Another casualty of the climate crisis? Our coolest words

Aaqsiiq is the so-called silence game played among the Nunavut people. Picture a circle of friends huddled round the fire. The first to giggle, or mumble a syllable, is out. Pretty much the format of Jimmy Carr’s new show, Last One Laughing, the comedians competing in a TV studio instead of an igloo.

Or itsat (a skin tent), or barabara (a sod house), or yaranga (a birchbark teepee). As you can tell, my vocab has expanded since last we spoke, annexed by Bernadette Hince, a natural historian with a joyous language bent. Her lexicon is Cold Words: A Polar Dictionary (CSIRO, 2025), riddled with 3000 terms from aaqsiiq to zucchini (a Mawson Station prefab longer than an apple hut, but lower than a melon hut).

Don’t let these words get iced out, I can’t (polar) bear it.Credit: Getty Images

Ice plays a starring role, of course. The frozen stuff escorts umpteen options, from ice apron (a glacier’s proscenium) to ice fog, ice hummock to rumple, ice saw to ice shove – alias Alaska’s ivu, a hazardous surge of ice that can ride up onshore. Then there’s penknife ice and pancake ice, lolly and rubble ice. There’s even aglu, or ice hole, where a seal may poke out its snout to breathe, and perhaps meet a kakivak, a three-pronged Inuit spear.

Indeed, treat today’s column as your aglu, a rare chance to steal rare air. A quick snort, mind you, otherwise you risk frozen snot – or snotsicles. Or kayak vertigo, where a paddler can’t determine the horizon. Or perlerorneq, a Greenlandic version of cabin fever, which can spiral into pibloktok (Arctic madness).

Bernadette Hince’s Cold Words: A Polar Dictionary.Credit: CSIRO

Both poles, plus such remote islands as the Falklands and Tristan de Cunha, feature in this orange volume. The unlikely colour, as Bernadette tells me, is to distinguish the book from all the other dictionaries on the ice-shelf, where most are pale blue or white, and all partial in comparison. Delight alone lurks in the 12,000 accompanying quotations “which might fly out like butterflies when you lift the lid”, a miscellany of travelogue, explorer journal, twitcher’s guide and anthropology paper.

Reading the collection – “hello, my name is David and I read dictionaries” – I couldn’t dispel the spectre of a vanishing world. Climate data tracks a shrinking icecap. In the Antarctic Peninsula alone, summer temperatures have climbed more than three degrees since 1970, according to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition site. Our seas are warming, turning acidic, just as this glossary reflects that crisis via talik (discontinuous permafrost) or Arctic amplification, where polar zones warm at faster rates than the global average.

Hence the urgency of this work, which is as much a linguistic reminder of what stands in jeopardy. We’d all be poorer to forfeit degomble (to rid your boots of snow) or a penguin’s “advertisement walk” – a flirty, head-wagging waddle across the rookery. Imagine never hearing a bergy seltzer (the fizz of an iceberg’s broken air-pocket) or encountering a husky’s poopsicle. Let alone iktsuarpoq, an Inuktitut word from Canada, encapsulating the anxiety we feel when anticipating a guest to lob at our igloo.

Kabloona is another gem, the Greenland name for eyebrows, as well as coded slang for any foreigner, since European faces own such mysterious arcs of hair. Hince herself was a quintessential kabloona, the outside scholar entering the freezer, probing ice for its private idiom. Hardly a JAFA (Australian Antarctic slang for “Just Another F---ing Academic”), Hince is more a prized translator of our planet’s fragile extremes, filtering the white noise into one orange book.

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