A Dictionary for the Future Present

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a public participatory artwork by artists Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott. Established in 2014 out of frustration with the dearth of language that reflected emerging climate realities and shared eco-political anxieties, the project takes up the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), which holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ worldviews. Thus acknowledging the social and cognitive power of words, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality creates new language as a way to better understand global shifts due to human-made climate change and other anthropogenic events. From 1–9 June 2019, the artists conducted workshops and hosted conversations with individuals and groups throughout Mississauga, inviting participants to coin neologisms expressing their feelings and experiences in the face of a rapidly changing world. Sometimes thwarting existing grammatical and linguistic conventions, the neologisms developed by participants with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality also contend with language’s hierarchies and inflexibilities: they imagine a world of words shaped differently, and by extension ask for a future shaped otherwise.

Namkalexa

Definition: Giving a human form, name, or voice to a useful non-living and non-human entity such as a car, digital assistant, tool, or operating system. In particular, there is a compulsion to gender these tools or “assistants” as female.

Usage: “My bank now uses a namkalexa to communicate with me about my account—they call ‘her’ Penny.”

Origin:
Pankaj Aggarwal
University of Toronto Mississauga, June 2019

Namkaran (Hindi naming ceremony) + Alexa (the name given to Amazon’s “personal assistant”)

Origin:
Carol Smith
Green Drinks Mississauga, June 2019

Definition:
A deaf person requires open eyes in order to understand our language, therefore we're inviting you to open your eyes. People can walk around with their eyes open and still not see so much.

Zohaib Qureshi and members of Deaf Muslims of Canada

Origin: Carol Smith Green Drinks Mississauga, June 2019

Prealsthanam

Definition: Prioritizing economic, governmental, or other systems that were constructed by humans over the earth’s innate systems (e.g., carbon or nitrogen cycles). This is often a result of being so embedded in human-constructed systems that you fail to recognize that we as individuals and a species can exchange, recreate, or do away with the systems we have invented, but that we cannot survive without the earth systems we depend on. For example, I can physically give someone bread without the exchange of the human-created system of currency, but I cannot breathe air without sufficient atmospheric oxygen levels that my body has evolved to breathe.

Usage: “’We cannot afford to reduce emissions’ is the most prealstham thing I have ever heard!”

Origin: Prasthanam (Malayalam—South Indian dialect—meaning system) + real

Jiby Mathew
Green Drinks Mississauga, June 2019

Refurbreck

Definition: The for-profit (or public relations-inspired) co-opting of land that has been poisoned, and subsequent glossing over any remediation to expedite the (literal) greenwashing of that space so as to reclaim it into a system of for-profit enterprise. Often the tainted land is used for recreational purposes, though sometimes it becomes the foundation for low-income housing or shady for-profit real-estate ventures.

This process removes the “unsightly” quality of publicly visible pollution, blight, and/or degradation, making the land seem desirable and quaint—but beneath the surface it remains toxic and unhealed.

Refurbrecking underscores the difficulties of remediating and restoring land that has been poisoned, as well as our resistance to face problems we cannot solve and look directly at the quagmires we would rather turn away from. Refurbrecking also addresses how our efforts to restore land are often for our own gain and do not allow letting the land heal itself for its own purposes, independent of ours.

Refurbreck is a different experience than when land was once used for military, mining, or other damaging purposes is properly restored and reclaimed for public good, or multi-species use.

Usage: “Paying to ski on Bowler mountain is a total refurbreck.”

Origin: Jiby Mathew, Louis Duong, Mohammed Hadid, Emily Cadotte
Green Drinks Mississauga, June 2019 From: Refurbish, break, wreck

F火eezing

Definition:
Cross-continental climate entanglement. When you are experiencing unusually and unseasonably cold weather in Canada and your closest friends or family members are simultaneously experiencing unusually and extremely hot weather in China.
Both parties share a common unease with the local weather that they may attribute to a rapidly changing climate, but their direct experience of this unease is radically different. The experience of f火eez*ng weather simultaneously becomes both a bond that connects the
friends or family members and an experience that highlights their separation.

Origin: Henry Bing and Ann Wu (伍允安)
University of Toronto Mississauga, June 2019

火 (mandarin: fire) + Freezing (English slang: to be extremely cold) + * keyboard emoji simulating a snowflake

Urbanmystara/Mystarpolis

Definition:
The longing to see the full spectrum of stars without toxic, human-made illumination that hides the sky and blocks the starlight.

Mystarpolis is a place where urbanmystara occurs.

Origin:
Visaree Bradshaw-Coore Ecosource Youth in Action—Credit to New Credit Program, June 2019