Letter From the Desert: Watch Your Language

Photo by Elliott Engelmann on Unsplash

The common language we use can reflect deeply unflattering aspects of the culture we grew up in.

I’ve expounded before on our common use of the word “tribalism” to mean fractious and unconstructive behavior. This usage is related to the informal and rather shallow use of the word “tribe” to mean “people I feel comfortable around” or “people who have the same hobbies I have.” This usage began to ring false to me a few years back, when I began to work more closely with members of actual tribes. Sentences began forming in my head when I’d hear someone use the word as a synonym for “factionalism.” Sentences like “Oh, you mean they’re saying they shouldn’t decide until they check in with the elders?” or “Glad to hear they’re working together due to a shared history of displacement and mutual pride.”

That is a bit of a North-America-centric point to make, to be sure. My limited knowledge of tribal culture doesn’t cross salt water. Or the Darien Gap. Still, you probably get the idea. On the occasions when I’ve actually let politer versions of those sentences slip outta my mouth or my keyboard, the eyerolling from those I’m talking to has often been rather impressive.

I understand the temptation — for non-native people living on stolen land — to dismiss this sort or linguistic observation as what is recently derided as “wokeness,” a sort of performative display intended to show my progressive bonafides. It’s not like I’ve ever been immune to that kind of performativism.

But I really say it as an editor. Writers¹ can often use reminders that text in which their intent may not be at all obvious to the reader. Despite the common trope that tribal peoples are confined to history, they can be found in almost all settings in modern life, including reading what you write on social media. They are likely perfectly aware of the way in which non-Native people use the term “tribalism.” But they likely also carry an internal definition of the word “tribal” that is at least neutral, if not resoundingly positive. And so the best-case scenario is that that reader has a brief conflict of interpretation. That brief conflict weakens the impact of your writing in a way that your using “factionalism” or some other less loaded synonym would not.

One could provide similar examples that lack the politicocultural weight of “tribal.” There are not a few words that expressly mean their own opposites. “Sanction” can mean permit or punish. “Original” can mean new, and it can also mean old. “Oversight” can mean attention to detail or the lack thereof. Most times the conflict is reduced or removed by context of the surrounding words. But linguistic evolution seems to work to remove one or the other contrary meanings from such contronyms, which is why “meat cleaver” is understood by fourth graders while “cleaving only unto one’s spouse” is humorously archaic.

Until these other contronyms shed one of their meanings, it’s a good idea to at least consider avoiding their use, unless the context demands it. If a government is trying to punish another government economically, then “sanction” is the word to use when describing the formal nature of said punishment.

It occurred to me today that some of us are in the process of attempting to create a new contronym. To wit: some of us are pushing to redefine the word “desert” as a positive.

“The desert is beautiful, my friends. Yeah, it is.” — Petey Mesquitey

Even among those people who resist the notion that literal deserts are barren and devoid of value, the word serves as a metaphor for just that state. Neighborhoods without grocery stores are called “food deserts.”² Small towns without museums or libraries or concert halls are called “cultural deserts.” The American Council of Education calls communities that lack institutions of higher education “education deserts.”

As is the case with the late fad for imprecise use of the term “tribalism,” it would seem worthwhile to interrogate the origins of our use of the word “desert” to mean a void. And I don’t feel like doing so right this second, but fortunately Erica Zurawski is on the case. In a March 2025 paper published by the journal Environmental Humanities, Zurawski dissects “the centuries-old spatial imaginary conjured by the food desert, what I call a colonial desert imaginary.” In the social sciences, an “imaginary” is essentially the shared assumptions and values of a group.

Zurawski continues:

At the bedrock of this imaginary are contradictory imperial ideologies about arid landscapes, representing them as simultaneously pathologically deficient and places in need of improvement, as problem and possibility, as ruined and in need of redemption. This imaginary is notably detached from the ecologically complex variegation of arid landscapes…

Emphasis mine. Pace Mary Oliver, who wrote in her work Wild Geese that

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting

…the literal desert is not easily reducible to a place of punishment.³

When la mujer que amo and I first moved into our place in Twentynine Palms we had in mind starting a microfarm on our one acre, which we would call the Food Desert. It turns out we actually pretty much did just that. The native mesquites, and screwbean, and the various palo verdes (native and otherwise) have grown in just five years to where they can supply a not-inconsequential portion of our food. The ironwoods aren’t far behind, and the prickly pear cacti not far behind them.

I am in Salt Lake City at the moment, having just attended a environmental conference at which earlier this afternoon, the Dine botanist/ecologist Arnold Clifford reminded us that if you get lost in a piñon-juniper forest, the juniper berries could keep you adequately fed until you’re found — assuming the forest is big enough to get lost in.

Food desert my ass. And similar arguments against “cultural desert” or “education desert” aren’t hard to construct. Though I have long thought of the cloyingly humid landscapes of the eastern United States as a “desert desert.”

Anyway.

Other ecosystem types have been treated with scorn in the past, their common names in English doubling as unflatering metaphors, and those ecosystems’ popular reputations have since been rehabilitated, but only at the cost of abandoning those negative names in favor of better branding. Google’s NGram viewer plots the frequency of words used in books Google has scanned as a function of the historical period. NGram viewer reveals that while “swamp” has been a popular term for as far back as Google’s data goes, “wetland” was near nonexistent until the 1940s, and actually overtook “swamp” in popularity in 1982.⁴ “Rainforest” never became more widely used than “jungle,” but the latter’s lead seems mainly based on the metaphorical sense, and the title of one particular book by Rudyard Kipling.

Both of these ecosystems started to earn greater public respect as a result of being rebranded and thus redefined. Are we going to have to do the same with “desert”? It seems a formidable task in a way that redefining “swamp” and “jungle” may not have been. For one thing, “desert” is used as a scientific term, as well as part of the formal name for many landscapes. Besides which, do you have handy ideas for alternatives? I sure don’t. “Arid lands” would be more or less accurate, if perhaps overbroad. But it’s not a particularly accessible term in the way “rainforest” is. I’ve seen people use “drylands” as a synonym for deserts and semideserts, an obvious riff on “wetlands,” but to me “drylands” lacks that certain something. Also, desert wetlands are a thing, and calling them “dryland wetlands” doesn’t seem workable.

So for now, I’m sticking to defending deserts rather than renaming them. But I’m open to suggestions. Especially since Merriam Webster is no help at all.

1. This very much includes me.

2. The term has fallen out of favor with people who actually work to improve the health of less-affluent urban folks.

3. Walking a hundred miles on your knees through the Garden of Eden would likely be similarly unpleasant.

4. Swamp has regained its lead in the last 15 years, for reasons that are hard to determine at first glance. There wasn’t a spike in 2016, so talk of draining political swamps seems to have been only a minor factor if at all.