*Landmarks*, by Robert Macfarlane

I enjoyed many passages in this book, here was my favorite:

As well as these untranslatable terms, I have gathered synonyms — especially those that bring new energies to familiar phenomena.  The variant English terms for ‘icicle’ — aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell and daggler (Wessex), cancervell (Exmoor), ickle (Yorkshire), tankle (Durham), shuckle (Cambria) — form a tinkling poem of their own.  In Northamptonshire dialect ‘to thaw’ is to ungive.  The beauty of this variant I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift — an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.

Also of note is the discussion of how places names in Gaelic (and many other languages and dialects) are becoming unintelligible, even if much of Gaelic is surviving.  And so:

The nuances observed by specialized vocabularies are evaporating from common usage, burnt off by capital, apathy and urbanization.  The terrain beyond the city fringe has become progressively more understood in terms of large generic units (‘field’, ‘hill’, ‘valley’, ‘wood’).  It has become a blandscape…It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing, rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen.

Definitely recommended, buy it here.

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