ABCs of Dictionaries …

Knowledge of words and their meaning is power … words describe the thing, the concept, the idea, the landscape, the sky etc – where would we be without them?

 

Nature and wildlife are essential to life (our life on earth) … so I was somewhat horrified to read about some of the words that had been removed from the Oxford University Press Junior Dictionary … wait for it … because lots of children have no experience of the countryside …….. doh?! 

Perhaps true, but surely this is a good reason to keep words in?

Dictionaries exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know or half-know …

I think the thing that got my goat was the words being included for the age group 7 – 11 … were “celebrity”, “MP3 player” and “broadband” … taking out the beautiful descriptive words such as “conker”, “acorn”, or “brook” …

“Blog” was also added in … but who but Lenny of such a young age blog, or know the reason for it … at 7 – 11?  Maybe one or two … but honestly … kids should be playing conkers, by the babbling brook, under the oak tree producing acorns.

Fifty percent of us now live in urban conurbations … but we wouldn’t be here but for life on earth … all our knowledge comes from this wonderful natural world of ours … it doesn’t come from broadband, or MP3 players …

A for Acorn - the fruit of an oak tree

So we must encourage our youngsters to remember words such as A is for Acorn, B is for Brook, C is for Conker, D is for Dictionary or Dog …

I grew up with these words … not D for Dog, but C for Cat … the Acorn is an amazing fruit which gives us that incredible oak tree, which will over time look after over 200 other species during its 250 year lifetime …

C for Conker - the fruit of the Horse
Chestnut tree

We played C for conkers … a childhood game – that may be a bit rough now … banished by the Health and Safety Peeps, while the Horse Chestnut tree is succumbing to Bleeding Canker – a lethal bacterial infection.

Two things here … do we not want our children to be interested in Botany and ancillary disciplines?  Also we should remember Anne Frank – this was the tree she mentioned in her diary … I have to say I did not know this.

Our food comes directly or indirectly
from plants, such as rice here

… and not A is for Attachment, B is for Block-graph, C is for Chatroom, D is for Dialogue … R is for ridiculous?!

In delisting these words we will lose their connotations and thus our descriptive phrases of the great outdoors … without language we will eventually lose the land itself.

B for brook

I checked in on B for brook … we had one nearby that as a family we’d walk to, paddle in, play Pooh Sticks, or just watch it babble away … as Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) describes in his poem “The Brook”:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,

By twenty thorpes, a little town,

And half a hundred bridges.

Til last by Philip’s farm I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,

In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret

By many a field and fallow

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there a grayling.

And here and there a foamy flake

Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak

Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river

For men may come and men may go

But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots

That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance

Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars

In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;

I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go

But I go on for ever.

Pooh Bear and Christopher Robin
playing Pooh Sticks

PS H is for Hip … improving rapidly – walking without sticks, but taking one when I do my long walks – half an hour or so at the moment … stretching out each day.

Link to the Guardian article

Hilary Melton-Butcher

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