Where have all the flowers gone?

The power, ingenuity, and beauty of nature have fascinated mankind since times immemorial. 

In his poem, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality" the English romantic poet William Wordsworth writes:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light...

Are we, for the first time in history, losing our ability to pay attention to, to be amazed and humbled by, what we see around us?

Oxford Junior Dictionary’s replacement of words that describe nature with the so-called 21st-century terms has rocked my world.

Words like ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ have disappeared, being replaced by ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste’. “A” is no longer for acorn, “B” for buttercup and “C” for conker. Instead, we now have "attachment", "blog" and "chatroom". A list of words taken out of the OJD includes hamster, heron, kingfisher, lark, leopard, magpie, mussel, otter, ox, and panther.

While I understand the need to introduce new words, does the choice of words omitted not tell us something ominous and worrying about the childhood of our children and about our own culture?

Robert McFarlane writes: 

"The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between things”.

Why should this loss matter? To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.” Or as Cocker punchily puts it, “If acorn goes from the lexicon, the game is up for nature in England.”

I am not ready to accept this "blaséisation" as an irreversible fact :). This blog is my attempt to live according to the advice of Mary Oliver - to pay attention, to be astonished, and to tell about it...and by doing so maybe help prevent what I love from vanishing from our collective consciousness.