Authors Electric

This book really doesn't need any help from me. It's already a classic. But I wanted to review it because I love it. I wanted to read it from the moment I first heard how it was inspired:-- during one of the regular revisions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, it was decided to exclude certain words, which modern children no longer looked up or needed-- words such as 'bluebell', 'heron,' and 'conker'-- in order to make room for words such as 'broadband' and 'wi'fi'. The book's wonderful artist, Jackie Morris, was incensed by this. She tells about how the book came about here. (The beautiful picture at the top of this blog is from Jackie's site.) Many other writers and artists were aghast when they heard about these words being dropped. There is a theory of language that says that when you lose the word for something, you also lose the ability to think about it or consider it important. It becomes something nameless-- ...

Here’s a nice bit of irony.  What do the following have in common? "Bluebells" in "Beech" woods Ash No more "larking" around Bluebell Fern Hazel Heather Ivy Lark Willow If you’ve been following the row over the  Oxford Junior Dictionary  that’s been rumbling on since 2007, and now just blown up again, you’ll assume the answer is that these are some of the dozens of ‘nature’ words omitted from the dictionary, on the grounds that they are no longer relevant to children’s lives.  And you’d be right.  Together with  beech, heron, kingfisher, buttercup, conker, mistletoe,   nectar, newt, otter , and a number of other words brimming with bright colours, textures and the sheer, quivering life of the natural world, they’ve had to be junked to make way for the dreariness of  blog, broadband, bullet point, chatroom  and  voicemail . If you can come up with anything else that so encapsulates how stuffy...