The Lost Words

by  Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (Illustrated by)

In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary — widely used in
schools around the world — was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon
noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been
dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to
merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these “lost words” included
acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and
willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog,
broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these
substitutions — the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and
virtual — became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf
between childhood and the natural world.