THE LOSS OF NATURE WORDS.
THE LOSS OF NATURE WORDS. Robert Macfarlane had an article on the Orion magazine web site in which he lamented the loss of precise nature words. (link via Arts and Letters Daily). He used as an example a new revision of the OXFORD JUNIOR DICTIONARY which omitted a large number of nature words, including 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 in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.