One Good Word

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Eco•cide (Noun)

The planet, we have general consensus on this, is only habitable due to a massive, complex interaction of countless—but finite—living organisms that collaborate to produce the enriching exchanges among plants and animals and oxygen that we humans depend upon for meaningful existence. Barring a catastrophic meteor strike or simultaneous volcanic eruptions of unprecedented devastation, there is only one factor that might prevent the planet from going right on living from here until eternity: Ecocide. The most grievous of all human error, the short definition of ecocide is “the murder of the environment.” The murder of Earth, a killing that many believe is in process, is committed through industrial pollution, war, large-scale land use change, deliberate and inadvertent contaminant spills and mining. You can join the movement to make ecocide an International Crime Against Peace.

Usage: “All I want to do is keep the car running so I can listen to the radio and have air conditioning while I wait for my roommate who’s in the market buying organic produce flown in from Chile, and you tell me I’m an accessory to committing ecocide?”

Photo: Stringer/Reuters

biosecurity bioscience research labs foodborne illness toxins pathogens

Bi•o•se•cu•ri•ty (Noun)

Some people find it a showoff move to toss around six-syllable words, but biosecurity is an essential addition to any humble and informed vocabulary. Biosecurity is a complex process and an increasingly critical concern. The coordinated vigilance of scientists, technicians, policy makers, security engineers and law-enforcement officials, along with common-sense citizen behavior, are all required to exempt mankind from worldwide pandemic or bioterrorism—an exemption that is the goal of biosecurity. The biosecurity juggernaut keeps dangerous pathogens and toxins from being stolen from bioscience research laboratories, and it curtails the spread of biological agents in things we eat and grow. Good biosecurity prevents sickness from invading our health.

Usage: “Two sneezing kids on the flight from New York defeated all of my individual biosecurity measures.”

Photo: Vivek Prakash/Reuters

family farming agriculture organic farms sustainable grass fed beef

Ag•vo•cate (Verb)

In a better world, there would be no need to coin the word agvocate.

The independent minority of small-business people who toil from before sunup until after dusk to raise the plants and animals essential to feed the majority population would be universally esteemed, rewarded at fair value for their exertions and receive adequate and appropriate support from both private and government sectors.

In short, family farmers would have no pressing need to stand up individually and in concert to advocate for agriculture—to agvocate.

Usage: “I spend as much time agvocating as I do on the tractor. What next? Breathvocating? Eatvocating? Lovevocating and sleepvocating?”

Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters

Kristen Stewart as Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman

The Bech•del Test (Noun)

Women, in case you haven’t noticed, are underrepresented in virtually every elite subgroup of society that people aspire to join. That exclusion extends to movie and television characters, where most of the storylines are centered on male characters and the concerns of male characters.

Does that statement seem a little Gender Studies 101 reactionary? Well, look at your Netflix queue and put your past 10 movie rentals to the Bechdel Test.

Established by Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the test presents three basic criteria:

The entertainment includes at least two women…
Who have at least one conversation…
About something other than a man or men.

Alison Bechdel first applied her test in 1985. In a sign of author prescience and sexist intransigence, her three-point rule is as pertinent today as it was more than 25 years ago.

Usage: “Our gender studies mentor told the whole fraternity to go see Snow White and the Huntsman and report back if it passes the Bechdel Test.”

Researchers dressed in panda costumes transfer giant panda Tao Tao to new living environment in Wolong National Nature Reserve, Sichuan province

Bio•phil•ia (Noun)

For some literal minded people, biophilia—the human love of living things—is a concept, hypothesis or theory; for the rest of us, those literal-minded people are blind to the paramount reality in front of their faces.

Presented as a defining human trait by German social psychologist Erich Fromm in his 1964 treatise The Heart of Man, biophilia posits an instinctive bond between people and other forms of life in nature. The human drive to be closely associated with the planet’s fauna and flora, presuming such a drive does exist, explains the Chinese researchers who have donned panda costumes in the photo above to transfer a cage containing a giant panda to a new living environment.

Usage: “Tracking through the woods to gaze upon a beautiful buck deer, and then shoot it, is a questionable form of biophilia.”

Photos: Reuters/China Daily

A woman rides a bike in front of a government building in Romania.

Bik•i•f•i•ca•tion (Noun)

A network of expanded bike lanes in urban settings around the country, although a good first step in promoting pedal power, will fail to satisfy the long-term goals of bikification advocates. Proponents of a foot-powered two-wheel transportation paradigm envision a big-picture change in the infrastructure of America’s cities and towns, and an equally concrete attitude shift in the people living there. All bikification wants is a mindset and a landscape that places the bicycle as the number-one mode of daily transportation.

Usage: “We just got back from a week in Amsterdam. Man, that city is way ahead of the U.S. in, uhm, what is it again? Bikification!”

Photo: Bogdan Cristel/Reuters

A woman walks on a leaf-covered path on a mild autumn afternoon in a forest outside Vienna

For•est Bath•ing (Noun)

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

First Lady Michelle Obama shops at a local farmers market.

Food De•moc•ra•cy (Noun)

The tyranny of the cost-cutting, animal-abusing, GMO-infusing, high-fructose-corn-syrup-enriched, fat-bottom-line food industry has gone on too long! Our bellies, our taste buds, our pocketbooks and our nutritional aspirations have consumed our last meal under the prevailing system of foodstuff oppression. The moment is ripe for food democracy. Citizens: Rebel against corporate dietary dictatorships! We have the power, the right, and the responsibility to usher in a new age of nutritional justice. Food democracy asks for healthy and affordable food for one, and healthy and affordable food for all.

Usage: “A vote for eating a snack from a gas station stop-and-shop is a vote against food democracy.”

Photo: Molly Riley/Reuters

A woman carries water and her child near a stream in Yemen.

Peak Wa•ter (Noun)

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

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Ai Weiwei Chinese dissident Internet alias

Love the Fu•ture (Proper Noun)

Love the Future is a sly term used to sneak Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s name onto the Internet. The Internet is a wide-open world in China, so vast that Chinese censors have no trouble slipping in and making themselves at home. Feeling crowded and repressed, the country’s online commentators have adopted a coded language to bypass official filters.

Love the Future first appeared after Ai Weiwei’s government-sponsored disappearance in 2011.

Ai and a word for love are homonyms in Chinese. Weiwei is very close in construction to the word future.

Usage: “Love the Future, a time when each of us will be Never Sorry.”

Photo: David Gray/Reuters

Thanks to the Atlantic Wire for the tip.

Hu•mane Slaugh•ter (compound noun)

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

group of breast feeding mothers, group of mothers publicly breast feeding babies

Lac•ti•vist (noun)

Formed by blending lactation and activist, lactivist designates any person who exhibits an avid support of babies drinking human milk. Lactivists promote the health benefits of breastfeeding over formula feeding and rally to counteract discrimination against nursing mothers.

Lactating mothers mobilize at “nurse-ins” to group breastfeed their children at specific public sites. Nurse-ins generally protest incidents in which a nursing mother was asked to cover up or leave a location because she was breastfeeding.

The word lactivist has been in use at least since 2003. The term was pushed toward mainstream usage by a 2005 New York Times article covering 200 nursing women who descended upon the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West 67th Street, outside broadcaster ABC’s headquarters. The lactivists had gathered to refute an on-View admission by Barbara Walters that a woman breastfeeding on an airplane had skeeved her out.

The lactivist goal is to make breastfeeding a stigma-free choice. The Food and Drug Administration has determined that embarrassment is more influential than any other factor in whether or not new mothers breastfeed their babies.

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Photo: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

dolphin playing with toss rings in swimming pool

Ter⋅mi⋅nal Cap⋅tiv⋅i⋅ty (Compound Noun)

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.”

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Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

De•pave (verb)

Depave as a term is so new that as of January 19, 2012, the word has yet to be included in either Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary. However, depave is already in use as a call to action from a Portland, Oregon, nonprofit that “promotes the transformation of over-paved places” into community green spaces. The “parking lots to paradise” concept is simple and attractive: Rip out leftover asphalt and cement and plant flora in its place. The Philadelphia Water Department also promotes depaving. It posted a step-by-step guide to turning a paved strip into a lawn or garden. Jackhammer and goggles not included.

Usage: If that lot’s not being used as a basketball court, depave it and grow some lunch.

Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Depaving Day! from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

shirtless boy holding a shirtless male doll

cis⋅gen⋅der (adj.)

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

Language is a constantly evolving tool. New terms and changing definitions influence how we perceive and experience people, places and things.

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One good, well-placed word can shift an attitude or clarify a blurry comprehension. That’s the first step in altering old behaviors and expanding limited beliefs.

Come to One Good Word to track the fresh vocabulary of terms that help walk the talk.

One Good Word

Eco•cide (Noun)

Photo: Stringer/Reuters

Bi•o•se•cu•ri•ty (Noun)

Photo: Vivek Prakash/Reuters

Ag•vo•cate (Verb)

Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters

The Bech•del Test (Noun)

Bio•phil•ia (Noun)

Photos: Reuters/China Daily

Bik•i•f•i•ca•tion (Noun)

Photo: Bogdan Cristel/Reuters

For•est Bath•ing (Noun)

Photo: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters

Food De•moc•ra•cy (Noun)

Photo: Molly Riley/Reuters

Peak Wa•ter (Noun)

Photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Love the Fu•ture (Proper Noun)

Photo: David Gray/Reuters

Thanks to the Atlantic Wire for the tip.

Hu•mane Slaugh•ter (compound noun)

Photo: Jason Lee/Reuters

Lac•ti•vist (noun)

Photo: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Ter⋅mi⋅nal Cap⋅tiv⋅i⋅ty (Compound Noun)

Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

De•pave (verb)

cis⋅gen⋅der (adj.)

Photo: Michaela Rehle/Reuters

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