Not Even the Dictionary is Safe

Any blog with philological pretensions has to put in an indignant note on this story. It appears that the Oxford University Press, of all presses, no longer includes words related to Christianity, Empire or the countryside in its Junior Dictionary. Of course there’s only limited room in a children’s dictionary, and something had to go to make room for ‘blog’ and ‘EU’. The modern British tyke no longer has time to pursue the ‘ferret’, the ‘goblin’, the ‘boar’ or the ‘cheetah’ through the ‘brambles’ and ‘buttercups’ beneath the ‘chestnut’, but at least now he knows that the former are ‘endangered’, and the latter may dry up any day now in a ‘drought’. Chesterton would have a FIT.