The power (and the usefulness) of language is that it gives us names for ideas. And a name is like a handle, or a tool, that helps us to work with an idea and think about it more clearly. That’s what makes this compound noun ‘racial essentialism’ such an important language tool. ‘Racial essentialism’ names the conviction that what divides us is greater than what unites us. To put that in perspective – we know that what unites us is our common humanity: we all laugh, and cry, and eat, and sleep, and work, and have babies and love our families and a thousand other things. Altogether these countless things are our common humanity, that unite us over time and around the world. Shakespeare is a powerful writer precisely because he captures our common humanity. Across the world, and through the ages, people have come across those pungent lines from Shakespeare and thought ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I’ve felt sometimes’. That’s our common humanity. The true believers in ‘racial essentialism’ agree with that – but they say our common humanity fades to unimportance next to the deeply racial characteristics that divide us. Every race, they say, has a distinctive and different ‘essence’ – characteristics that come from their DNA, from their history, and from their culture. And these characteristics will always deeply and permanently divide us. Reverend Martin Luther King opposed ‘racial essentialism’ in his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech: ‘I have a dream that my four small children will grow up in a nation where they will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. That’s saying ‘racial determinism’ is wrong, and what unites us is stronger than what divides us. But when someone says: ‘Indigenous Australians are special and deserved special treatment’ they are endorsing racial essentialism. (That’s the power of language – by giving us a name for something it helps us think about it clearly.) The Voice referendum is an attempt to write ‘racial essentialism’ permanently into the Australian constitution.

It’s Weird Word time once again. This time, it’s a word naming something you might have experienced. It happened to a friend of mine. It was early in the summer and a nice, warm day, so he went down to his backyard pool, put his toe into the pool then dived in. He quickly discovered that about six inches below the top layer of warm water it was icy cold. That shallow, sun-warmed layer on the top of a body of water is called the ‘epilimnion’. It’s one of those cases where we know who coined it and when. It was the invention of an American scientist named Edward A. Birge of the University of Wisconsin. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘epilimnion’ as: ‘The upper, uniformly warm layer of water in a stratified lake’. Birge gave us this weird word in 1910.  The whole field of ‘limnology’ (the study of lakes – from the Greek limne) seems to have exploded around the start of the 20th century – along with a whole new vocabulary. What gave my friend the shock of his life as he plunged into the colder, lower, level of water was the ‘hypolimnion’ (‘the lower, cooler layer of water below the thermocline in a stratified lake’ (OED). And Professor Birge was at the forefront of coining all these news words, and this whole branch of science called ‘limnology’. (I suppose one way to be a specialist is to invent your own speciality!) I’m not sure just how successful ‘limnology’ has been as a branch of science, but the International Society of Limnology still has a couple of thousand members.