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| Print by Stanley Donwood |
'We are making do with an impoverished and increasingly homogenized language to describe the landscapes outside of our cities' says Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways. He's at the Foyles on Charing Cross Road, talking about his new book Landmarks. To prove his point, he turns to the Junior Oxford English Dictionary which in 2007 removed seemingly essential words such as dandelion, nectar and cauliflower to be replaced with others such as broadband, email and analogue. Should children really learn to spell blackberry with a capital B before they've tasted the fruit?
When he's not lecturing in English at Cambridge, Macfarlane spends a lot of his time walking in and writing about these landscapes, so you might expect him to have developed a richer vocabulary for them. But the point that he's making is relevant to us all. How often have you been for a walk in the countryside and found yourself unable to name the plant, animal or distinct weather that catches your eye? What does the act of naming bring to our experience? What does it matter?
It's about cognition as much as anything, Macfarlane seems to be saying. Once you know the name for something, such as a ‘smeuse’ (Sussex dialect for ‘the hole in the base of a hedgerow made by the repeated passage of a small animal’), you're more likely to be aware of it and actually see one. He gives the example of a period in which he was reading J A Baker's Peregrine, a singular exploration of the Essex landscape in search of these beautiful raptors. Around this time Mcfarlane started seeing these birds in his own area, tuning into their presence with an awareness that he had not previously held. Language and books about nature can, he says, change the way that we see. Macfarlane's own writing, infused with the culture, history and people of the landscapes that he visits, certainly achieves this for me.
He describes a campaign to save the peat moors of Lewis, the North most of the Outer Hebredies. For the company hoping to build Europe's largest wind-farm here, it made sense to describe the place as empty and desolate. To anyone looking at pictures of these open, windswept places, that's how they seem. For locals such as Finlay Macleod, however, it's a landscape steeped in the experience of the crofters who once cut the turf from it's ground. Macleod's lexicon, included in one of nine glossaries in Landmarks, gives us phrases such as the wonderfully precise 'rionnach maoim’ (a Hebridean Gaelic term for ‘the shadows cast by cumulus clouds on moorland on a sunny, windy day’).
As I stood at the train station this morning, and realised that I was suffering 'sun-scald' from the glare of the rails, it dawned on me that it's not just our countryside that requires a richer language. Many of us can't even describe the landscape of our everyday urban environment. The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape is a good start, but perhaps there should be a word the shadow cast by a tree upon a brick wall, for litter trapped against a fence by the wind, or the way that you can look back in time by glancing above the modern shop fronts of a high street. Maybe there already is. I've always been a fan of desire lines (that muddy corner of the grass in a park that everyone cuts to make their journey shorter).
Macfarlane wants to encourage his readers to experiment with their own language, highlighting the fun that Douglas Adams and John Lloyd had re-appropriating English place names in The Meaning of Liff. It's time, he says, to re-wild our language, and there's a page at the back of the book left blank for you to start your own lexicon. My wife and I begin with 'The Best Bits' - a phrase we use to describe those rays of sun that break through the clouds like beams of god (as an Art History graduate I'm sure I used to know the correct word for this phenomenon but it's since been supplanted. Where can I turn for a decent visual dictionary?). In the interest of linguistic diversity, I'm sure we can do better than that.
