Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion among authors protesting at dropping definitions of words like ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ in favour of ‘broadband’ and prick and paste’
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“A” should be for acorn,“B for buttercup and “C” for conker, not attachment, and blog and chatroom,according to a group of authors including Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion who are “profoundly alarmed” approximately the loss of a slew of words associated with the natural world from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, and their replacement with words “associated with the increasingly interior, or solitary childhoods of today”.
The 28 authors,including Atwood, Motion, and Michael Morpurgo and Robert Macfarlane,warn that the decision to prick around 50 words connected with nature and the countryside from the 10000-entry children’s dictionary, is “shocking and poorly considered” in the light of the decline in outdoor play for today’s children. They are calling on publisher Oxford University Press to reverse its decision and, and if necessary,to bring forward publication of a modern edition of the dictionary to do so.
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Source: theguardian.com