“haze-fire luminous morning mist through which the dawn sun is shining poetic”
from Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
George Orwell wrote some good stuff about the project of controlling what people think by controlling their use of language, what words they’re taught and what they’re allowed to say with them. The revision of the Oxford Junior Dictionary to take out words for nature is just a particularly distressing example.
So I bought Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Landmarks,’ a dictionary-plus-essays volume about lost or almost-lost words for natural phenomena. It’s based in the UK, but I understand there is a US equivalent. Why should we let other people be the ones who change our thoughts by changing our vocabulary? Let’s reclaim nature, one word at a time.
