One Good Word

Originating in 1982 at the suggestion of Japan’s forest agency, the concept and exercise of “forest bathing” entails taking a leisurely walk in the woods. Think of this arboreal stroll as a natural form of aromatherapy, with additional visual and cardiovascular curative aspects. The key to maximizing the benefits of the forest bath treatment is to deeply breathe in phytoncides, volatile antimicrobial organic compounds released by essential wood oils.

Usage: “The wife and I were feeling a little stressed; so we took a forest bath together, and now we’re talking about renewing the vows!”

Photo: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters

The term peak water is derived from the concept of peak oil, with one promising difference: Unlike petroleum, the planet’s more-or-less constant supply of H2O continues to fall from the sky.

Peak oil describes that point in crude extraction when half of the earth’s original reserves will have been burned through. From the peak onward, oil production becomes ever more costly, and enters its terminal decline.

Peak water, on the other decline, indicates a condition, currently pertaining in vast regions of the earth, in which human water usage depletes the resource beyond nature’s capacity to replenish it.

Usage: “When you can’t take a sip out of the tap without breaking out in a rash, you’ll know peak water has come to town.”

Photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Wrestle the Water-Wasting Monsters

Humane slaughter is a term of some dispute. Animal rights literalists object that a pair of words has no business hooking up if one word means “compassion, sympathy, understanding,” and the other denotes “the act of killing.” Nonetheless, humane slaughter, perhaps unattainable, is a policy in animal husbandry calling for animals to receive humane treatment in markets, during transport and at slaughter.

The Humane Slaughter Association of the U.K. takes credit for introducing the practice of “stunning” in the 1920s. Stunning animals in the butchering process is intended to reduce trauma as throats are slit. Whether the lessened trauma is to the slain beast or to the consuming human is one crux of the humane slaughter debate that has yet to be decided.

Usage: “Perspectives on humane slaughter vary greatly depending on what side of the knife you’re on.”

Photo: Jason Lee/Reuters

Dolphin-rights activists have spoken “terminal captivity” in anger from at least 1991. An L.A. Times report from June 1991 details the death of 45-year-old dolphin Pollyanna at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida’s Ocean World.  Pollyanna had been captured in the Florida Keys in 1966 and spent the rest of her life in a tank about the size of a backyard swimming pool. Russ Rector, a member of the anti-captivity Dolphin Project, and a former Ocean World trainer who had cared for Pollyanna from 1968 to 1975, pronounced the cause of death: “Pollyanna died of terminal captivity. That animal has been in the pool so long, she wasn’t living, she was merely surviving.”

Rector surely hoped in 1991 that terminal captivity would have lost its relevance within the next two decades. Sadly, the term was current as of January 25, 2012, when the Dolphin Project’s Ric O’Barry used it in criticizing the U.S. Navy’s military exploitation of dolphins.

Usage: “Buck was sent to the Dolphin Research Center. He spent a few years there painting pictures for tourists before he died of terminal captivity.”

Don't Buy a Ticket to a Dolphin Show

Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Cisgender or cisgendered refers to a person whose gender identity matches his or her biological sex at birth. Carl Buijs, a female-to-male transsexual from the Netherlands, is credited with coining the term in 1995. Buijs constructed cisgender from the Latin prefix cis, which is antonymous (opposite to) trans. The word was coined as a neutral counterpart to transgender, an umbrella term that connotes people whose sense of self as male or female differs from that typically associated with their birth sex.

Usage: Other than being born into a life of cisgender privilege, there’s nothing innately superior in being at one with the genitals you arrived with.

Photo: Michaela Rehle/Reuters