, blah, blah, blah. Net-zero by 2050, blah, blah, blah. Climate-neutral, blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words, words that sound great but so far have led to no action,” (Thunberg, 2021)
Greta calls out a phenomenon that sees people using words devoid of meaning or disconnected from reality, to achieve personal goals. Such a practice most commonly is referred to as lying, but might also be called misleading, twisting, slanting, etc. In any case, it goes against the actual purpose of words. A word is defined as “a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken or written” (word, 2021).
How do words lose their meaning? What robs words of their original purpose, leaving them devoid of the weight they once carried? Often a multitude of processes is at play and devaluing a word usually takes place over an extended period of time.
In the post-Trump and Covid Zeitgeist, empty words have become an acceptable way of conduct with leaders talking for the sake of talking. A simple question arises: Did we forget the meaning of words? Through our systems full of contracts, agreements, and terms of references we have been slowly but surely chipping away at the value of the spoken word.
A spoken word is rarely considered to hold up in front of the law, can even be faked through software, and most importantly often lacks the formal backing a written word enjoys. It seems people have emptied words of their meaning when it suited those yielding them to do so, comforted by the idea that it is acceptable. Who did not once use a word devoid of meaning, knowingly fooling the receiver? Devoid of such meaning the word is then picked up by people, who do not know its original meaning. They are put into contexts wrong to their nature, every intentional or unintentional misuse deludin the original meaning.
Empty words however are not the core of the problem, they are merely a symptom of structural problems they obscure through their blown-up shapes and forms. As such they become signals once again, not of their original meaning but of a systematic problem that stole their meaning.
So what do they signal? Going back to Greta, the words devoid of meaning are words used in connection to the climate crisis. They are used to make an unfulfilled promise for action to create a better future, a promise that does not seem to influence behavior. It seems that the main challenge of a better future, is not the devoid words, but the lack of action showcased by them. There is a disconnect between humans’ well-stated values, expressed by big words and their actions.
Actions hereby are incoherent with values on a political level, but also on an individual level. For instance, most people agree that the climate crisis is a huge threat to humanity and claim that they would like to see a more sustainable future. However, most people would not like to change their own behavior to enable this sustainable future. As Pappas et al put it: “Many of us would like the world to be a more sustainable place… we just don’t want to have to do too much of the work ourselves.” (Pappas, Pappas and Sweeney, 2015).
So how could we fill these big and small words that have lost their value to misuse with their original meaning once more? It seems that this process, both for individuals and groups (nations, governments etc.) is rather straightforward. There are multiple books and articles, mostly from the self-development section offering guidelines on how to make your words more meaningful. After having consulted a great deal of these, it seems that it boils down to one simple base rule:
Connect your words to action.
Simple enough? Let’s try it together – make a statement and give your words meaning by connecting them to action. It is empowering to feel a word of your choice grow and maybe even regain a part of its initial value through your action, at least to the person you’ve made the statement to.
Whilst writing this blog post I have made the statement that I would like to see biological agriculture grow and become our main source of food production. Now I am not a farmer or politician, but as any human, I am consuming a lot of farmed products. To give these words meaning, the logical course of action is to change my own behavior and buy as much biological produce as possible. So far so easy.
In the course of two weeks, I have discovered a world of supermarket shelves shrinking from being widely filled to scarcely providing any options, my favorite pasta being off the table and cheese becoming a luxury good (compared to the price I used to pay for it). I’ve renegotiated the meaning of these words with every grocery trip since then, sometimes treating myself to a non-biological option, sometimes changing my plans to empower my own words. Most interestingly, I have seen the words take up meaning in my immediate surroundings filled with my own actions. If I can give some meaning back to words, with my micro-scale actions, people holding the power to large-scale actions could do so on their respective scales.
I hope that leaders at this year’s climate conference in November (COP26), will use words like Green Recovery, Net Zero, Carbon Neutral, etc. Using their power to fill these words with meaning once again. Imagine a COP26, in which each spoken word would weigh heavily on the value of its meaning. It would be a quiet conference, with an impact going down in the history books.
References
Cambridge.org. 2021. word. [online] Available at: <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/word> [Accessed 13 October 2021].
Pappas, E., Pappas, J. and Sweeney, D., 2015. Walking the walk: conceptual foundations of the Sustainable Personality. Journal of Cleaner Production, 86, pp.323-334.
Thunberg, G., 2021. [online] Twitter. Available at: <https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1442860615941468161> [Accessed 13 October 2021].
