Imagine a childhood without gerbils, goldfish, guinea pigs, hamsters, herons, larks, or leopards; where even the idea of these things had been replaced by practical modern concepts like celebrity, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, and creep. This is the world of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, whose current edition has dropped all the old words in the first list, and added all the new ones.
This isn't – just – going to be a rant about dictionaries. The first thing to say is that the dictionary claims here to be tracking usage. The old words are much less common in contemporary speech, and the new ones correspondingly important. We nowadays live in a world where children are more likely to be familiar with creeps and celebrities than larks or leopards and they are horribly impoverished as a result.
The gradual suburbanisation of British life, and the rise of the car, and of television, have all impoverished childhood. Not only are children less healthy physically as a result but their imaginations and their senses are much less widely stimulated. That explains the loss of an enormous number of flower names and nature words, starting with "Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash ... " and ending with "thrush, weasel and wren".
Perhaps these are things which urban poor children never knew, but they were certainly within the aspirations of any middle class family and their loss is a horrible impoverishment.
The Daily Telegraph, in which I found the story, also highlighted the disappearance of such old-fashioned concepts as bishop, chapel, altar, saint, sin, devil, and vicar. I'll miss those, too, but the loss of Christian or religious concepts is a separate problem and in some ways less serious. There, I think, we see a deliberate policy to promote the idea that Britain is or ought to be a post-Christian country. That's controversial, and in my opinion wrong, but there are perfectly good arguments on both sides.
The loss of the countryside is different. I'm not sure that anyone thinks it ought to be celebrated or hurried along. And the process underway in the dictionary is more than just a loss of the countryside. It is a replacement of concrete things with abstractions. Ivy, lavender, leek, and liquorice in all their quintessential particularities are replaced with EU, committee, common sense and biodegradable. With the exception of common sense, these are all words which can be satisfactorily defined without anyone ever meeting up with an example of the real thing.
Dictionaries should be many things, but even the smallest should be a gateway into wonder. The child who doesn't even know of the possibility of larks and leopards has been robbed. To offer them instead the grey bureaucratic porridge of the new words is a crime against their humanity. Somehow wonder and strangeness will find their way into children's lives since the demand for them is almost universal. But it won't be through words, at this rate, but perhaps through characters in video games. And the replacement of language by pictures is a greater, worse change than the loss of Christianity or even the countryside.