{"id":12498,"date":"2015-01-15T11:28:48","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T19:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=12498"},"modified":"2015-01-15T21:32:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-16T05:32:00","slug":"shooting-the-messenger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=12498","title":{"rendered":"Shooting the messenger"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Margaret Atwood is among the many prominent authors and naturalists who recently sent\u00a0an open letter to the Oxford University Press. The group expressed its profound alarm at the decline in a child’s awareness of the natural world. The petition<\/a> notes:<\/p>\n

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Firstly, the belief that nature and culture have been linked from the beginnings of our history. For the first time ever, that link is in danger of becoming unravelled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Secondly, childhood is undergoing profound change; some of this is negative; and the rapid decline in children\u2019s connections to nature is a major problem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What is particularly interesting is what precipitated\u00a0this angst. It seems that the\u00a0Oxford Junior Dictionary<\/em> has been systematically replacing entries about nature with those\u00a0about technology. The petitioners objected. Nature Canada<\/a>, which offers\u00a0a list of Oxford’s expunged words, summarizes the issue\u00a0wryly:\u00a0blog<\/em> is in; beaver<\/em> is out.<\/p>\n

I share the concerns about\u00a0nature awareness expressed by\u00a0the authors of the\u00a0petition, and with those of Canadian artist, Robert Bateman, who also commented upon the dictionary’s action:<\/p>\n

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This move will only help to alienate children from their wild neighbours. It\u2019s taking a step in the totally wrong direction. If kids don\u2019t know the name of something, they won\u2019t care about it or think about it. This is especially true of our wild neighbours. How can we expect a kid to care about beavers or herons if they don\u2019t know those words?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oxford’s defence is that dictionaries are designed:<\/p>\n

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to reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is a simple statement that turns the tables on the blame heaped upon Oxford: the dictionary merely reflects present usage—it is not a device for social engineering.<\/p>\n

The analogy is that if your physician tells you that you have cancer (or whatever) do you appeal to him or her to merely change the diagnosis, rather than address the underlying problem? It seems to me that the Oxford Junior Dictionary<\/em> is being blamed for recognizing a deeper problem: the decline in the relevance of the natural world to today’s children. Is this a problem of Oxford’s making? Hardly. Does Oxford\u00a0make a convenient scapegoat? It would seem so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My grandfather, Thurlow Fraser, was born in 1869 along the Ottawa River, just two years after Confederation. His father, Robert, taught him the names and behaviour of local plants and animals. Such instruction may well have been common in that day. While\u00a0I similarly teach my grandson such things,\u00a0I suspect that this\u00a0behaviour has become an outlier in a changed country. When my grandfather was born, Canada was 19% urban and 81% rural. This has now reversed: Canada is 81% urban and 19% rural (Statistics Canada<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n

As people have moved away from the natural world, its relevance declined in the consciousness of\u00a0Canadians. Is it\u00a0Oxford’s fault that it recognized the same\u00a0problem as did the\u00a0authors, naturalists, and artists? It seems to me that the Oxford Junior Dictionary<\/em> is being made a scapegoat for a something far deeper.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The solution (if indeed there is one) does not lie with shooting the messenger (Oxford); it involves dealing with the problem: the increasing irrelevance of the natural world for urbanites and their children.<\/p>\n

I don’t have a fix. I could argue that this blog, with its frequent and clear delight in local nature, is an antidote. Yet, I am not so na\u00efve as to endow my dabbling with such significance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Six of my shots\u00a0of local animals are offered\u00a0as a requiem for the\u00a0lost relevance of the natural world. Alas, the assessment\u00a0of the Oxford Junior Dictionary<\/em>\u00a0is probably disturbingly correct.<\/p>\n

Are these otters wistfully contemplating lexicographic oblivion?\"\"<\/p>\n

A heron is more concerned with eagle aggression than\u00a0dictionary neglect.
\"\"<\/p>\n

Will my\u00a0visiting kingfisher stop by less often now that it\u00a0has been deemed irrelevant?
\"\"<\/p>\n

Even\u00a0that national\u00a0icon, the beaver, has been expunged, and with it much of Canadian history.
\"\"<\/p>\n

This doe, but maybe not her fawn, is now free to vanish from a child’s consciousness,
\"\"<\/p>\n

And even the ubiquitous raven has been erased from the ledger. It is unlikely to stop here.
\"\"<\/p>\n

The fact that nature has receded from our consciousness is not the fault of a\u00a0dictionary; it is the fault of all of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Margaret Atwood is among the many prominent authors and naturalists who recently sent\u00a0an open letter to the Oxford University Press. The group expressed its profound alarm at the decline in a child’s awareness of the natural world. The petition … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,17,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-commentary","category-mammals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12498"}],"version-history":[{"count":71,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12576,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12498\/revisions\/12576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}