There are Words, and Then There are Words

There are so many undiscovered books and authors to unearth in a UK bookstore (and the newspapers give extensive coverage to books, of course). One writer that I have come across is Robert Macfarlane, a Cambridge naturalist, whose books explore the British landscape. His most recent is Landmarks, in which he gathers scores of almost-forgotten words that precisely describe features of landscape and weather. From his walks and conversations with locals, Macfarlane has created a lexicon that defines a unique sense of place. This includes such words and terms as moored, for “smothered in snow,” and ammil, a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs, and blades of grass when a freeze follows a partial thaw. Eit refers to “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.” One of my favorites is smeuse, an English dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal.” Such precision in description makes the words we typically use in the Northwest to describe our landscape (a hill, creek, etc.) simplistic and impoverished. Who’s up for collecting and refining our own words about the natural environment, both those lost over time and newly invented?