In 2017, British nature writer Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places, published a book of poems, or what he termed spells, called The Lost Words. The book was, essentially, a protest against the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s dropping 50 words relating to the natural world from its 2012 edition, and replacing them with words relating to the Internet. “Acorn” was dropped, and “attachment” added; “buttercup” and “bluebell” made way for “blog” and “block-graph,” and so on. Deleted from the dictionary, wrote Macfarlane in his introduction, were words “that children used to name the natural world around them.”
Macfarlane (and illustrator Jackie Morris) wanted to re-introduce children to the words of the natural world, on the theory that by doing so children would find nature more familiar, less frightening, and therefore worth saving.
In addition to the book, Macfarlane and 27 other writers, including Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion, signed a letter to Oxford University Press in which they stated that “there is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing.” Not having words to put to the natural objects around them drives children indoors, onto the Internet, into social media, confined to a world of “obesity, anti-social behaviour, friendlessness and fear.” They said that by restoring the lost words in its next edition of the OJP, the Press would be sending “a tremendous cultural signal and message of support for natural childhood.” OUP replied that it had no immediate plans to do any such thing.
Which is unfortunate, because, to judge by the New York Times’s daily Spelling Bee, some sort of signal is needed on this side of the Atlantic as well. It seems the disappearance of words related to nature and the environment has become pandemic. I, like thousands of others, do the Spelling Bee every day. For those who don’t, each day’s puzzle consists of seven letters arranged in a hexagon from which puzzlers must construct as many words of four letters or more as possible; one of the letters is located in the centre of the honeycomb, and each word must contain that letter. Puzzlers climb the orthographical ladder from “Good Start” to “Genius” as they approach the goal, which is to get all the possible words and become a “Queen Bee.”
I know, it sounds kindergartenish. But it’s interesting to me, as a writer, that so many people find word games irresistible. More than 50 million North Americans do a crossword puzzle every day. Think of the popularity of games like Scrabble, Wordle, Balderdash, and Bananagrams. Words matter. Knowing the right word for something matters. Living half the year in Mexico, I am diligently learning to speak Spanish. I judge my progress not by my ability to use the subjunctive, but by how much my vocabulary has increased. I would far rather go into a hardware store and ask for an extension cord in Spanish than say to a waiter, “Would that I had a coffee.” Words ease us into our environment: the more we have, the richer the environment.
But in Spelling Bee, getting “all” the possible words can be frustrating, because, as many puzzlers have found, Spelling Bee does not accept many words that are quite legitimate. Some of these unaccepted words come from specialized fields – architecture, for example; Spelling Bee doesn’t take “ogee” or “dado.” Such omissions from the New York Times lexicon are annoying, but not alarming. I lived a happy and fulfilling life not knowing what an ogee was. But I do find it alarming that a disproportionate number of words not accepted by Spelling Bee are words pertaining to the natural world.
Recent Spelling Bees, for example, have rejected “gannet,” “hoopoe,” “caracara,” and “dunlin,” all legitimate and not all that recherché names of common birds. Is it possible that no one at the New York Times knows what a gannet is? A gannet (Morus bassanus) is a large, white sea bird with black wing tips and a delicate yellowish tinge on its cheeks. The bird, and the word for it, appear in Beowulf (1000 AD) and in Hakluyt’s Voyages (1589), and to watch thousands of gannets diving for fish off Île Percé is still one of the chief reasons for visiting the Gaspé Peninsula.
A hoopoe (Upupa epops) – so named because its call sounds like “oop-oop” – is a brownish, crested bird native to southern Europe, Africa and Asia. “When they migrate to England,” writes Islamic scholar S. Zaynab, “they have a reputation for favouring vicarage lawns.” Hoopoes were scorned in the Torah as “abhorrent and not to be eaten,” because the females emit a strong odour that repels enemies and attracts insects. However, in the Quran, the hoopoe is intelligent and wise, and is credited with introducing King Solomon to the Queen of Sheba. Hoopoe fossils have been dated to the early Eocene, about 56 million years ago, giving them one of the most ancient lineages of any modern bird.
The dunlin (Calidris alpine) is a member of the sandpiper family, and is one of the most abundant shorebirds on the planet. Its name, first recorded in 1531, is a dialect form of “dunling,” from the colour of its feathers (similar to the way that the “starling” is so named for the star-shaped spots on its winter plumage). Some etymologists derive the name from “dune,” which is where dunlins are most often found.
The Crested caracara (Caracara plancus) is a large, black-and-white South American member of the falcon family, with some distant affiliation with vultures. It’s quite common in Mexico: April Gaydos, head of Audubon Mexico in San Miguel de Allende, says that “a day of birding is not complete unless I see a caracara,” and she usually does. There was a Guadalupe caracara, native to the island of Guadalupe off the coast of Baja, California, but the last one was shot in 1906. In A Most Remarkable Creature, his book about the caracara, Jonathan Meiburg writes: “Unless you live south of the Rio Grande, chances are you’ve never heard of caracaras,” and he seems to be right. In reviewing Meiburg’s book for NPR, bird researcher Anna Morris writes that “caracaras are so many of the things that we are as well: inquisitive and adaptable, obstinate but flexible, constantly seeking the horizon.”
A pity, then, that the New York Times puzzle editors live so far north of the Rio Grande.
I fear extinction in language precedes extinction in nature.