A Speccie reader has been in touch to complain about the use of the expressions ‘wind farm’ and ‘solar farm’. They are not farms, he protests angrily. They grow nothing we can eat! They contribute nothing to the things we can consume or wear or any sort of physical thing on sale in the supermarket. Whatever they are, he insists, they are not farms. I think he has a point. ‘Solar farm’ first appeared in 1971, and was followed by ‘wind farm’ in 1980. But they have never looked like farms. Having acres of land covered by glassy solar panels is not my idea of what a farm looks like. And if these solar panels are filling what would otherwise be fertile, productive land they are definitely not farms – they are anti-farms. As for wind turbines – these things look like giant, metallic and concrete monsters that stride across the land like John Wyndham’s notorious triffids. Perhaps ‘factories’ is a better word? We could talk about the destruction of fertile farmland, and natural bushland, to put up huge ‘wind factories’ and ‘solar factories’. Is that a more honest way of talking about these things? And such expressions would then echo William Blake’s famous remark about factories as ‘dark, satanic mills’. At the very least, we should not let ourselves be fooled by this talk about ‘farms’ that are, in reality, anti-farms!

One commentator on Fox News has suggested that Kamala Harris’ language in speeches and interviews is often just a ‘word salad’. He then made the outrageous claim that one of his fellow commentators at Fox had coined the expression. Well, we can settle that one quickly. The English expression ‘word salad’ goes back to 1904 and seems to be a direct translation of an earlier (1894 or thereabouts) German expression, wortsalat. When it was first coined it was applied to the meaningless jumble of words that poured out of patients with advanced schizophrenia. I suppose the notion was that a ‘salad’ was a tossed mixture of different ingredients and what these patients were doing was tossing together a mixture of words. In the years since then the expression ‘word salad’ has broadened in meaning – so that it covers any mixture of words that appear to be randomly tossed together. So, does that capture Kamala Harris’s approach to the English language? Well, let’s watch and see, shall we?