Grooming Your Word-Hoard

Regenerative Culture Language & Oral Tradition
#1

Inspired by Zach Elfers posted link on the rewild.com FB page:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape

I’m creating a topic just for the words you create, find, swap, and share to help you name the unnamed beautiful and intriguing experiences and beings all around us. Also, for digging up old names that we’ve almost forgotten. Have at it!

From the article: “Yet it is clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between things”.”

#2

Hoopster (n):
A rewilder who is planting back nomadic circuits with other hoopsters.
Etymology: “Hoop” + “Ster”

Hoop (n):
The circuits that nomadic hunter-gatherers live on year after year, planting gardens along the route.

Ster
suffix
suffix: -ster
1.
denoting a person engaged in or associated with a particular activity or thing.
“gangster”
2.
denoting a person having a particular quality.
“youngster”
Origin

Old English -estre, -istre, etc., of Germanic origin.

#3

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#4

#5

(Originates from traditional stories in Japan.)

#6

800×400

#7

I don’t mean to poop on your memes Peter, but by starting this topic I was going for eloquence and rewilding language of landscape rather than a rewilder’s dictionary, if you get my drift (suppose we could start that too). Could you steer things back in that direction, towards what the author was discussing in the article?

Thanks -

#8

trumble by Mindy Fitch, on Flickr

#9

Hoping to propose some baby steps in the process of Word-hoard grooming, I’d like to share some of the things I like to practice (which usually turns out easier in writing than in speech). Especially in the case when it comes to nature topics:

  • in comparisons, prefer earth skill-based examples over high-technology-based ones;
  • depending on the topic or context, use descriptions referring natural forces rather than terms of technological aggression - or at least, terms that tend to get associated with such;
  • try and include words that may not get used very often anymore or that may at least contribute to someone’s vocabulary.

Some examples:

  • “The cat purred like a bullroarer” rather than “a smooth-running engine”;
  • “The room erupted in laughter” rather than “exploded with laughter”;
  • “Every day we get flooded with information” rather than “bombarded”;

In what ways do others like to tend their use of tongue?

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#10

Sometimes I think of the city as like a taint… I would even call it “The Taint” and those blindly entrenched in it’s ways “The Ever So Sadly Tainted”. So the wild COULD be (on occasion) “Beyond the Taint Where All Flows Natural” or “The Realm Where No Taint Spreads and Takes Root”. I know there are probably no pure untouched and untrammeled places like these names suggest… just throwing some ideas out there in the hopes that they inspire something. A place of peaceful serenity in the wild where one can go to reflect and recuperate I might call a “Healing Haven”. A beautiful sight in the wild such as two eagles mating (seen it :slight_smile:) one might call “A Glimpse into Mother’s Far Encompassing Love” and the place where such a sight was witnessed might be called by the witness(es) “A Place Where Mother’s Finger Once Woke My (or Our) Heart(s)”.

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