Annie and her buddy Vita cruteling (rambling cutely) on the Heath
A budding Macfarlane? Did you guys loose anything last week? You know like a phone? Or a bag? Or perhaps a word? Am not kidding, someone out there is stealing words. Important words. Seriously, the Oxford Junior Dictionary is culling words relating to nature. The words apparently no longer relevant to children include: acorn, bluebell, buttercup, conker, cowslip, dandelion, fern, pasture and willow. The words that took their place instead included blog, broadband, celebrity, chatroom, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. Come On. Conker! Pasture! There's an idiom armageddon going on. An armag-idiom. And we're doing naught about it. Am I the only person who wants to cry big fat llama tears when she reads this? You can see them in the offices, "No don't worry they don't need to know about conkers, but I think we should add minecraft as a definition. Yeah let's put minecraft in."
You might think, why does it matter? It matters because if it weren't for words and the worlds they conjure up, you wouldn't have Dr Seuss's Fiffer-feffer-feff or even his Zizzer-zazzer-zuzz. It matters because if we don't have a word for it, we can't understand it completely. Or as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." And surely you don't want your kids' world to start and end in a chatroom?
This is where my hero Robert Macfarlane of the Clan of Lost Words comes into the picture. The author of the brilliant book Landmarks is like the knight-errant of the stolen buttercup. He is single-handedly trying to save our language and our landscape from becoming a linguistic wasteland. He has meticulously collected - little idiom squirrel that he is - expressions and words from all around the UK, which relate to our natural world but are sadly fading into extinction. Words like smeuse an English Dialect noun for "the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal". Now that you know what a smeuse is, you might suddenly find yourself pointing one out. "Check out that giant smeuse kids, looks like your father fancied a shortcut on the way home from the pub." Or doofers, Scots for "horse shit". Aka a brilliant word you can happily use as an expletive as nobody but you will know what it means.
This weekend, we joined Macfarlane in his quest and tried to undo some of the word-thieving that has been going on at Oxford University Press. I told the kids they were the Dr Seuss of nature, word alchemists, magicians of meaning. They could invent any expressions they liked relating to our activities in the wild. We would write them down and they would become part of our family lexicon. So climbing to the very top of a fallen tree on the Heath became Titanic walking, or two fairly adorable children rambling across the landscape together became cruteling, or perhaps my favourite, crittlecronks - the exposed spikey remnants of the roots of a tree after it has come down in a storm. So dictionary people, you may take our buttercup, but you will never take our tongues.
To join us in our quest to add more words to our natural world...
All you need:
Top tip: Read your kids a Dr Seuss story before you set off, just to get their imagination going. The man is a genius when it comes to invented creatures, places and activities. After all he gave us Foo-Foo-the-Snoo and the Tuttle Tuttle tree.
Top quote: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
You might think, why does it matter? It matters because if it weren't for words and the worlds they conjure up, you wouldn't have Dr Seuss's Fiffer-feffer-feff or even his Zizzer-zazzer-zuzz. It matters because if we don't have a word for it, we can't understand it completely. Or as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." And surely you don't want your kids' world to start and end in a chatroom?
This is where my hero Robert Macfarlane of the Clan of Lost Words comes into the picture. The author of the brilliant book Landmarks is like the knight-errant of the stolen buttercup. He is single-handedly trying to save our language and our landscape from becoming a linguistic wasteland. He has meticulously collected - little idiom squirrel that he is - expressions and words from all around the UK, which relate to our natural world but are sadly fading into extinction. Words like smeuse an English Dialect noun for "the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal". Now that you know what a smeuse is, you might suddenly find yourself pointing one out. "Check out that giant smeuse kids, looks like your father fancied a shortcut on the way home from the pub." Or doofers, Scots for "horse shit". Aka a brilliant word you can happily use as an expletive as nobody but you will know what it means.
This weekend, we joined Macfarlane in his quest and tried to undo some of the word-thieving that has been going on at Oxford University Press. I told the kids they were the Dr Seuss of nature, word alchemists, magicians of meaning. They could invent any expressions they liked relating to our activities in the wild. We would write them down and they would become part of our family lexicon. So climbing to the very top of a fallen tree on the Heath became Titanic walking, or two fairly adorable children rambling across the landscape together became cruteling, or perhaps my favourite, crittlecronks - the exposed spikey remnants of the roots of a tree after it has come down in a storm. So dictionary people, you may take our buttercup, but you will never take our tongues.
To join us in our quest to add more words to our natural world...
All you need:
- nature
- imagination
- pen
- notepad
Top tip: Read your kids a Dr Seuss story before you set off, just to get their imagination going. The man is a genius when it comes to invented creatures, places and activities. After all he gave us Foo-Foo-the-Snoo and the Tuttle Tuttle tree.
Top quote: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
Titanic Walking. Minu coined this term. She hasn't seen Kate Winslet on the prow, but she's learning about the Titanic at school and is obsessed with the facts... Most mornings start with "Mama, did you know..."
Transfixed by watching ants do their thing. Mungle-bungling is now our word for when ants are walking in a line, carrying food, being busy. I'm so going to use that one for me though. No sorry kids, I can't. I'm mungle-bungling.
All boys love smooging: doing what boys do in forests i.e. gathering wood, cracking it, stacking it...
More smooging. Girls can smoog too of course.
Crittlecronks. Or the spikey, exposed roots of a tree taken down by a storm
Climbing out the heart of a magical tree is now called: Beequeening
Limited edition linocut of a "smeuse" (sold out) by artist Stanley Donwood, who created the cover of Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks book
More wild ideas:
 Wax on, leaf off |  Got wood? |  Is that mud on my wall? |
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