The Bureau of Linguistical Reality

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Interdisciplinary artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante create public workshops to develop language about the feelings of living in the anthropocene. 

Maintenance Actions (Example of a neologism coined through a field study)

En·nui·poc·a·lypse · slang: Slowpocalypse · noun

Definition: While media often depicts the apocalypse as a sudden and dramatic event, the Ennuipocalypse, or Slowpocalypse (slang) offers the concept of a doomsday that occurs at an excruciatingly slow day to day time scale. Slow Ennuipocalypse, may occur in a geologic blink of an eye, but for the Homo Sapiens in urban/suburban settings who are often disconnected from the natural cycles— it is painfully boring.

As a result of the perceived slow pace of the apocalypse or Slow Ennuipocalypse those who live through it feel a compulsion to distract themselves with ever faster technology, media and economic systems— all of which feed back into a disconnect from the pace of the natural systems we need to survive.

Usage: Edgar escaped into his instagram account to distract himself from the news reports about the epic California drought that he had been listening to for four years straight.

Origin: Mike Arcega and Field Study #007 Participants, August 2015.

Derived from: Slow: Old English had slawian “intransitive”

Ennui: To bore, Old French enui “annoyance, bore”

Apocalypse: 14th century Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation”, used in the modern sense of a “a great disaster”

*information taken with permission directly from The Bureau of Linguistical Reality website. Neologisms are copyrighted to The BLR using Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

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