Robert MacFarlane

I just started reading his Landmarks, a book of essays and glossaries about the largely Scottish, and some other UK areas, landscape, and the language used to describe it.

Wood engravings by Jonathan Gibbs.

He has a great love of the exactitude of terms used, and now falling into disuse, to show the details of the features of the countryside. It's a great journey into the importance of language not just in preserving meaning, but in adding to our experience of the natural world.

 He is trying to preserve important meaning in our lives, by having readers be aware that there are, for instance, many words for parts of fields, varying with appearance, history,  and function.

He shows that we don't just act on nature. Nature acts on us, too. The landscape we encountered in early childhood stays with us as the backdrop against which our lives are enacted, even if we're far from it in later years.

And that knowledge saves us from the ignorant take of  describing areas we're not able to perceive, as wasteland, wrecked, barren.  He has great respect for the writers and language experts who continue to preserve this treasure. Nan Shepherd, on the Cairngorms, Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod, who saved a Shetland island from engineered destruction by using language to educate the authorities in the value of what engineers had dismissed as waste, only useful for digging up.

Language is powerful and we need to preserve it.

My only quibble about this lovely work is that the only form I could get it in is very small type, tiring to read. So I broke down and bought a big magnifier for the whole page, been wanting one for ages.

 It's  only 3x, but that's enough for my need.  Comes with built-in LED lights. This required a trip out for AAA batteries, after my battery-drawer search yielded two. Needed three, sigh.

I also plan to study other things under it. And maybe get pix of plants and flowers which defeat my modest camera phone.

Many uses possible. Do consider reading MacFarlane. What he says matters.