Acorn. Fern. Cygnet. Everyday words. Or so you would think. Words that belong in everyone’s lexicon. However, along with bluebell, pasture and willow the Oxford Junior Dictionary has deleted these words from its books. Discarded, like ashes in a burnt out fire, they scatter on the breeze, taking flight, flying further away from us. 

As our youngsters increasingly reject the outdoors, the woods, fields, streams and gulleys, words relating to the environment are becoming redundant, replaced by ones of the digital world. Welcome to blog, broadband and chatroom. Welcome to the insidious destruction of our language; an incalculable loss that will only be felt, appreciated and mourned much later.

Our landscape is being replaced by cyberspace and in the process we are failing to see that the rocks and stones and trees ought to remain ‘an active and shaping force in our imagination, our ethics, and our relations with…