Nature's Wordplay Lost in The Woods

“Attention,” the nature poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “is the beginning of devotion.” It is a deceptively simple line — one that feels almost radical at a time when algorithms are competing for human attention, and yet, it is true. To pay attention to something, a birdcall, a sapling, is to let it matter. You can only truly fall in love with something after you begin to see it.

According to a study by the University of Derby, the words that authors use in books to describe the natural world are decreasing dramatically. In the late 2000s, the Oxford Junior Dictionary unceremoniously edited out words like acorn, bluebell, and conker, much to the outrage of authors like Margaret Atwood. Words such as chatroom, broadband, and cut-and-paste, were added instead. The words seem to reflect a spiralling cultural schism. The vocabulary ceases to exist if we stop being intimate with spaces around us and only rely on constructed metaverses.

Writer and editor Anita Roy remembers encountering this news with a sense of dread. “It is a chilling thought that with the ‘thinning’ of species comes a falling away of their names,” she said. “Why would we need to name something that doesn’t exist or that you’d never see?”

The dictionary defended the changes as a reflection of language, not a shaper of it. To Roy, the shift reveals the shrinking horizons of childhood itself. “The rise of attention deficit disorder and the quick-fix sugar-rush of the online world is depleting our ability to stay with something — to watch and listen and wait — which allows the shy magic of the natural world to reveal itself.”

If she could reintroduce just one “lost” nature word into a child’s life, she would choose otter. “To see an otter, you have to be alert, out at dusk or night-time, whiskers aquiver, eyes darting — you have to become a bit of an otter yourself, and that’s a wonderful thing.”

Zinnia Sengupta, writer and facilitator at Children’s Books for All, notices the shift every day. “Children today call each other bots,” she said, laughing softly. “They use the language of algorithms to describe each other. When they play Minecraft, they build perfect forests on screen because they don’t have access to messy, unpredictable ones outside.” Her observation sits somewhere between humour and grief, an acknowledgement that the vocabulary of play has migrated online.

The loss is not simply linguistic. It is simultaneously emotional and cultural. “When we were children, we built worlds out of mud,” Sengupta said. “Now they build them out of pixels. The senses are dulled, not because children are not curious but because the worlds that they are taught about have become flatter.” Words, she believes, are a form of touch. To name something amaltas, gulmohar, koel, is to reach towards it, to hold it in language before it disappears.

This loss is also being witnessed by those in mental health and community work. Vani Subra-maniam, a narrative therapist who works at the intersections of mental health activism, community work, and social justice, sees the erosion as part of a larger shift in how young people speak. “Language has evolved for young people in almost unrecognisable ways,” she said. “A lot more slang, very flattened, very thin vocabulary overall. The total number of words a young person knows right now is extremely limited.”

She also points out that many of the words removed from Western dictionaries were never part of a child’s lived reality

in India to begin with. “A heck of a lot of those words are not remotely known in the first place to a kid in the Indian context,” she said. “So even if a child did look up acorn or bluebell, where would the relatability of that word be?”

Subramaniam sees children’s literature as a space of possibility. “I’d be curious to see what authors are seeking to preserve, whether it is nostalgia or an attempt to expand the vocabulary of the natural world,” she said. “Because I don’t know if a child can name three trees right now if they live in the city.”

Mary Oliver left us with an abiding command: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” For Oliver, as she wrote in her collection of essays Upstream, this act of fixing the gaze, of truly seeing the "pluralism of the woods" where "one tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether", transcended mere observation; it was a spiritual endeavour

In Indian languages, the resistance is still alive. “Even if acorn disappears from the English dictionary,” Sengupta said, “words like badaam or aam survive in homes where parents still point things out in their own tongues.” The local vocabulary carries its own ecological wisdom — a reminder that language diversity can hold back amnesia for a while longer.

To pay attention is to preserve. Each word we forget takes with it a way of seeing; each word we remember roots us again. The fight against ecological loss must begin with the smallest acts of attention. The preservation of the natural world requires us to save its vocabulary first, ensuring that every child inherits a dictionary rich enough to inspire the devotion that nature deserves.

• In the late 2000s, the Oxford Junior Dictionary edited out words like acorn, bluebell, and conker, much to the outrage of authors like Margaret Atwood.

• Words such as chatroom, broadband, and cut-and-paste, were added instead.

• The dictionary defended the changes as a reflection of language, not a shaper of it.