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uproar among parents
Back in 2007, the Oxford English Dictionary removed words describing nature such as acorn, dandelion, mistletoe, pasture and willow from their junior edition aimed at school children. They replaced them with terms such as 'blog', 'broadband', 'chatroom', 'cut-and-paste' and 'MP3 player', causing an <anchor>uproar among parents</anchor>. While some parents petitioned the dictionary to reinstate the outdoor words, other parents couldn't see a reason for the fuss. They argued that the less bulky the book was, the more likely kids would be to carry it around with them.
Why Oxford Dictionaries are right to purge nature from the dictionary | Martin Robbins | The Guardian
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It's not the OED's fault if the youth of today have no idea what these sheep are standing in. 

It’s not the OED’s fault if the youth of today have no idea what these sheep are standing in. Photograph: FURLONG PHOTOGRAPHY / Alamy/Alamy

It’s not the OED’s fault if the youth of today have no idea what these sheep are standing in. Photograph: FURLONG PHOTOGRAPHY / Alamy/Alamy

This article is more than 9 years old

# Why Oxford Dictionaries are right to purge nature from the dictionary

This article is more than 9 years old

Martin Robbins: Attacking a dictionary for removing archaic words is like punching your thermometer when it’s too cold.

Tue 3 Mar 2015 04.30 ESTLast modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 06.50 EDT

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If the pen is mightier than the sword then words are probably more lethal than bullets, and that makes Oxford Dictionaries the most powerful military force in the world. This metaphor helps explain two things: why I’m not a very successful writer, and why a group of authors are so concerned that a variety of words relating to nature were culled from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

The purge actually happened in 2007, but in January this year a number of the Anglosphere’s literary giants, including Andrew Motion and Margaret Atwood, joined a campaign by some 28 writers to get the Oxford University Press to reconsider their position, protesting at the loss of healthy outdoor words in favour of language that is, “associated with the increasingly interior, solitary childhoods of today”

“The deletions,” according to Robert Macfarlane in another article on Friday, “included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.”

Few kids today would know what to make of this rare green hedgehog. Photograph: Alamy

I’m sympathetic to the campaign. They’re right to be concerned about a generation of indoor kids raised by cowardly parents, and the impact that may have on health, obesity, or even just the appreciation of nature and our place in it. It’s a tragedy that kids don’t get out more, and any effort to reverse the trend should be applauded.

But Oxford Dictionaries are absolutely correct in what they’re doing, and the people moaning at them have got the whole situation completely backwards.

Firstly, the job of a dictionary is to document words and usage, not dictate them. The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical record, analyzing contemporary writing and parsing the results according to strict guidelines to provide its users with an accurate depiction of how language is used.

In the case of the Junior Dictionary, that work is carried out using a 100 million word corpus of children’s literature and writing. The editors aren’t just taking an adult dictionary and chucking out words; they’re performing a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the English language and recording the results as faithfully as possible. Is the system perfectly accurate and free of bias or editorial influence? Well no, nothing human ever is; but it’s a damned sight better than letting campaign groups get involved.

And I have to say, I’m a little bit queasy at the idea that somehow natural words are morally superior to technological one. Maybe ‘chatroom’, ‘blog’ and ‘cut-and-paste’ lack the poetic qualities of cowslips and otters, but they’re far more valuable to most people’s lives, and there’s nothing intrinsically ‘wrong’ about that fact.

I tried searching the Guardian Picture Desk for 'cowslip' but all I found was this freaky mutant buttercup. View image in fullscreen

I tried searching the Guardian Picture Desk for ‘cowslip’ but all I found was this freaky mutant buttercup. Photograph: Alamy

That leads me to a second complaint, expressed by a lot of people I know, that Oxford Dictionaries have somehow gotten their analysis wrong. Surely the idea that words like ‘acorn’ or ‘pasture’ or ‘conker’ are archaic is just bonkers, when these things are all around us? I would dearly love these people to be right, but I suspect the OJD corpus shows that they’re not, and that this disbelief has more to do with our own denial than any faulty scholarship on the part of the editors.

I don’t have access to their database, but I can use a substitute. Google’s N-Gram viewer provides trends for the frequencies with which words appear in literature over the last two centuries. It’s not an exact match because it’s a different set of works than those used by Oxford Dictionaries, it includes American and British sources, and it covers adult literature too. However, it should give us some idea whether these words are in decline or not.

I won’t go through all of the words mentioned, but here are a the graphs for pasture, buttercup, fern, and catkin:

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The unfortunate truth is that most of the words I tried from Macfarlane’s list have fallen considerably in usage since the mid 20th century. Not all of them, and I’m not going to go through them all here, but you can play around for yourself and find little to contradict Oxford Dictionaries’ decision.

Attacking a dictionary for removing these words is like punching your thermometer when it’s too cold, or shouting at journalists because you don’t like the news from Syria. They’re simply reflecting reality, and if that troubles you then maybe you should be out confronting these issues in the real world rather than in the pages of a book. It isn’t the job of the OUP to get kids to play outside: that’s called parenting, and maybe that’s where campaigners should be focusing their attention.

(Edit 3/3: Corrected “Britain’s literary giants” to avoid implying Margaret Atwood was British. Also edited ‘Children’s Edition’ to ‘Junior Dictionary’ to emphasise that these are separate titles rather than two versions of the same title, and OED to ‘Oxford Dictionaries’ to better reflect the name of the publisher.)

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