"The same summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature.
Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a 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 taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
? Arthur Schopenhauer
appropriate quote
I am really concerned about this country's future, and humanity in general.
Never felt like this before, even back during the Cold War.
Doubleplusungood...
As long as they don't lose "Please, Thank You, Sir or Ma'am" I'll be good.
'cuz he's been evicted from the playground....
AMMO UP!!!!!!! 😛
Cripes! Until today I didn’t know the meaning of;
Catkin: A flowering spike of trees such as willow and hazel. Catkins are typically downy, pendulous, composed of flowers of a single sex, and wind-pollinated.
My definition: Kitty Cats whose growed up babies live in the trailer across the street.
Conker: A series of action-adventure video games developed by Rare. It chronicles the events of Conker the Squirrel. Or Conkers is a traditional children's game in Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of Horse Chestnut trees—the name 'conker' is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other's conker until one breaks.
Nope Conkers are those dudes (perpetually smoking ganga) in Jamaica that will deliver fresh Conch to you for a $$$ fee.
Cowslip: Primula veris is a flowering plant in the genus Primula of the family Primulaceae.
Nope, Cowslip only applies to “The most Devine Bovine” in a hideous attempt to explain to Mrs. Cow why he was once again escorted out of the “Medicinal Pasture”. The “slip” part occurs when His Holiness tries to explain his whereabouts to Mrs. Cow and a large cud of “medicine” plops right out there on her newly painted hoof.
Cygnet: Beats me, probably some sort of wooden goose? Or website.
And, Hah! To you foolish “caretakers” who thought I wouldn’t escape Sunday night. ha ha ha…
B-)
Gotta check out that "medicinal pasture" of which you speak.
Cygnet is a little swan. Eastern Kansas has Marais des Cygnes River which is from the French meaning Marsh of the Swans. Of course, they were seeing snow geese and labeling them as swans. Similarly, the Marmaton River is named for European marmots but actually referring to groundhogs.
French explorers named Cat Island off of MS coast because they had never saw a racoon before.
