Think of the parable of a frog in boiling water. That’s us dithering as the ‘unprecedented‘ weather becomes more extreme | Helen Pilcher

The complacency is staggering: just another hot summer, a flooded street, a crop failure.

We are accepting this extraordinary deterioration as normal Recently, I overheard a conversation in a cafe where someone described their toast as “awesome”.

I felt myself bristle.

Not because the toast wasn’t good – I didn’t taste it – but because I remember a time when “awesome” meant something that inspired awe: towering mountains, the vastness of the night sky, the haunting song of a humpback whale.

Now it’s being used to describe breakfast.

“Fantastic” has met the same fate, shedding its fantastical origins to become a synonym for “great”.

Meanwhile “literally” has been so thoroughly abused that it can now mean something that is, quite literally, not literal.

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