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 a
corn,
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.