Tobias column: Finding the right words another step in learning to see

In 2007 the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed “kingfisher” and replaced it with “broadband.”

It was one of about 40 common words concerning nature like acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, newt, and willow that had been dropped. Even the adorable “otter” was scrubbed from the popular primary school dictionary.

It seems that children weren’t using these words enough to warrant their being listed in the dictionary.

Here are some of the more popular words that have now crowded out acorns and newts in the consciousness of our children and youth: attachment, blog, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, voice mail, social media, and emoticon.

I suppose kids these days need these terms to get by in today’s brave new world, like we seniors need words for tax returns, Medicare (Plans A, B, C, D, G and N), and campaign commercials.

Just think: 2024 TV has succeeded at crowding out, from our own consciousness, better words like petrichor (the aroma after a spring rain), goldfoil (the sky lit by lightning), and moonglade (the track of light from the moon shining on water — a common nocturnal occurrence on the Albemarle Sound). These words are worthy of welcome in the human mind, much more so than scripts of irascible electioneering.

“Finding the words is another step in learning to see,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a Native American bryologist, which is a specialist in mosses, hornworts, liverworts and lichens. A citizen of the Potawatomi nation, she echoes the main linguistic lesson in our Master Gardeners class: use the right name, know the right words to recognize a plant (or any creature).

I witnessed a strange and magical transformation in my garden — or rather, in me as a gardener. On the rare occasion that I actually learn and connect a correct name to a plant, I am able to see it better, to perceive it from the tangled background of green and brown, leaves and stems. Time was when all I could say of a plant was that “It is a leafy green thing.”

This week, I and my fellow Wednesday Weeders are returning to the Cupola House Gardens, and I have to be careful not to pull up the tiny young shoots of larkspur and poppy that are poking through the surface. I have to have a care because yours truly has been known to pull up plants that come out easily, forgetting the old green thumb axiom that “If it’s hard to pull up, you know it’s a weed, but if it comes out easy, it was meant to stay.”

Indeed: “finding the words is another step in learning to see.”

I don’t know if you believe the Genesis story of Adam naming all the animals: “God brought them to the man to see what he would call them” (Genesis 2:19). Whether or not the story is literally true, the point remains: naming is the root of language and thought. Naming animals, naming plants, naming what we experience in our God-given life is essential to our God-given humanity.

Naming is an act of love and devotion, honor and respect. When you name your pet, that creature enters into your memory and your heart. It is bound up in your care, your hope, your affection for family and home. It now stands apart from the background of amorphous “everything else.” It is tied to you forever by memory’s silver chord.

The thankful human naming of creatures, of the things we encounter in life, is exactly the vocation of the “priesthood of all believers” that began in the Garden of Eden and continues now, even in a fallen world.

That is why the loss of names from nature is tragic. When a child can only say “bird” instead of “kingfisher,” we’ve left her blind and mute, and we’ve deprived her of the beauty we all need to be human. She will never know this in the virtual technological STEM world. She might very well succeed and grow up to be as rich as Midas and Dives, but she’ll have forgotten that natural beauty is a sure sign of the servanthood of God.

Yes, you heard that right: in true, real religion, we are persuaded that God gives Himself away to creation and serves humanity especially. That’s exactly what “providence” means.

Still don’t believe me? In the Christian Gospel, the son of God is not portrayed as a filthy rich despot, but as a foot-washing servant.

In 1977, I heard a Quaker philosopher (I can’t remember his name) tell his audience that “God loves us through creation, and beauty is its fame.” He said that Noah’s rainbow was proof of this luminous truth.

But today, too much time is given over to grievance, complaint, transactionalism, anger and fear. The cramped and pinched bad mood world is drawn up into polar opposites of us versus them, comfort versus threat. We’ve hitched too many of our neurons to gray faded memes of machines.

We’ve let poetry shrivel in the souls of our youth. Poetry is the therapy our kids need. Us too.

There’s a pretty book on my desk by poet and naturologist Robert MacFarlane, illustrated in poignant watercolor by Jackie Morris. It’s called “The Lost Spells.” It’s intended, Morris says, for “children ages 3 to 100” — a book “to conjure back the common words and species that are steadily disappearing from everyday life — and especially from children’s stories and dreams,” a book “to catch at the beauty and wonder — but also the eeriness and otherness — of the natural world.”

Poems that name real names heal dreams. In the concluding verse, “The Silver Birtch,” a red fox is nestled amongst a stand of winter trees. “Round and round the dangers prowl,” sings the concluding lullaby, “wolves and monsters, worries, witches — but the birches stand like churches as the dark around them surges … Held at bay until at last the sun emerges, warms the pines, the larches, lights your yawns, your stretches, there among the silver birches.”