Lost Words
what sort of worlds do we weave with our words?
There is a phenomenon happening that is so subtle and sinister that you probably haven’t even noticed it wrap its ugly fingers around your life. Not to be dramatic. Slowly, over years of technological advancement and scientific exploration, there has been an eroding away from our vocabulary (and lives) of our most basic link to life itself. Where there once were words to describe every notch and curve of the land, words to express how a tree grows upon a rock or how sand slips down cliffs, there is now a fumbled locution of sounds clumsily trying to describe what we see (when we actually take the time to notice such things). Pointing just off center of the thing. Reaching around but never quite touching it. Is this what has become of our fate? Why is this so? Do people not see the value of holding the words of the land close to our hearts? Of being able to pass on the vocabulary of our alive and natural world to our children? Not just the words ( although they are indeed the pillars of our own inquiry and recognition ) but the things themselves. To be able to walk through a forest, tiny hand in hand and name the fungus or notice the different kinds of moss growing on rotting wood. We have lost not just the words, but the ability to truly inquire into that world. To hold the awareness to ask such questions. To notice when a mushroom grows on a living tree, or a dead one, or the fallen leaves on the ground. To notice the dozens of different kinds of moss growing on one stump. Such details have evaded our consciousness. I feel as though something really fundamental is missing in a life that doesn’t maintain and nurture this presence within the world that sustains us. It starts for many of us with knowing the words. A word helps bring our attention to the thing. To bring it forward in the mind. To recognize it when we see it. Otherwise, we are walking around empty. There is something substantially missing in a world that can name every type of phone brand or recognize a car by its logo, yet couldn’t recognize a tree by its buds or a bush by its leaves. What has happened here? A world stirred deeper into machinery and further from where our actual lifeblood and roots lie.
Over many years, words that describe the natural world have subtly and quietly been removed from dictionaries - especially noted in the ones for CHILDREN who are just beginning to shape their awareness of life - and in their place come technologically centred words. Things that seem basic to us now, that our children may not get the opportunity to learn. Imagine the words that we missed. Things that describe LIFE. What we see everywhere all around us, yet have learned to ignore and now couldn’t even name if we tried.
That's an interesting process of the brain, isn't it? How it filters. These filters are heavily influenced by the things that we learn, the words we use, the people around us. Imagine the impact of extracting the natural world from our vocabulary and awareness. Our brains start to filter it out. One no longer notices the bird that just sang in the tree above their head, or the sky exploding in colour in front of them.
We don't even know what we don't have the words for anymore. The words exist. They are out there somewhere in the ethers longing to be spoken again. The land yearns to be seen and named. We knew them once. They have just been systemically removed from our attention ever so slowly that we don't even know what is missing. We don't notice what we are looking at anymore.
Here are just a few examples of what has most recently been removed from the children’s Oxford dictionary
Dandelion
Acorn
Bramble
Newt
Heron
Conker
Otter
Crocus
Catkin
And what has been added
Blog
Blackberry ( The cellphone not the fruit)
MP3 player
Analogue
cut and paste
Database
Broadband
Celebrity
We are seeing here folks the slow eradication of the living natural world in our language, and especially in the lives of young children just beginning to learn how to express the world around them. Our language is a pillar of our experience of the world. Having the words for something gives us the ability to experience it on another level. To see it and name it and bring it into our lives as a part of us. To be able to recognize it when we see it again. Words bring it to life for us in a way not possible otherwise. What does it mean for us that our brains are filled with brand names and computer words rather than types of berries or medicinal plants. Children grow up knowing more about computers these days than they do about the land where they live. This to me really comes out as such a blatant ploy to remove kids further from nature and closer to an artificial society. The matter of such words being removed and added is important. It signals to us where they are directing our focus. Directing what experiences our children have when we aren't paying attention. It is to further sever each succeeding generation from the natural world that we all come from and are wholeheartedly enriched by. Kids these days can no longer go outside and name what they see. Heck, let's be honest, grown ass adults can't even do that anymore. However, they can sit at a tv or iPad all day and be artificially entertained and grow up with no real, tangible skills for connection and understanding of the world.
These beautiful ( perhaps that is another element of it, at least to me. The beauty of such words as dandelion or conifer, or such experiences as catching a whiff of a flower. It is romantic, yes. It is alive and rich with sensation. Compare this to the bland, empty words and meanings of database or ipad. For me, it is clear as day. It is a visceral knowing that this does indeed affect the richness and aliveness of our lives when our vocab is shrouded in lifeless words such as these) words that are used to describe what we see around us are being forgotten. The experience of going out and being able to name the expression of a landscape and its formations, or the growth patterns of trees, is a huge loss to the human consciousness. Words hold power and when we can no longer name what we see around us in the natural world, the less we will remember and understand it until one day we stop to recognize it entirely. What we can name though is 50 different kinds of phones and cars and video games. What is life even? When it becomes centred around such synthetic things. What sort of effects does that have on children who grow up without a relationship to the breath of life and instead find their life cord connected to a computer screen?
I discovered a book a couple months ago that highlighted this beautifully, and actually was what first brought my awareness to this swapping of nature for computers.
The lost words
A collective project that was made as a sort of rebellion against this eradication of the natural world in children's lives. It was intended to be a short dictionary for kids (and adults honestly) with words of the land that had been removed from the junior's Oxford dictionary, so hopefully they may be remembered still. Such seemingly simple words as kingfisher, heather and adder that are becoming less and less known, and remembering the importance of maintaining these words within our vocabulary. To be enriched by what we see around us, and to be able to know it, name it. It is a lost art, to walk through a meadow and know what plants one sees around them, or to hear the birds and recognize them. That is where soul is found. In running with the wolves and singing with the larks and laying in a bed of moss.
Soul is found in seeing the 5 clustered needles of white pine and the peeling skin of birch.
It is found in the crag rising up around a flat landscape or an eddy pooling at the bank of a river.
It is there in the braided strands of a delta and a sopping marsh
It is right there in the murmurations of starling and swooping of swallow
In the painted silhouette of a heron and the vining curling swirling network of bramble
In the vibrant autumn displays of maple and larch
Ever since discovering this book, it has sparked a passion in me to be able to hold this legacy of the land, so that I may pass it on to my babies. To reweave myself with this wisdom so that my children will know it too. To not let such things be forgotten but instead, elevated and celebrated by tiny hands and feet that feel the importance of those strings of sound that come together into something meaningful and guide them into a life connected to all that is alive and well.
Many of us have forgotten how good it feels to be in such an interwoven and intimate kinship with the land that we can see meaning in what is around us. What a sad and empty world it would be if we lost such a connection to that which is ALIVE and instead just held on to a pulseless, empty void of technology.
The lost words was turned into a marvellous, melodic song that lives as a prayer for the living world and sacred words. It has very much woven itself as a hymn for me and this baby that grows in my womb. Every time I listen to it tears swell in my eyes and my heart fills with sensation and baby dances in my womb with joy. A spark of something very much alive. A spark that feels like, where we come from. The place were my baby resides. A holy land.
I will share the words as they are for me the most potent aspect of this blessing.
Enter the wild with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you travel far from heather, crag and river
May you like the little fisher, set the stream alight
May you enter now as otter without falter into water
Look to the sky with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding
Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light
And in the dead of night my darling, find the gleaming eye of starling
Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter
Walk through the world with care, my love
And sing the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you stumble through machair sands eroding
Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing
Let the selkie swim you deeper, oh my little silver-seeker
Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker
And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus
And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home
Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
M
I have this book too and love it! I’m a grandmother, an artist and a certified master naturalist. I teach nature journaling and nature education classes to children. I use my gift of art and my knowledge to help keep these wonders of the natural world alive in a world that seems to be taken over by technology. It’s with the children that our future lies. Teach them to love nature and they will want to do what they can to protect and preserve it. My father passed this gift to me and now it’s my turn to pass the gift.
I love that song!
and
I would offer a counterpoint to the despair, which is that to me the *soul* is not in a word that can be deleted from the Oxford dictionary but in the world itself, and if we don't have the right words then we will make them up. Or - at least - when I was a feral child exploring the wilds of rural Minnesota I don't remember needing a name in order to see. I noticed and played with dandelions long before I had a word for them. My father and I made up our own place names and sometimes our own names for frogs and insects and clouds and plants. And then we got serious about it and met some scientists and learned the "official" names.
A century from now, without effort to maintain the abstraction and the underlying artifice, we might forget the meaning of blog or MP3 or broadband. But nuts will still fall from oak trees, whatever we choose to call them.
I have to say that while I love the motivation behind the Lost Words project, I don't care that much about what the bureaucrats in charge of dictionaries decide to do. I care instead that children still have a sense of wonder, if we allow them to run free instead of stare at screens. I want to raise more feral children, and I think despite the seeming momentum toward a digital-everything reality there is a rebellion brewing. One that will not be publicized. Dropping out of soul-draining systems. Noticing once again the beauty always close at hand.