It is almost official… Children in Britain no longer need to know such things as acorns and blackberries, beetroots and ravens.
Instead, they need to know celebrity and citizenship, vandalism and voicemail.
These are among the lists of words that have disappeared from, or have newly arrived in, the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.
“We have moved from a roaming childhood to one that is lived indoors,” says Henry Porter, writing for the Observer and blogging at Comment is Free.
In line with this trend, the dictionary’s editors have been quietly rejecting words that describe to natural world.
Gone is the stoat, the starling and newt. Likewise the conker, carnation and wren.
Of the newly excluded word “sycamore”, Porter says: “if you don’t know the word for the tree, you mind is unlikely to be lit up by its associations.”
If children are no longer to learn the names of their native biodiversity, I fear it will disappear faster than ever.
How fitting it is, that among the new arrivals to the dictionary’s pages, the youngster will find the word “endangered”.
