Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks, a collection of dialect terms for features of the natural landscape, includes zwen, the sound of partridges taking off, and zawn, a wave-smashed chasm in a cliff. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Zwen and Zwan”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. We’ve been talking about the book Landmarks by Robert McFarlane, and this is a book that seeks to rewild our language by collecting hundreds of specialized and poetic terms for the natural world.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about the genesis of this book. It goes back to 2007 and two events, one of which was that in 2007, somebody handed him a copy of the Pete glossary. Now that’s P-E-A-T glossary.
And this is a glossary of hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland on an island off the coast of Scotland. And he was so excited to find all these different terms associated with, you know, what you just think of as an expanse of land, you know, the moor.
The other thing that I know you know about was that in 2007, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary made headlines when it culled a lot of familiar words from its print version. Words like acorn and bluebell and buttercup, dandelion, fern, ivy, lark, mistletoe, pasture, and willow.
And they added new words into this edition like block graph, blog, broadband, bullet point, celebrity chatroom, committee cut and paste, and voicemail. And this, of course, created a great hue and cry, as you know quite well.
It wasn’t really fair, right, Grant? I mean, attacking a dictionary for removing words like that is like hitting a thermometer because it’s cold outside. The reason these words were cut is because they’re not as common as the words that they were replaced with.
Broadband and voicemail are more common than dandelion and willow. Was willow one of the words? Willow was one of the words. And so it needs to be the words that British people are using.
And so it’s a reflection of culture, not a direction of culture. This book by Robert McFarlane is an interesting mix of poetic essays and also just lists of words that might catch your fancy.
Like, for example, the word zahn, Z-A-W-N. The definition is a wave-smashed chasm in a cliff. And there’s also zwer in that part of the country, Z-W-E-R, which is the whirring sound made by partridges taking flight.
Oh, that’s nice. Which if you’ve ever heard it, you know it’s a zwer. Like that. The other thing that I appreciate about his book is that he is well aware of the danger of making too much of the words themselves.
And he has an interesting comment about that. He says, there are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo, or to which silence is by far the best response.
Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on top of a mountain, I just say, wow.
It’s true. It’s really true, right? So Robert McFarlane in the book is? Is Landmarks. Landmarks.
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