Recently, I overheard a conversation in a cafe where someone described their toast as “awesome”. I felt myself bristle. Not because the toast wasn’t good – I didn’t taste it – but because I remember a time when “awesome” meant something that inspired awe: towering mountains, the vastness of the night sky, the haunting song of a humpback whale. Now it’s being used to describe breakfast.

“Fantastic” has met the same fate, shedding its fantastical origins to become a synonym for “great”. Meanwhile “literally” has been so thoroughly abused that it can now mean something that is, quite literally, not literal.

Linguists call this “semantic bleaching”: the gradual erosion of a word’s original meaning through overuse. Which got me thinking about another word we hear with increasing frequency: “unprecedented”, the go-to adjective in reporting about the climate crisis. In recent months, I’ve read about unprecedented heat, unprecedented rain, unprecedented drought and unprecedented wildfires. Batten down the hatches: reports suggest that the current El Niño is going to be – you guessed it – unprecedented.

The dictionary definition hasn’t changed. “Unprecedented” still means something that has never happened before – and all the events described above have indeed represented a ratcheting up of the severity of heat, drought, rain and fire. But the word is being used so often, it feels as........

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