LANDMARKS

A short acknowledgment on the loss of language

I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s LANDMARKS; a glossary of specific words in Gaelic, Irish, Shetlandic and other dialects, for the landscapes of the British isles. He includes the outer Hebrides and its moors, its grasslands, as well as the coastal places, including the peaks of the Cairngorms. As we rapidly lose a literacy around our landscapes, it is a beautifully particular and honouring read.

Oxford University Press revealed the list of entries it no longer felt to be relevant to modern day childhood. The deletions included:

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 to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voicemail.

Let that sink in for a minute.

I recently read a 2015 study that had been done of university English majors in America, that showed the overwhelming majority of them were unable to get through the first paragraph of chapter one of Bleak House. They simply didn’t understand it (so, unable to restate what they read). Granted, it’s Dickens and certainly challenging language but all the same, grim.

Back to LANDMARKS;

Here are three of the words from Macfarlane’s gatherings across the British Isles that I re-read, rolled over and luxuriated in:

eit: practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn Gaelic (Isle of Lewis)

feetings: footprints of creatures as they appear in the snow Suffolk

sithean: by association with features within which fairies were thought to dwell: applied to small knolls, in most cases crowned by green grass Gaelic

What we give our attention to and particularize, we love.

Thanks for reading — and to my new subscribers, thanks, and welcome here.