A good friend sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal article the other day. The article (“Why You Can’t Say Where You Are” by Tom Shippey) reviewed Robert MacFarlane’s new book, Landmarks. In this book Macfarlane explores the idea that lacking the words to describe the things around you causes you to be less able to see those things clearly, and this growing lack of clarity and focus then causes you to relegate these phenomena to irrelevant trivialities that not worth the effort to save or preserve.
Macfarlane’s starting point is a discussion of some of the words being deleted from the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. These extirpated words include many basic nouns of the natural world including “acorn,” “buttercup,” “heather” and “wallow.” The editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary justified their actions by stating that since modern children do not encounter such objects in their daily lives, the words have become irrelevant. Words like “celebrity,” “attachment,” “blog” and “voice-mail,” though, were added to or maintained their presence in the new edition because of their great relevance to experiential world of youth.
Macfarlane ponders a world in which children increasingly are kept locked away (and safe?) within their homes and other controlled spaces. They are allowed to roam freely about in the “antiseptic” world of the Internet (and that’s a topic for intense discussion later!) but are prevented from encountering or exploring the components of their natural landscapes. The words they need to describe their experiences are not the vocabulary of natural places! Will these children, then, ponders Macfarlane, ever know that the natural world exists? Will they ever see any value in an uncut forest or uncultivated field or wetland? Or will these places be regarded simply as “empty” and “useless?”
Words! When I was in grade school I was an avid reader of DC Comics. I remember a cascade of odd vocabulary words that I slowly assimilated because of their use in these silly (and wonderful!) publications. In fifth grade I explained to my Reading group the meaning of the word “irony” (of course, I had to use Clark Kent and Lois Lane in my explanation!). In high school I remember cramming vocabulary words from the paperback book we simply called the “green book” (because of the color of its cover) in preparation for taking the SAT’s. My friends and I would pepper our lunch time conversations with “pejorative” and “salubrious” and “fecund.” Our absolute favorite new word, though, was “jejune.” It was so useful in describing our high school experience!
There is, though, no vocabulary “green book” for the increasingly lost words that describe the forests and fields around us. Writing about hiking through the rolling hills and the continually re-sculpted forests here in Pennsylvania have forced me to recognize and use words like “hollow” (a small valley or basin) and “copse” (a group of small trees growing closely together) and “swale” (a low lying, often wet stretch of land). There is some discussion about whether the words “copse” and “coppice” are synonyms, or if coppice implies a stand of shrubs instead of trees, or if coppice is best used as a verb (the action of regularly cutting trees and shrubs (which then regrow in a uniform manner)).
Copse at Mossend Farm, R. Griffith, Wikimedia Commons
A copse in which game animals are found is a “spinny” which is quite similar to a “covert” (a dense group of trees and shrubs that shelter game animals). A number of extremely localized words have been derived to describe the hiding places for hunted animals! It is important for hunters to recognize optimum game microhabitats!
In grade school we all sang the “Caisson Song” and the line “over hill over dale we will hit the dusty trail.” In third grade one of my braver fellow students asked our music teacher what a “dale” was. She said, quite confidently, “the opposite of a hill.” True! A dale is a valley, and a small dale can be called a “dell” (with the farmer there in!), and a dell might be justifiably referred to as a “hollow” (although “the farmer in the hollow” has a very sinister ring to it!).
Lothlorien, N. Kenrick, Flickr
J.R. R. Tolkien loved both nature and words! Reading his Lord of the Rings takes you through “dingles” (deep wooded valleys) and over “tors” (rocky hills) past “bights” (curved recesses at the edge of a forest) and through “chines” (deep, narrow ravines). Along the way you encounter “cobs” (spiders), “lobs” (also spiders!), and “conies” (rabbits) along with the incredible array of elves, orcs, dwarfs, goblins, dragons and balrogs! The richness of Tolkien’s descriptions of the forests and swamps and wastelands that Frodo and his companions wander through make these books of fantasy feel intensely real!
Another wonderful set of books book that emphasized the power and importance of words is Ursula LeGuin’s 1968 Earthsea Triliogy. Wizards living on the scattered islands of Earthsea labor to learn the “true names” of the inhabitants and all of the other biotic and physical components of their world so that they could use these names to shape and control not only Nature but also the future. Decades before Harry Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry youthful wizards were being taught far away in Earthsea the secrets of their world!
So far, I have listed fifteen “nature words” in this essay, and I hope that everyone can see how useful and rich they are! I wanted to finish with a short vocabulary quiz to help advance the use of complex words in descriptions of nature. There are seven questions and twenty-eight possible answers! Correct answers are listed at the end of the essay! None of these words are jejune (of course!)! Good luck!
1. A valley or basin on the foot of a hill is called a
a. Fell b. Grove c. Combe d. Daddock
2. A wild, uncultivated, usually upland area is called a
a. Pinery b. Covert c. Cag d. Weald
3. A watecourse running through peat, often dry in the summer
a. Bugha b.ammil c. feith d. dag
4. Rough or marshy ground usually overgrown with one kind of plant is called
a. A brake b. Mast-land c. Chaparral d. A forb
5. The rough sod of moorland (with the heather growing on it)
a. brug b. bruach c. def d. beat
6. A place of deep mud or mire is called
a. A heath b. A slough c. A ghyll d. Spronky
7. A grassy, open space in a forest is called a
a. Fen b. Slive c. Glade d. Steppe
Let me know how you did! Use each word five times and it will be yours forever (or so my high school English teacher claimed!). The words that make up the wrong answers are worth looking up, too! I especially like “spronky!” (Questions 3 and 5, by the way, are terms from MacFarlane’s Glossary I in Landmarks. These Glossaries are the closest things we have to a Natural Green Book!
(Answers: 1 c, 2 d, 3 c 4 a, 4 b, 5 d, 6. b 7. c )
Missed Nos. 3 and 5.
“spronky” — wow! It’s not in my Webster’s Collegiate, Oxford American, or American Heritage dictionaries. I’ll have to search online because I want to use it in my next conversation with someone.