[Tagging] dry swamps

[stevea]

On Feb 11, 2023, at 3:53 PM, Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefitz1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2023 at 05:10, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> A wetland is a land area that is saturated with water, either permanently or seasonally”
> 
> But does "seasonally" include "maybe once every 20 years"?

Climate change (being real, humans on Earth do experience climate change right now) makes words like "intermittent" (to describe stream flow) and "seasonally" (about whether a wetland or playa has surface water, possibly over dusty, sandy, "soil" or raw earth annually or occasionally or almost-perpetually-but-not-always...) pretty goopy (wet, plastic, runny...) themselves.  Assumptions change, words defined in one era become less precise over years.  This is normal language evolution, btw.  Sometimes years and decades, sometimes many centuries.  I find it interesting how climate change does this, and it does.

In short:  it's hard to say what words about "changing, yet often predictable cycles of weather" mean when we're in the midst of changes about what "weather" means.  It might seem like "doomed to failure" here, but languages adjust, sometimes in poetic, beautiful ways.  And what is tagging but another language?

I think a result is for us to be as precise and yet as succinct as we can be with agreed-upon tagging.  "Brevity is the soul of wit" is true for reasons.