WHAT'S IN A NAME: II

 I’m getting cranky in my old age. (Not that I feel old, except when I have to get up off my knees!)

So I get annoyed with some aspects of language.

I have always enjoyed the English language; it’s the only one I’m reasonably fluent in. I like the way that there is always the right word to use for everything (as long as one can remember it!). And it is evolving all the time to be able to keep pace with our changing society. One sees in the media (principally the written media) from time to time that new words or terms have been added to the Standard Oxford Dictionary. For a long while in our history the “media” was only written. Then came radio, then TV and now “social media”. So changes have accelerated.

One would expect that with this increased distribution of news, ideas, language, our vocabulary would have expanded enormously. But I venture to suggest it has not. So now we have “woke”. I’m not sure what that is exactly, so I guess I’m not it! But how many of you are familiar with the term “barging”. It’s what we used to do to the sides of hedges with a sickle (hook) to cut off the seasons growth on the sides of the hedge. (It was collected up to make “staddling” for standing ricks of hay or corn on.) These are dialect words for operations which are no longer performed, so they drop out of use. They might remain in songs which have long histories, or in literature, but they don’t appear much on mainstream media. If they don’t remain in print or songs they will disappear.

That’s sad, as far as I am concerned. But what annoys me is the misuse of old terms, largely propagated by our media. I first noticed it with “twitchers”. Those of us who are bird-watchers find we are often, nowadays, mistaken for twitchers. But twitchers are those birders who personally (because there is no real scientific outcome) will travel all over the British Isles, or even internationally, to see a bird they have not seen before. It obviously gives them very great satisfaction, because it is a very expensive pastime, in both time and money. But it’s not for me, or many other birders. But it appears that some clever dick in the media heard the term and unknowingly put it on the media, and the name stuck. And now the media refers to all ‘birders’ as ‘twitchers’, obviously not knowing the difference.

The same has happened to Starlings. If one looks up a list of collective nouns one of the entries is ‘a murmuration’ of Starlings. Those of us who live and work in the country are familiar with a bunch of 20 or 30 Starlings perched in the top of a tree, and their custom of all burbling away together to each other. They are not stridently singing, proclaiming themselves to the world. They are just chatting among themselves. So murmur describes exactly what they sound like. Now put thousands and thousands of starlings together in a giant roosting flock, and look up a list of collective nouns, and you will find “murmuration”. It sounds clever when you report a murmuration on the media. That isn’t what the original term referred to. But if you are not familiar with that smaller group and its behaviour you won’t know this. These enormous flocks don’t murmur. Their calls to each other in this situation are more urgent and, in total, almost deafening. Combine it with the wing noise and it is an awesome sound. But the power of this display is not so much the noise but the spectacle. So if you want a word to describe it, why not “aerolutions”. Its a magnificent spectacle. Hundreds turn out to see it at the various sites throughout the country. But a murmuration it is not!

So another word mangled by the media.


Nothing murmuring about this lot!

*****************


“So …..” seems to be the stock reply now to any question put by an interviewer to an ‘expert’ on our media. Like “down to” instead of “up to”, our language quickly changes when it is heard on the radio or TV, and at once becomes normal. Is it affectation, or just an automatic copy-cat response? Whichever, I don’t like the way our use of language becomes globalised by the media. Quite soon the Eskimos will have only one word for snow!

 

Other sites worth a look:

 North Cornwall Naturalist 

maryatkinsonwildonline  

Kim Atkinson (@kim.atkinson257) • Instagram photos and videos

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