For over a decade I have been collecting place-words: gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences, or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper. Now and then I have hit buried treasure in the form of vernacular dictionaries or extraordinary people—troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages. one such trove turned up on the moors of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2007. There, I was shown a “Peat Glossary”: a word-list of the hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland that stretches over much of Lewis’s interior. Some of the language it recorded was still spoken—but much had fallen into disuse.
The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.
The substitutions made in the dictionary—the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live. Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for differ-ent trees and creatures. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place. As the writer Henry Porter observed, the OUP deletions removed the “euphonious vocabulary of the natural world—words which do not simply label an object or action but in some mysterious and beautiful way become part of it.”
Consider ammil, a Devon term meaning “the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost,” a beautifully exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen but never before been able to name. Shetlandic has a word, pirr, meaning “a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water”; and another, klett, for “a low-lying earth-fast rock on the seashore.” on Exmoor, zwer is the onomatopoeic term for the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight. Smeuse is a Sussex dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal”; now that I know the word smeuse, I will notice these signs of creaturely movement more often.
The variant English terms for icicle—aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell and daggler (Wessex), cancervell (Exmoor), ickle (Yorkshire), tankle (Durham), shuckle (Cumbria)—form a tinkling poem of their own. Blinter is a northern Scots word meaning “a cold dazzle,” connoting especially “the radiance of winter stars on a clear night,” or “ice-splinters catching low light.” Instantly the word opens prospects: walking sunwards through snow late on a midwinter day, with the wind shifting spindrift into the air such that the ice-dust acts as a prismatic mist, refracting sunshine into its pale and separate colors; or out on a crisp November night in a city garden, with the lit windows of houses and the orange glow of street light around, while the stars blinter above in the cold high air.
I would not have guessed at the existence of quite so many terms for animal dung, from crottle (a foresters’ term for hare excrement) to doofers (Scots for horse shit) to the expressive ujller (Shetlandic for the “unctuous filth that runs from a dunghill”) and turdstool (West Country for a very substantial cowpat). Nor did I know that a dialect name for the kestrel, alongside such felicities as windhover and bell-hawk, is wind-fucker. once learnt, never forgotten—it is hard now not to see in the pose of the hovering kestrel a certain lustful quiver.
In The History of the Countryside, the great botanist Oliver Rackham describes four ways in which “landscape is lost”: through the loss of beauty, the loss of freedom, the loss of wildlife and vegetation, and the loss of meaning. I admire the way that aesthetics, human experience, ecology, and semantics are given parity in his list. Of these losses the last is hardest to measure.
I do not, of course, believe that such words will magically summon us into a pure realm of harmony and communion with nature. Rather that they might offer a vocabulary that is “convivial” as the philosopher Ivan Illich intended the word—meaning enriching of life, stimulating to the imagination, and “encouraging creative relations between people, and people and nature.” And, perhaps, that the vibrancy of perception evoked in these glossaries may irrigate the dry metalanguages of modern policymaking (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for instance, offers such tautological aridities as “Land use: the use to which a piece of land is put”). For there is no single mountain language, but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language, but a fractal of coastal languages; no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.
As I have traveled, I have come to understand that although place-words are being lost, they are also being created. I met a painter in the Hebrides who used landskein to refer to the braid of blue horizon lines in hill country on a hazy day; and a five-year-old girl who concocted honeyfur to describe the soft seeds of grasses held in the fingers. John Constable invented the verb to sky, meaning “to lie on one’s back and study the clouds.” We have forgotten ten thousand words for our landscapes, but we will make ten thousand more, given time.
Of course there are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo—or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, “Wow.”
Robert Macfarlane lives in Cambridge and is author of The Wild Places and The Old Ways. The text that appears here is adapted from his book Landmarks, forthcoming from Trafalgar in June.
Comments
The tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote in January, “Oxford Junior Silences Wind in the Willows, Strikes Fear in Piglet,” (All Things Literary:All Things Natural) barely does justice to the vital importance of the language of the land in the way that Macfarlane’s “Landspeak” does. I’m looking forward to his forthcoming book, Landmarks.
Page Lambert
Connecting People with Nature
Connecting Writers with Words
That is a quite interesting information. The difference between variants of English terms around whole country is impressive. I didn`t expect such distinction in the small UK.
Very enjoyable. Can recommend Macfarlane’s books to Orion readers not yet familiar with this British author. “For there is no single mountain language, but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language, but a fractal of coastal languages; no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.” Thought that was a particularly clever bit of writing there…
I came across the word petrichor recently and love the sound as well as its meaning. It is a word used to describe the distinct smell of rain in the air. It’s the name of an oil that is released from the Earth into the air before rain begins to fall. The smell itself comes about when increased humidity fills the pores of stones, rocks and soil; even though this is just a tiny amount of water, it is enough to flush the oil from the stone and release petrichor into the air. Amazing word for an amazing process that I never thought about before now!
BTW, the Hawaiian language is full of such descriptive words as you are talking about–including a name for every day’s phase of the moon as well as so many other things in nature–they were very observant of their environment.–the ocean as well as the sky and the earth.
Thank you so much for this article. Check out a map of Aotearoa (as is known to Polynesian peoples) or New Zealand (as it is known to European peoples). It is covered with the names of British generals, battle scenes, Royalty and other reminders of British military might. Previously all these places had Maori names that described with exquisite poetry the landforms, waters and flora of this land. Often the Maori place names evoked legends expressing great connection with the skies, oceans and earth. Many of the Maori names are now just reminders of the unique great forests that resided here, the streams you could drink from and the abundant ocean that existed pre-British colonization.
Perhaps being born in a land that is at the farthest corner of the Earth from “The Home Country” has enabled me a more dispassionate inquiry of the English language? What it reveals is that the excesses of the Combustion Revolution (known as the Industrial Revolution in Britain) have been accompanied by a complete transmutation of the English language since the 16th Century.
In brief, the meaning of many of our prime symbols has been inverted and these words are now in profound denial of the great principles of physics that govern the universe. What is most interesting is that the leading generators of these changes were the Romantic Poets (e.g. Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and their modern successors – the Environmental Movement. Ancient Chinese psychology explains this phenomenon in that it articulates how the person who reacts against something perpetuates that which they react against.
You may be interested to catch a glimpse of this transmutation at http://truehope.info/wordpress/quick-a-
z-wise-word-use-guide
Observe that all the words with unsustainable meanings are drawn from the language of our modern, most well-meaning “environmental educators”.
A world without nectar– how could that be? Now this has me thinking about what words I’d trade out and what I’d keep. I had the pleasure of interviewing former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur wrote a lovely book called The Disappearing Alphabet. Take heed, dictionary poobahs, as Richard Wilbur points out:
“If the alphabet began to disappear,
Some words would soon look raggedy and queer
(Like QUIRREL, HIMPANZEE, AND CHOOCHOO-TRAI),
While others would entirely fade away.
And since it is by words that we construe
The world, the world would start to vanish too . .
.”
Such delight and relief I experienced upon reading this essay by Robert Macfarlane! I’ve been waiting for what seems a very long time (probably months), since I read “Mountains of the Mind,” “The Old Ways,” and “The Wild Places.” His writing is simply wonderful, and “Landspeak” promises to be another fine — such an inadequate term! — book from this excellent writer and observer of our world.
Thanks for such a delightful read of delicious words.
I recently finished reading The Old Ways, my first encounter with Robert Macfarlane’s work. I read long passages of it aloud to my wife. We both loved the book. I am eager to read more of his work, including Landmarks. Writing from New York City…
At loss for words, on glorious mountaintop or deep in unfathomable cave, Awen comes to mind. From Welch for Inspiration, awen also means life force–at least, to modern druids. Yet we modern re-constructors, though well intentioned and treading the word as best as we can along long faded ancient paths, are but kindergarteners to the old ones who invented such words as Ogham. Ogmah, the Gaelic God of poetry invented the Ogham alphabet/sign language. It is pronounced OAM, very similar to the Sanskrit Aum, which brings us back to the awe and the life force one feels at the mountaintop or in dark depths unknown. It would take many great books to describe, but to scratch the surface, as the old ones did on wood and stone, the ogham alphabet is based on tree letters. Every letter represents a specific tree. So, on top of symbolizing a phonetic sound, each letter represents a depth of meaning one could only understand who has studied each tree. The letter D for example, Duir, represents the oak. The oak was king of trees, itself representing the doorway between inner/underword and outer/above.
It is tragic to see what Oxford is doing or allowing. A counter-conspiracy is nigh in order. I, for my wee part, will study MacFarlane’s work and work to weave these old gems into new stories and every day conversations with young people. I’ll also research the intriguing links and works of some of the commenters above. Clearly, the natural linguistic counter culture is strong!
May the forest be with us!
When land/nature words are lost so are neural pathways that would have been formed.
Ironic in an era science is discovering new facts about the different bacteria in our brain, gut, heart….without which we die.
More, too many problems with childhood health now go back to not living with nature, no exposure to beneficial interior & skin biomes keeping us healthy. How can children know they need nature when their parents & grandparents do not know nature?
Nature is treated as amusement by most, a commodity to business, stewardship has been lost.
Have designed landscapes for 3 decades. Few clients have a vocabulary to describe what they want for/from their landscape. Most of my clients are 50+. A sadness for 1/2 century of life, and most USA adults have no nature vocabulary. Worse, the words they do use for their landscape are incorrectly used.
You are singing to the choir with me, my hope is you sing to as many as possible with zero nature vocabulary, and they get the epiphany.
Began Lunch Ministry a few years ago. Whenever I meet a non-gardener, but they seem inclined, I invite them to lunch, in my garden, in the Conservatory of course. Amazing how often it is a young woman, and the most common reaction is TEARS. They cry. Their soul knows, yes?
Garden & Be Well, XO Tara