Charles Tomlinson

Michael Kirkham  passionate intellect

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/dec/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview34

5 ... the miners working the Great Northern Coalfield in England's north-east developed a dialect known as 'Pitmatical' or 'yakka', so dense it proved incomprehensible to Victorian parliamentary commissioners seeking to improve conditions in the mines in the 1840's. The name 'Pitmatical' was originally chosen to echo 'mathematical', and thereby emphasize the craft and skilful precision of the colliers.

3 The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions 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 introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

7 We inhabit a post-pastoral terrain, full of modification and compromise: this is why the glossaries contain plenty of unnatural language, such as terms from coastal sea-defences  (pillbox, bulwark, rock-armour) that register threats both from the sea and of the sea ...

9 In The History of the Countryside (1986), the great botanist Oliver Rackham describes four ways in which 'landscape is lost': through the loss of beauty, the loss of freedom, the loss of wildlife and vegetation, and the loss of meaning.