I have an unusual dictionary. It’s titled Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published by Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas, in 2006. In it, various naturalists define words such as “dune,” “kettle” and “narrows.”
In my everyday Merriam Webster’s, for example, “riffle” is described as “a shallow extending across a streambed and causing broken water; a small wave or succession of small waves: a ripple.” In Home Ground, conservationist and author William deBuys—whose work in North Carolina, Arizona and New Mexico has led to the permanent protection of public and private lands totaling over 150,000 acres—explains it as “the little brother of a rapid. It is a shallow section of stream where sediment has been deposited, often in response to the upstream scouring of a pool. As water flows over the obstruction, the current becomes more turbulent and breaks into a succession of small waves. Riffles produce some of the happiest voices of a river, murmuring and chattering, never roaring or growling with argument.”
Frankly, I can see a need for both styles of definition. Sometimes, you just want to know what a word means. At other moments, you’re interested in its breadth; what concepts it’s capable of conveying, especially when it comes to nature terms. But what happens when the words themselves—such as “canary” or “vine”—disappear from the dictionary altogether, without a trace?
The endangered list
According to an article in the October/November 2009 issue of National Wildlife Magazine titled “When Words Become Endangered” by Anne Keisman, more than 30 nature terms were taken out of the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which was published in 2007. “Acorn,” “otter” and “wren” are three that are no longer present. On the other hand, the expressions “chatroom,” “MP3 player” and “cut and paste” do, now, appear.
It’s the job of a children’s dictionary to help kids understand the words that they hear in the world around them. And if those words revolve around technology, then that dictionary is fulfilling its mission. But you have to wonder why children aren’t also hearing about “dandelions” or “beavers,” two words that were also removed.
My mother never had the chance to finish 12th grade. Being the eldest daughter with seven siblings, my grandfather suddenly decided just before she graduated that “she was needed at home.” But while I was growing up, I was always impressed by how she knew the name of every wildflower and every plant we passed by—not their formal Latin labels, but the common and colorful ones. I, on the other hand, would be hard-pressed to identify all the varieties of trees on the little acre and a half of woods where I live.
I think with each new generation, there’s a degrading of a connection to nature. I see it in my own children, who are even less capable of naming the plants and trees around them than I am. In the same vein, though, I’ve heard my daughter, a biochemist, remark, “It’s surprising how little people know about the nature of human beings, about the basic molecules they’re made of.”
It could it be that because I write on nature topics, I notice how rare the words of landscapes are. How often do you hear “glade” or “quagmire” or “traprock” mentioned anymore? Maybe because she’s a scientist, my daughter is sensitive to our increasing unfamiliarity with basic biology. On the other hand, perhaps there’s an information technology expert out there saying just the opposite: “How articulate children are today!”
Do you think the scarcity of nature words in our day-to-day conversations is contributing to our growing disassociation with the natural world? And if so, how will children learn to discover their place within it and their responsibility toward the environment? Please post your thoughts below.
Here’s to finding your true places and natural habitats,