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02-28-2015, 03:44 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,340
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Language and landscape
http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...ding-landscape
The above Guardian article is chock-full of wonderful words, but those of you in colder climes than mine might appreciate this section in particular:
Quote:
The variant English terms for icicle – aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell and daggler (Hampshire), cancervell (Exmoor), ickle (Yorkshire), tankle (Durham) and shuckle (Cumbria) – form a tinkling poem of their own.
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I like the broader point MacFarlane is making--that the loss of nature-words (many less-arcane ones were removed from the 2007 Oxford Junior Dictionary, apparently to make room for technological words) results in our own impoverishment:
Quote:
I am wary of the dangers of fetishising dialect and archaism – all that mollocking and sukebinding Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Wary, too, of advocating a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name, with the intent of citing and owning – when in fact I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not knowing. There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a distant echo. Nature will not name itself. Granite doesn’t self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. When I see a moon-bow or a sundog, I usually just say “Wow!” or “Hey!” Sometimes on a mountain, I look out across scree and corrie, srón and lairig – and say nothing at all. But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words.
Yet it is clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between things”.
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The following paragraph was particularly eloquent on the reverse of that, i.e., our enrichment through awareness of words for natural concepts:
Quote:
Some of the terms I collected mingle oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognisable in that they name something conceivable, if not instantly locatable. Ammil is a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a whole landscape to glitter. It is thought to derive from the Old English ammel, meaning “enamel”, and is an exquisitely exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen, but never before named. Shetlandic has a word, pirr, meaning “a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water”. On Exmoor, zwer is the onomatopoeic term for “the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight”. Smeuse is an English dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal”; now I know the word smeuse, I notice these signs of creaturely commute more often.
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I hope other word nerds here enjoy the article as much as I did.
Last edited by Julie Steiner; 02-28-2015 at 03:56 PM.
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02-28-2015, 07:14 PM
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Join Date: May 2013
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 2,238
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Julie
I'm off to England in 3 weeks and am wondering what I'll encounter in the way of accents and dialects and words, such as you mentioned, that only exist in certain counties. I've noticed on the TV series 'Inspector George Gently' that the local detective often has to translate the local dialect for the Inspector who is from London.
I've been wanting to post this for some time, all about language, not so much nature but still I think it adds to the debate, English humour, does it translate to the USA, I wonder? It is from 'Fry and Laurie' two related skits both about language and poetry.
http://youtu.be/Ij1pZvv9m0g
Link now works. Well worth watching.
Last edited by ross hamilton hill; 03-02-2015 at 08:12 AM.
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03-02-2015, 06:31 AM
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Old South Wales (UK)
Posts: 6,679
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Well, Ross, they do sneak across county boundaries, but their spirit is always the same. "Smeuse" becomes "smout" in Yorkshire; there they are built into the lower courses of drystone walls, so that sheep can creep through without jumping up and bringing the wall down. In some parts, a smout is also called a "thirl-hole" which links to Chaucer's "nose-thirles", or the nostrils we pick when nobody's looking.
But I'm surprised you didn't see that the Hampshire icicles - "clinkerbells" and "dagglers" - are around in Oz, pinched from the British shepherds' terms "clinkers" and "daggs" or "daggings", which denote the accumulations of excrement round a sheep's bum. Clinkers are dry and rattle when the sheep dodges the catcher in the pen, while daggs - trust me, you don't want to know.
I was a shearer in another life...
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03-02-2015, 07:51 AM
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Join Date: May 2013
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 2,238
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Ann
I read what Julie wrote but not the whole article, too tired, will tomorrow.
We still call a person 'a dag' or 'daggy', there was also the expression 'shake your dags' meaning 'get a move on', but that's pretty much gone. Most people here have no idea what it really means. 'clinkerbells' I have never heard of and I've been around sheep a bit. Dags here is always with one g, there was a TV comedian who's character was called Fred Dag, he invented Farnarkling which was never explained.
The link I posted above to 'Stephen Fry on langauge' now works.
Last edited by ross hamilton hill; 03-02-2015 at 08:17 AM.
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