social earthquake
n.— «We are producing enormous stress within our ecological and social systems that creates the possibility of what I call social earthquakes; the probability is going up of major system discontinuity and we’re acting as if the world is going to be the same in 50 years. Meanwhile, we are almost certain that it will be radically different. It may not be dramatically worse, but it is almost certain to be dramatically different and the changes will be discontinuous and non-linear. If we don’t build resilience into our society then change could be catastrophic.» —“Resilience and Civilization” by Ron Dembo Huffington Post Jan. 17, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...