The Oxford Junior Dictionary (U.K.) is planning to remove many words about the natural world from their dictionary and replace them with words from tech world. There will be emptiness in the OJD where these words once lived: Beaver, boar, cheetah, colt, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, porcupine, porpoise, raven, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren; Acorn, almond, apricot, ash, beech, beetroot, blackberry, bluebell, bramble, brook, buttercup, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, fern, fungus, gooseberry, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy; lavender, leek, melon, mint, mistletoe, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, poppy, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow.
How will human children grow up to know they are part of the natural world if they have no words for it?
In a recent Guardian article, Oxford, U.K. says they have no plans at this time to release an up-dated dictionary. It’s possible that letters from famous writers, including Margaret Atwood, have made a difference. I hope any of you who read this will be moved to contact the Oxford Junior Dictionary people at: bookquery.uk@oup.com and express a strong opinion. When we do not act, we give away what we can’t bear to lose.
I told the writers in our Wednesday Flagstaff writing circle about Oxford’s plans, read the lists of words, asked the students to choose a few and suggested that they write using the words. We worked for twenty-five minutes, then read. As I listened, I knew we had taken a powerful action – a reclamation, a refusal to concede to business as usual. Here are the pieces that emerged from five gifted writers. After you read these pieces – they are really prayers of gratitude – please write one of your own. Join us in reclaiming the power of true words. I’ll be happy to add your writing to our collection next week.
Kerry Bennett
Today I ate ALL of my cereal and I drank ALL of the milk in the bowl! Cause I love Lucky Charms, mostly the green shamrocks.
Can we go outside to play? Our babysitter, Maggie, nods her head, and we run barefoot through the kitchen door, down the steps. Be careful! Sometimes I get a splinter in my foot but I don’t care. The thick green grass is still wet. Look! Pretty yellow flowers all over the place. Tina laughs. We pick the flowers one by one and hold them in both our hands like flower girls. That’s what we did at Sammy’s wedding. We held flowers out in front of us, like this, and walked into the church. Only they weren’t yellow. They were purple. VI-oh-lets and LAV-en-der. I love purple.
“DAN-de-lions,” yells Alan. He’s older than us. He knows more sometimes. He has hay fever, so he sits on the steps to watch us. They do look a little bit like lions, with shaggy yellow faces, I think. But no teeth.
We pick all the dandelions we can find, then sit down on the grass and cross our legs. We tie the flowers together, making dandelion necklaces for me and Tina and Alan and Maggie. We made one for Mom, too. She’s at work. She works in the post office.
Mom read us a funny story last night about a bear and piglet who were friends. The bear’s name was Poo. The piglet didn’t have a name. He was called Piglet. There was another story, too, about the wind in the willows. I like willow trees and the way they play in the wind. I like pussy willows. Daddy used to bring me pussy willows when he went hunting in the woods. They were soft and furry and gray, like Frisky, my cat.
I haven’t seen Daddy in a long time. Mom says he loves us but he is busy working on some steps.
I learned a new word, terrapin. At first I thought it was a piece of jewelry, but it’s a fancy name for a turtle. We used to have a turtle named Turtie. Alan put him in the refrigerator one day when it was really hot.Mom came home, found Turtie, and screamed. We laughed but then Mom said it was too cold in there for Turtie and he died. Alan cried.
Did you know that a piglet is a baby pig? Maggie says bacon is made of pigs. I think she’s making it up. She says it’s pork. I wonder if a POR-cu-pine is a piglet in a pine tree? Do pigs climb trees? I don’t know.
Tina and I roll down the hill toward the canal. Roll, roll, roll. I did three somersaults in a row. The willow tree at the edge of the water looks like it has long hair. I watch its hair blowing in the breeze. Alan runs down the hill and beats us to the edge of the canal. He has a can of pop. POP-pies. Poppppppppp… eeeeeees. Dorothy sleeps in a field of poppies as bright as Mommy’s red velvet dress. I was Dorothy for Halloween. I wish I could be Dorothy when she makes the wicked witch melt. “I’m mellllllllllllting!” screams the witch. That’s cool.
Mom says I’m going to be a writer when I grow up. I love the way words sound when you say them out loud. I love the word OY-ster. I wonder why it sounds like LOB-ster. We went to Red Lobster on my birthday. I had lobster pizza. Lobsters come from the ocean. One time when we visited Grammy in Delaware, I saw lobsters swimming around in the grocery store. They had rubber bands tied around their claws. They looked really, really sad.
There are so many words! I wonder who makes them up? I would like to be a word-maker. Mom says that some very bad people in England have stolen lots and lots of words that they don’t want kids to learn any more. Nobody knows why. Words like poppy and violet and dandelion and willow and piglet and lobster and oyster.
You know what? I think we should go to England in a helicopter and when it’s dark we should steal all of those words back from the bad people. We should write them down on little tiny pieces of paper, like that stuff they throw in the air. Confetti. Then we should fly the helicopter all over the world and throw the confetti out the window. Then we’ll have billions and millions and cabillions of words and all the children can learn them. We can start our own dictionary, the free words dictionary. I will write down all the words ever spoken forever in our dictionary. And I will be the word-maker.
Larry Hendricks
The End
Little Shiloh enjoyed the ride. She was at school waiting for her mommy when the nice man pulled up in the big, shiny box car.
“What’s your name, sweet girl?”
“Shiloh.”
He said he was a friend of mommy’s and was going to take Shiloh to her. On the way, the man, who was really tall and smelled like Shiloh’s grandpa, showed her a little movie about flowers. It was on a little box he said she could hold. The movie even gave Shiloh a chance to repeat the flower names, and after the movie would say the flower names, the man would say,
“How do you say that one, little Shiloh?”
And she would say, “Dandelion,” or “Buttercup,” or “Tulip” or “Poppy.”
Then, the movie was about birds, and when the man would ask, “How do you say that one, lovely Shiloh?” she would say “Heron,” or “Magpie” or “Pelican” or “Raven.”
The herons looked silly with the long legs, and the pelicans made her laugh. The ravens, the noises they made, all dark, scared her.
Then, the man stopped the big box car and said, “We’re here.”
“My mommy’s here?”
“We have to take a little bitty walk to go see her,” he said and let her out.
The sky looked like it was going to rain.
“I don’t have my black panther rain jacket.”
“That’s OK,” the man said. He had big, yellow teeth. His eyes looked like the eyes on her dolls at home.
“Where’s mommy?”
“She’s down there,” he said and started walking. “C’mon.”
She followed.
“You want to play some more of the fun game?”
“Uh-huh.”
He bent over and picked up something small.
“This is an acorn.”
He handed it to her. His hands were cold.
“Acorn,” she said. “What does it do?”
“With time, it makes a tree like this one,” the man said and pointed. Shiloh looked up. The tree was so big and tall. She felt so small and she shook.
“It’s getting cold.”
“Not too much farther.”
He kept going. Shiloh couldn’t see the box car anymore and she heard the noise of the black ravens in the trees.
“These are brambles,” the man said.
Shiloh felt the pointy ends.
“Where’s my mommy?”
“She’s over there, sweet Shiloh.”
He kept moving, and he pointed.
“Those are ferns, and that’s a walnut.”
But Shiloh wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t want to play the game anymore.
Lin Saunders
When I was nine and a half, an afternoon of wind, ice, and snow kept me inside. School was cancelled, and I drove Mom mad with complaints and questions all morning. For her sanity I was not allowed on the first floor of the house until lunch. She encouraged me to spend quality time in my room and perhaps clean it. Right. I did scour my room for misplaced treasures, and under the bed, among dust bunnies big enough to have middle names, I found five unmatched socks, and old pen with my name on it, Lisa, and a flashlight that worked. The pen I got two years ago on my birthday. With pen and flashlight in hand I climbed the ladder to the attic. I kept the light off because I thought I might see things better in a small circle of light. After taking inventory of old wooden trucks full of ivory colored lace shawls and dresses that looked brown on the outside and black inside, I stumbled across a medium sized box of books I’d never seen on earlier trips. Using an old blue hammock, I made a mat and pulled one of the older looking books from the box titled Words Not Needed. I flipped through chunks of pages then stopped and poked at a word with my pen.
WEASEL was printed under the picture of a furry animal with a pointed face and small black eyes, and small sharp teeth. I wouldn’t have petted it if it popped up next to me. I flashed the beam of light around the room to see if I could find something similar. The moment light hit the old sign leaning against the wall and tilted right read Skunk Crossing, I know the animal was more like than unlike WEASEL. The picture of the skunk was flat and wide in the middle where the WEASEL was round. Something about the eyes was the same, but I think I might pet the skunk if it could be done without getting sprayed.
I looked down at the book again and flipped through more pages, poked the pen at a spot and saw WREN. This picture above the word was like a joke. Long skinny legs with funny knees led to a thing too large for its legs. One wing was spread out and reached far that if I had those wings with fingers at the tips I could scratch every place on my back. The head was small with a long narrow beak. Maybe this WREN was made from boxes of bits that didn’t match.
Marty/Kathleen Shideler/Walters
What a beautiful world there is out there. But there is no way to describe it. I would like to tell my mother what I saw today but someone stole all the words. Maybe I can draw a picture of that big black thing that goes gawk gawk, and flap my arms like I am flying. Will she know what I mean I think I will call it Gaagi
Mama, do you know what this is? I ask, flapping my arms and saying Gawk Gawk. She looks at me and asks “What color is it?” As black as the stones in front of our house that look as if they were burned.
“Raven,” she says.
And how about this? I ask standing on one foot, putting my hands in front of my face and bending and picking up food with the tips of y fingers.
“You are a heron,” she says—or maybe a stork.”
I think about these words—RAVEN—HERON—STORK. I next point at our cat but say it’s very big—and runs fast and all stretched out and painted with black spots.
“Leopard,” she says, “or maybe Cheetah.”
“How do you know these words, Mama?”
“I learned them before the rulers came in and stole the important words.”
* * * *
The sky was a sheet of red velvet. I reached up and touched it just as it faced into purple silk and slid away—away from my fingers reaching to grasp the brilliant rays that paused then disappeared.
I cried in memory of what was no longer there, but my silent screams also faded into oblivion.
The black sea met the black shore under the black sky. I closed my eyes and could see more than when they were open. I saw dancers and dreamers fighting to reach the surface. I saw blossoms bursting from seed pods and struggling upward through the dark earth. I saw the invisible creatures of the night. I reached out to grasp them all and we floated higher, beyond the earth, beyond the sea, beyond all meaning.
Victoria Enders
She had never been to Oregon—she came from the city. When she arrived, she was wearing cowboy boots. I think that gave her away. None of us ever wore cowboy boots, unless we were on horseback and in the ring, or practicing for it. My expectation of being intimidated by a haughty New York sophisticate—I’d been to the library and looked up all those Teen Miss magazines—those fears flew out the window as soon as I saw those boots. “She doesn’t know anything about us,” I thought. “Well, let’s see how she does.”
Sybil’s coming had been my grandmother’s idea—someone my own age to keep me company while I visited during the summer. Sybil was her cousin’s granddaughter—a cousin my grandmother hadn’t seen in forty years. No one here knew her–she was alighting in completely unknown territory, and already at a disadvantage. She’d probably need my help, “if she wants it or not,” I said to myself, stepping forward.
“Hi, Sybil. How would you like to go blackberry picking? If we go now, we might get enough for a pie for dinner.”
Her blank stare took me aback. “It’s easy,” I said, thinking I’d make it more inviting to her, “there are thick brambles right over there, down by the creek.” I thought her face showed fear at first, and then cleared a little.
“You mean they’re something to eat?” she ventured, and it dawned on me that they might not have blackberries in New York City.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “They’re wonderful and they grow in thick bushes with thorns, but they’re worth the trouble. Blackberry pies are the best.”
We went over the fence and into the field where buttercups and dandelions scattered yellow all over the green.
“These flowers,” Sybil said, “did you plant them?”
“Sybil, these are wild flowers,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.”
“I mean, nobody planted them. Don’t you have flowers in New York?”
“Of course we do.” Her voice deepened. “We have tulips and primroses all over the patio. And ferns, and holly at Christmas.” Her voice rose as her hands shaped a small holly tree.
“Oh, I see.” I said. “Well, we have tame flowers, too, on our patios, and in our houses. But we have fields where seeds are blown by the wind, and land, and just grow by themselves. These are buttercups, see the shiny yellow petals that look like butter? And these paler flowers are dandelions. They’re really more like weeds. They turn into puffs with little seeds on the tips. We hate it when they blow into the lawn. They’re hard to keep out.”
Then I spotted the mistletoe up in the big oaks on the hillside.
“Do you ever have mistletoe balls at Christmas? You know, you’re supposed to stand under it if you want to be kissed.”
Shannon Cowell
The ground rises, great pines with red bark stand crowded in rows. We listen for voices and chainsaws. I hear a voice. I freeze. I pull Nyssa beside me and we look around. Silence.
“What was that?” I ask, just as the voice sounds again and stops when I stop. Nyssa’s eyes flick from treetop to treetop. Whatever it is clears its throat and clucks three chiding clucks. She spots it and points. High up, through branches, a big tasty-looking black bird with a hefty gray beak.
I go for my gun but Nyssa holds me back, cups her hand over an ear.
“Ma says it’s a raven. She says don’t eat it.”
“Well, I say it’s dinner. Is it poison or what?”
She clocks back into ancestor land, her eyes cast to the ground and nearly closed. “She says that bird is probably smarter than you. And she says they’re supposed to be spooky, and a lot of people all over the world won’t eat them. But it’s superstition, do what you wanna.”
The raven shouts at us from on high, with two or three hoarse, clicking sentences, pauses between like punctuation. “What’s he saying?” I ask Nyssa. She confers with Ma again. I keep my eye up at the raven, who tilts her head down to look at me. “She says they never figured out the language.”
My tongue sits heavy in a slimy pool of saliva. Nothingness–air, gas, a blade of grass–gurgles through my large intestine.
“I’m gonna eat that bird,” I say.
The raven croaks, a long, disgusted, throaty sound, and flies off into the wilderness. Too tired to stomp my foot, or throw the gun against a tree, or even sling a curse or two, my eyes slide sideways to meet Nyssa’s, and I let rip a croak, a long, disgusted, throaty sound.
We march, cross a road into a slightly different forest of amputated trees. We wade through a shifting carpet of cast-off limbs that poke our shins and thighs as we walk. Now Nyssa freezes, and pulls me back. I teeter too long on one foot until the weight bearing branch slides and lodges my foot and ankle deep into the tangle of branches.
“Dammit, what? I ask. She grabs my arm and shakes it–shut up–and hunkers down with me, hand cupped over her ear.
“A doe,” she says, pointing again at something I’ve missed.
I point at my stuck foot, toes sunk low into a painful ballet point. I can’t get out without noise.
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