In 2009 Oxford Junior Dictionary (Oxford University Press) revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. So they deleted these words from the Junior dictionary. These are the words deleted:
acorn,
adder,
ash,
beech,
bluebell,
buttercup,
catkin,
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.
This is an outright shame because as Wendell Berry wrote: “… we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”
When I was a child, I asked my mother what this was (see above), she said it was Nature. For some time after that, every time someone said the word, ‘Nature’, I imagined a dandelion seedhead.
