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Several years ago the 10,000-entry Oxford children’s dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature — words like buttercup, fern, willow, and starling — in favor of terms like broadband, voicemail, analogue and cut-and-paste.

This afternoon the boys waded through a shallow stream bed lined by towering shale cliffs. They climbed over round rock concretions and into intermittent waterfalls, passing white oaks and warblers, trillium and turtles and two water snakes.

When a word goes into the dictionary, another often has to come out. Editors make decisions about inclusion based on criteria such as frequency of usage and familiarity to children at particular ages, common misspellings and curricular requirements. Print lexicography may be a zero-sum game. Space is limited.

Still, it feels sad -- acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker, kingfisher, otter, raven, wren — gone!

When a word comes out of the dictionary, maybe it is our job to go into the world and reclaim it?
Naming things felt like a special way of paying attention this afternoon, spelling some lost letters back into a Sunday. A world bereft of words for birds cannot therefore be bereft of regard for them.