Landmarks

May 30, 2016
Macfarlane’s (The Old Ways) beautifully written blend of nature writing and lexicon connects the work of his favorite writers to the British Isles’ natural settings and the distinctive, lyrical vocabulary used to describe them. Each chapter is devoted to a different landform (such as flatlands, coastlands, and woodlands) and followed by a glossary of relevant terminology. The featured authors include “word-hoarder” Nan Shepherd, whose book The Living Mountain has its own lengthy glossary of colorful Scots words, such as “roarie-bummlers” (fast-moving storm clouds); and “water-man” Roger Deakin, whose book Waterlog, about his experiences swimming around the United Kingdom, unearthed archaic words such as dook (a swim in open water) and tarn (an upland pool or small lake.) The sources of the words in the glossaries are as diverse as the British landscape: works by famous wordsmiths such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Clare, as well as the various cultures, regions, and languages of Great Britain. Macfarlane bemoans the gradual disappearance of these colorful descriptors from modern usage, resulting in a “blandscape” of general terms. It would be fabulous if his wish in writing this exceptional compilation—for these words to “re-wild” contemporary speech—comes true.

Starred review from May 15, 2016
A prizewinning naturalist explores the connection between what we say and how we see."A basic literacy of landscape is falling away," writes Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, 2012, etc.) with regret. "A common language--a language of the commons--is getting rarer." He was dismayed when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary eliminated words such as acorn, catkin, heather, and nectar in favor of blog, broadband, and voicemail to reflect, the publisher explained, "the consensus experience of modern-day childhood." In this fascinating, poetic compilation of vocabulary invented to describe the natural world, the author aims to "re-wild our contemporary language for landscape" and enrich our "vibrancy of perception." "Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment," he writes, "for language does not just register experience, it produces it." Throughout, Macfarlane chronicles his peregrinations across different landscapes, including flatlands, highlands, water, coast, and woods, sometimes in the company of friends, often with references to nature and travel writers he admires (Roger Deakin, John Stilgoe, and Barry Lopez, to name a few) and to earlier word researchers. Each chapter is followed by a glossary of terms for aspects of "land, sea, weather and atmosphere" gleaned from English, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh, Breton, and other dialects of the British Isles. Readers will discover, for example, that a "bunny bole" names the entrance to a mine in Cornwall; a "lunky" is a "gap in a fence or dyke (big enough to let sheep through but not cattle)" in Galloway; "oiteag" is Gaelic for a "wisp of wind"; and in Shetland, "skub" describes "hazy clouds driven by the wind." Macfarlane has found 50 words for various permutations of snow, including "ungive" to describe thawing, in Northamptonshire. Many terms, the author contends, function as "tiny poems that conjure scenes." Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane's aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature's enchantments.

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