From o’erswak to whutterick-fuffing: 10 old Scots nature words that deserve to return to common usage

Last autumn, the author and academic Robert Macfarlane teamed up with illustrator Jackie Morris to produce a true book for our times: The Lost Words. Intended to be read by both adults and children (and by adults and children together), it was an elegant and eloquent response to the way in which, over a period of several years, the publishers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary had been removing words to do with nature and replacing them with words to do with technology and cyberspace. In a slow process of attrition which had begun in 2007, words like moss, blackberry, bluebell and clover had been quietly jettisoned in favour of blog, chatroom, database and broadband. To begin with, the changes went mostly unnoticed, but gradually a protest movement grew up, involving not just Macfarlane and Morris but also literary heavyweights including Margaret Atwood, Michael Morpurgo and Andrew Motion.