After Oxford University Press released its 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, a keen reader noticed what was not included in its more than 10,000 entries. Some 40 common words had been removed, like dandelion, bramble, heron, leopard, oyster and newt. They all related to nature. And they were replaced with terms such as blog, bullet-point, and voice-mail.
Oxford’s explanation to inquiries about the deletions was that many children no longer live in rural environments so such words are not familiar to them. Other words that were deleted were blackberry, clover, hamster, herring, lark, minnow, almond, mussel, otter, ox, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, catkin, cowslip, cygnet, ivy, nectar, wren, raven, bramble, magpie, starling, weasel and panther in favour of analogue, graph and celebrity.
“What we might call the ‘nature of childhood’ has changed dramatically in Britain over recent decades,” said Dr. Robert Macfarlane, a Reader in Environmental Humanities in Cambridge University’s Faculty of English. In the United Kingdom, “Online culture has boomed, screen time has soared and the ‘roaming range’ within which children can play and stray unsupervised has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years amid parental fears about traffic, ‘stranger danger’ and the pressure of school work.” This trend has been measured elsewhere, with some studies revealing that a decade ago 40% of children regularly played outdoors, while far fewer no longer do so. The consequences include obesity, but also anti-social behaviour, friendlessness and non-specific fears and anxieties about the outdoors.
Dr. Macfarlane also discovered, following a 2002 study in Science by Professor Andrew Balmford from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, other evidence of losses in “nature-literacy”. A National Trust survey, for instance, showed that 50% of children couldn’t tell the difference between a wasp and a bee, and that only one in five children in Britain were “positively connected to nature”. The loss of words is a symptom of this problem. “We cannot know what we cannot name,” warned Dr. Macfarlane, “[and] we cannot care about what we do not know.”
In Japan, a 2004 study by Tetsuro Saito of Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University, the fourth of its kind carried out since 1991, found that 52% of children have never seen either a sunrise or a sunset. Thirteen years earlier, the figure had been 41%. This trend, considering the continual urbanization of Japan and the greater reliance on digital devices, suggests that such natural occurrences as a sunrise and a sunset are even less likely to be a part of a Japanese child’s experience.
Back in Great Britain, tens of thousands of people signed a petition for the Oxford publishing house to reinstate words related to the natural world. To no avail. So Dr. Macfarlane teamed up with illustrator Jackie Morris to respond through what they called a “spell book”. The Lost Words, featuring 40 terms that were celebrated through text and watercolour, was intended to bring the words back into children’s minds and lives. The two authors didn’t feel qualified to call themselves “poets”, so they called their contributions “spells”. The book became an international best seller.
Later, in Canada, Morna Edmundson, artistic director of Vancouver’s Elektra Women’s Choir, found herself captivated by the coffee-table book when she came across it at a friend’s house just before the Covid-19 pandemic—so much so that she thought, “I wonder if we could get the rights for it?” Edmundson got permission. The Lost Words: A Spell Book—featuring 20 choral works by 10 Canadian composers—was given as a world-premiere event in Vancouver on October 1, 2022.
The success of The Lost Words: A Spell Book probably had only a marginal influence on connecting children to nature. But we do owe a debt of gratitude to the Oxford Junior Dictionary for inadvertently measuring what is really happening to us and our relationship to nature on this most amazing of all planets.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: Newt – photo by John K Thorne via Flickr (Public Domain)