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Pyrocene
A new word for our times
By Adam Smith
Geological time involves glacial – or even slower – change , so the rapid shifts in the terminology used to label our current era feel anomalous .
The term Anthropocene , first coined in 2000 , designates the period of primarily human influence on the Earth ’ s ecosystem . More recently , the earth scientist Stephen Pyne has suggested a more appropriate label for our era is
Telegamy
It ’ s long distance for love
By Adam Smith
On first encountering the word telegamy one might think it refers to a TV gaming program . But put alongside its nearest relatives in English ( monogamy , bigamy , polygamy ) its meaning begins to emerge – as a particular kind of marriage , albeit not one made in a TV reality show .
Rather it ’ s a marriage maintained over a long distance ( tele- as in telephone , from the Greek meaning distant or far away ).
pyrocene , as it focuses on the element that causes environmental change ‘ fire ’ ( from the Greek word pur ), in the same way as we talk about the Ice Ages .
Nomenclature for geological time is generally rather slippery . For example , I ’ ve already misused the word ‘ era ’, which refers to hundreds of millions of years and is second only in length to the eon ’ s half a billion .
More correctly , the pyrocene would be an ‘ epoch ’ ( 10s of millions of years ), or an ‘ age ’ – the shortest of these time units , as it ’ s only millions .
The traditional name for our current epoch is holocene , literally
Telegamy would of course have been the lot of many couples in previous times but with the jet age of travel , telegamy became the modus operandi for couples with lucrative and / or meaningful jobs based in countries oceans apart from each other .
It worked on smaller scale in the 1940s for British academics Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach , who were inclined to say that they practised telegamy , while she worked at Oxford and he at Cambridge .
To call it telegamy was a slight exaggeration , according to Elizabeth ’ s biographer ( Jenny Teichman ), since
‘ completely new ’, which isn ’ t a very forward-thinking choice . Then again , other period terms like ‘ Cambrian ’ and ‘ Jurassic ’ connect them with particular regions where evidence for relevant dating was first found , which seems over-specific .
Despite the fact that human existence is virtually irrelevant in the overall timeframe of the Earth , we can ’ t help but impose our perspective when describing it . ■
Dr Adam Smith is convenor of the Editing and Electronic Publishing program at Macquarie University .
they got together at weekends and during university vacations , had seven children , and collaborated on three philosophical monographs .
With so many of our relationships being conducted over mobile phones , it ’ s somewhat surprising that telegamy has yet to be registered in the Oxford English Dictionary . It will certainly present some particular definitional challenges – how far apart do the couple have to live , and how continuously , for it to count as telegamy ? ■
Emeritus Professor Pam Peters is researcher with the Macquarie University Linguistic Department .
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