In 2007, the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary introduced new words such as “broadband” while others, describing the natural world, disappeared.
The dictionary’s guidelines require that it reflect “the current frequency of words in daily language of children”. However, the philosopher AJ Ayer introduced a generation to the notion that unless we have a word for something, we are unable to conceive of it, and that there is a direct relationship between our imagination, our ability to have ideas about things, and our vocabulary.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a groundswell of opposition to the word cull began to grow and, in 2015, the debate reached a tipping point when an open letter to the OJD, coordinated by the naturalist Laurence Rose, was signed by artists and writers including Margaret Atwood, Sara Maitland, Michael Morpurgo and Andrew Motion along with the brilliant illustrator Jackie Morris and the hugely acclaimed wordsmith, word collector, and defender of the natural world, Robert Macfarlane.
“There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing,” the letter said.
A heated debate in the national press ensued, both for and against the lost words, and the collaboration between Morris and Macfarlane was born.
The Lost Words makes no mention of the dictionary and Macfarlane deftly insults the OJD with a taste of its own medicine by ignoring it. Instead, in a book of spells rather than poems, exquisitely illustrated by Morris, Macfarlane gently, firmly and meticulously restores the missing words. Acorn, blackberry, bluebell, conker and “perhaps the one that cut the deepest” for Morris, “kingfisher”, are lovingly returned to future generations of children.
It is a big, sumptuous, heavy book.
