ON THE WING
My first close encounter with birds came when a flock of blue tits flew through a classroom window of the primary school I attended in Britain in the 1950s. The arrival of the birds was opportune because that very morning the class had had nature study, a core syllabus at the time. Nature study took its place firmly alongside the Three Rs, reading, writing and ’rithmatic.
Nature study meshed nicely with the first two because, when it came to learning to read, many of the pictures with words attached in our books portrayed symbols of the wild world — animals, flowers and trees. They were familiar, not abstract, and so through word association it was easy to learn how to read, write and spell their names.
With memories of the days when I discovered both birds and literature, I was staggered recently to discover the compilers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary had deleted many words with associations to the natural world. They had been replaced with words from a different environment — the computer world.
To make way for modern hi-tech terms such as BlackBerry, blog, voicemail and broadband, the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has opted to excise the real blackberry, or at least its original meaning. And no longer can a child check the dictionary to learn more about not just the blackberry, but the dandelion, the acorn, ivy, poppy and willow.
Among bird names to vanish are heron, kingfisher and budgerigar, and among animals, the beaver, porcupine and porpoise.
According to Vineeta Gupta, who heads children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press, changes in the world were responsible for changes in the book.
“When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance,” she said. “That was because many children lived in semirural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.”
The 10,000 words and phrases in the junior dictionary were selected using several criteria, including how often words would be used by young children.
Computer terms, many of them abstract like cyberspace, are not the only new ones. Among additions are celebrity and conflict, which might say something of the state of the world today, at least events that “trend” on the internet.
My discovery of the changes to the dictionary came on a day when I read another report concerning the natural world and the impact it can have on not so much the past, but the future.
The Age in Melbourne reported on the benefits of parks in urban spaces. It said 40 years of research had demonstrated exposure to nature increased calm and rumination, decreased agitation and aggression and improved concentration, memory and creative thought.