Each month, the open access team of the University of Groningen Library (UB) puts a recent open access article by UG authors in the spotlight. This publication is highlighted via social media and the library’s newsletter and website.

The article in the spotlight for the month of June 2025 is titled 'The Role of Neologisms in the Climate Change Debate: Can New Words Help to Speed Up Social Change?’, written by Greta Zella, Tommaso Caselli, Saskia Peels-Matthey (all from the Faculty of Arts) and Jan Willem Bolderdijk (Faculty of Economics and Business). 

Abstract
New expressions—or neologisms—continue to emerge in the discourse around climate issues (e.g., “flight shame”). Does the emergence of neologisms merely reflect shifts in sustainable attitudes, or can new expressions also speed up/frustrate social change? Building on literature grounded in linguistics and environmental psychology, we conclude that neologisms may have an important, yet underrated and not sufficiently investigated potential to influence the speed of social change. In this Focus Article, we first discuss the way in which neologisms facilitate the conceptualization of new ideas and thus increase awareness. We do this by linking contributions from the literature in cognitive linguistics on the creation and retrieval of concepts in the mind with work from environmental psychology on the adoption of sustainable behaviors. Then we employ cognitive and ecolinguistic frameworks to describe how new expressions support the introduction of different points of view for the interpretation of climate-related issues. In other words, by bridging different disciplines, we explain how neologisms can facilitate or frustrate the onset of social tipping points. We illustrate these possible effects of neologisms with eight climate-relevant examples (flight shame, greenwashing, light-bulb minute, carbon footprint, carbon indulgence, global warming, climate crisis, climate change) coined or widely adopted in the English language between the 1970s and 2018. Insights from these examples can help activists, policymakers, and citizens to coin neologisms that contribute to climate change mitigation efforts from a communicative perspective.

We asked corresponding author Greta Zella a few questions about the article:

This was your first published article as part of your PhD project, congratulations! How did you experience the publishing process?
Thank you! I have to admit the process took longer than I expected. WIREs usually publishes by invitation, so we first had to submit a proposal for the piece we were working on. Once it was accepted, we submitted the actual paper. All in all, it took us over a year. It wasn’t too stressful, though. We got two rounds of reviews, and we didn’t need to make too many changes. The reviews were focused on refining certain aspects and making the paper as relevant as possible for the audience of WIREs Climate Change.

You write that “neologisms can facilitate or frustrate the onset of social tipping points”? Can you give an example of both? 
In our minds, concepts are connected to form a network through which we perceive the world around us. Using one word instead of another implicitly highlights certain concepts, while hiding others. This mechanism is called “framing.” For example, “global warming” emphasizes one of the many consequences of climate change, i.e., warming, and all the others are omitted. It’s not a coincidence that this phrase is often used in contexts that deny climate change. Reducing such a complex issue to “warming” makes it easy to dismiss it, at least superficially, when temperatures are colder than usual. With this purpose in mind, “global warming” can be used to undermine efforts to limit climate change by encouraging people to believe that there is nothing to worry about.

On the other hand, an example of “framing” that supports social tipping is the word “greenwashing.” It refers to the practice of companies that present themselves as “green” or “sustainable”, but do not act as such. The term implies the use of a sustainable (green) rhetoric or facade to metaphorically wash away the unsustainable practices that the company still engages with. Labeling the advertising of such companies as “greenwashing” leads consumers to perceive it as immoral and, consequently, pressures companies to align actions and words in order not to lose their customers.

What makes a good neologism?
It is difficult to define what makes a good neologism because there are many factors at play to determine its adoption by speakers. For example, if an emerging neologism is used by famous people, in campaigns or advertising slogans, it can suddenly explode. However, there are some linguistic features that increase the chances of a neologism becoming widespread. In addition to framing, which I have already mentioned, “anchoring” is a process that consists in linking innovation (in this case, a new word) to tradition, by stressing the common ground between them. It is not only about language, this mechanism has been in use since antiquity to introduce all kinds of innovations and it has the purpose to make them more familiar and acceptable. In the article, we discuss “carbon footprint”: oil companies have made carbon emissions a personal issue by linking them to footprints, which are inherently personal.

A third important feature is the transparency/opacity of the new word: speakers naturally prefer words whose meaning is immediately understandable, as in the case of “flight shame”,i.e., the shame people feel when they fly, due to its environmental impact. On the other hand, the meaning of words like “greenwashing” requires a few more logical steps to be decoded. These are technically more difficult to catch on, but as “greenwashing” itself demonstrates, it is not impossible. Regardless of how good they are, neologisms are an expression of communicative efficiency, because they allow speakers to give a name to phenomena that did not have one before and this makes it possible to conceptualize them and talk about them in an easy way.

Could you reflect on your experiences with open access and open science in general?
I had a positive experience. The University has an agreement with WIREs, so there were no additional costs involved. I generally benefit from open science and open access myself, both as an academic and as a lay reader of other disciplines. This system allows researchers to have access to previous work and therefore publish increasingly comprehensive and high-quality studies. The non-academic public also benefits greatly because they can have direct access to a large amount of scientific material and read it firsthand.

Useful links:
Open access journal browser: search engine that can be used to check if a discount on the article processing charge (APC) is available for a specific journal. UG corresponding authors can publish with an APC discount (mostly 100%, so for free) in more than 12.000 journals!

Citation:
Zella, G., Bolderdijk, J. W., Caselli, T., & Peels‐Matthey, S. (2025). The Role of Neologisms in the Climate Change Debate: Can New Words Help to Speed Up Social Change? WIREs Climate Change, 16(2). Portico. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.70004

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