When it rains, it acid-rains
By Dan Drollette Jr | January 17, 2019
The January 21 issue of The New Yorker just came out, and their one-page “Shouts and Murmurs” humor column is devoted entirely to climate change.
Or, more specifically, to “Idioms Updated for Climate Change.”
The author, Ginny Hogan, takes everyday sayings and modernizes them to reflect a not-so-fictional decaying planet in the near-future, where the weather is going haywire and the food supply is disappearing; one memorable line is “There’s got to be at least one other fish left in the sea.”
And when read in sequence, one can detect a series of subtle (and not-so-subtle) narrative threads. For example, the first updated idiom is “A rising tide floods all houses” while towards the end, more idioms pop up along the lines of “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, as we escape this raging fire and sprint for dear life toward the rocket ship.”
Publication Name: The New Yorker
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Keywords: climate change, climate change communication
Topics: Opinion, What We’re Reading
Dan Drollette Jr
Dan Drollette Jr is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent... Read More
This is one time I’m glad to be old. I don’t expect to be alive when this mess hits hard. But I truly do hate it for the younger ones in my family and those around the world.