From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Ridiculous, adj: very silly or unreasonable, absurd.
Otter, noun: no idea…?
You may have seen the news about a recent move by Oxford University Press – the people who publish many of our textbooks, and most famously, our dictionaries. The bestselling Oxford Junior Dictionary is one of the most widely used in UK schools. It has recently been revised, with a few little changes: for example, replacing the words acorn, conker, and heron with blog, broadband and chatroom. What?
The list of “literary giants” who have objected to this crazy thinking is huge. They have written to OUP to protest against the segregation of the real world from cyber-land. The letter is signed by some huge names: Simon Barnes, Michael Morpurgo, Margaret Atwood - the list goes on. Even for not-yet-nature-lovers, it is ridiculous that the people who write our textbooks want to narrow down the ways in which we can express ourselves. For those of us who have discovered ourselves in nature, this is sheer madness.
OUP are not the only ones trying to sideline the natural elements of our world. You may have heard of Project Wild Thing, the creation of filmmaker David Bond, who decided the only way to make nature popular in our screen-dominated culture was to “market” nature, just as other products are marketed. His initial publicity campaign featured a poster of a young girl licking a frog – well, it was certainly eye-catching. I was appalled to see a photo they shared in despair recently: a poster in a shopping centre advertising hand wipes, showing a girl holding a frog, with the caption, “For every child, there’s a hand that needs sanitizing”. What are these companies doing to our younger siblings, who, if things continue in this way, won’t even know how to spell frog, let along hold one and laugh at their funny noises?
We need to get tough. It is not difficult to imagine real buttercups (noun.) being literally cut and pasted (verb.). We are on the brink of a second Dark Ages, where the wisdom of nature is lost in a black hole of social media. Nature gives us food, medicine, room to grow, fun and inspiration. Take that away in Key Stage 2 and we are left in a world of extinct words and extinct species. It’s time to join the protest and speak up for nature. I urge you to kick up a fuss and tell the nature-alienators where to stop. Write, complain, share, inform - and hold on to nature for dear life.
We can’t hold back the tide of the cyber-world and “modern” thinking. It rushes onwards, by definition impossible to grab hold of and stop. But we can create new ways of thinking to go alongside it; we can look to nature as a friend, heritage, lifestyle. A right. It’s time we educated ourselves, and the people who write our textbooks.