30 Saturday May 28 2022 | the timesComment
Matthew Oates Nature Notebook
materials in such short supply that
Angela Scanlon has had to cancel
both her TV building shows, these
words will cease to have meaning and
construction will have to be done
with such useless space-filling
commodities as we have a surplus of,
including “masks”, “bottles of hand-
sanitiser” and “plastic table dividers”,
all of which will become familiar
words in the building trade. As in,
“Yes, mate, we can do your side return,
no problem, we’ll glue a load of
plastic table dividers to columns made
of empty hand-sanitiser bottles and
insulate the dry wall with old masks.
But not till we’ve had a cup of tea.”
“Butterfly” — With conservationists
warning that half of our butterflies are
in imminent danger of extinction, it is
fair to predict that by 2032 there will
be none left. Likewise “hedgehogs”,
“badgers”, “polar bears”, “elephants”,
“rhino”... all of which words will have
been replaced by either “wasps” or
“flies” as that will be the only wildlife
left. Except for “spiders” which you
will still be able to see in zoos.
“Dog” — After the ridiculous
lockdown hound boom which saw
every silly bugger in England buy at
least three dogs they didn’t have time
to walk, feed or train not to savage
toddlers, sending the price of these
vicious walking poo factories soaring
to imaginable heights and the
animals outnumbering humans in
Britain by three or four to one, the
price of dogs has crashed, we learnt
this week. With the mutts now
worthless and out of fashion, by 2032
the very word “dog” will have died
out, to be replaced, thank God, by “cat”.
“Woman” — Actually, I don’t want
to get into that.
“Boris” — Who?Her Majesty shuffles off this mortal
coil, the title “Queen” will of course
be taken by the Duchess of Cornwall,
as Her Majesty recently decreed.
Except it won’t. Because with all the
debate about whether Charles should
become king or abdicate in favour of
William, or perhaps pass it straight
on to Prince George, or maybe let
Harry have a go so he can do a
Netflix deal around it, what the royal
family will actually do, taking its cue
from television shows like Have I Got
News For You and Pointless, is punt
the problem into the long grass by
ditching the words “king” and
“queen” altogether and appointing a
series of rotating “hosts” such as
Alexander Armstrong, Romesh
Ranganathan and Lauren Laverne.
“Central heating” — this will
become a long-forgotten luxury as
the energy price cap rises to
£700,000 to be replaced by “bonfire
of the last remaining furniture” when
the weather turns really cold. Words
such as “radiator”, “thermostat” and
“boiler” will in their turn be replaced
by terms such as “woolly jumper”,
“bed socks” and “brrrrr”.
“People” — While still current in
the United Kingdom, Australia and
other English-speaking countries, the
word “people” will have fallen into
abeyance in America, due to them all
having shot each other.
“Ukraine” — Absorbed into the
Union of Putinny Putinist Republics
(UPPR), “Ukraine” will revert to the
dormant state it enjoyed from 1922 to- See also “Georgia”, “Belarus”,
“Uzbekistan”, “Armenia”, “Azerbaijan”,
“Kazakhstan”, “Kyrgyzstan”, “Moldova”,
“Turkmenistan”, “Tajikistan”, “Latvia”,
“Lithuania” and “Estonia”.
“Joist, brick, glass” — With
“THINGSMASH” and nobody who
went to Eton, Harrow, Oxford or
Cambridge will be allowed to say it,
let alone play it or watch it. This will
encourage a new generation of
diverse people from all backgrounds
to enjoy a sport that only takes three
seconds so as not to bore anyone.
“Comedy” — Wide-ranging
anti-offensiveness laws designed to
protect people from being “harmed”
or “othered” by words innocently
intended to make them laugh will
mean that nobody bothers trying to
be funny any more (except Ricky
Gervais, unfortunately). Instead of
telling jokes, comedians will just say
“the Tories” and audiences will boo,
and that will be what passes for a
night out. Fans of The News Quiz on
Radio Four will not even notice.
“Queen” — When, God forbid,I
n an innovative piece of linguistic
research that is in no way just a
daft bit of marketing for Cinch, the
online car retailer with whom she
has been working, the doyenne of
Countdown’s Dictionary Corner, Susie
Dent, has announced that words such
as “petrolhead”, “clutch” and “gears”
will disappear from our vocabulary in
the next ten years, on account of the
electric vehicle revolution.
Yes, folks, disappear. As technology
changes, phrases such as “nothing
left in the tank” and “take your foot
off the gas” will simply vanish
because the mechanical systems to
which they referred are no longer
relevant. Much, I suppose, as “full
steam ahead”, “ploughman’s lunch”
and “nothing to write home about”
were vaporised overnight when
steam engines, cart horses and letter
writing went out of fashion, never to
be heard again by anyone, ever.
In their place, says Dent, will come
newly familiar words and phrases
relating to electric vehicles, such as
“juice” for fuel, “froot” which is a
boot in the front, and “regen”, for a
regenerative battery. Not to mention
“death trap” for the extension cable
you have to run out of your telly
room window and across the
pavement to charge your vehicle
because you do not have off-street
parking, and “nightmare” which is
what it is when you arrive at a
service station in the middle of
Wales with only six miles of rangeleft, to find that the charger your app
said was available is owned by a
network you don’t have a card for,
and is broken anyway, so you spend
your “family seaside holiday on the
Pembrokeshire coast” in a layby,
crying, and wishing you hadn’t sold
your old diesel Volvo in a deranged
attack of ecological lunacy that has
blighted your life ever since.
Now, I may not be a lexicologist on
the level of Dent, but Dictionary
Corner is, as Countdown fans will
already have worked out, an
anagram of Coren Dictionarry, and
with that serendipitous qualification
at my elbow, I feel empowered to
declare that motoring terms are not
the only words and phrases that will
be bound to disappear from daily
usage by 2032. For language is an
ever fluid and mutable resource.
Lockdown has already seen to it, for
example, that words like “office”,
“suit” and “commute” have been
replaced by “bedroom”, “onesie” and
“roll out of bed”, and cultural andenvironmental shifts will lead to
thousands of other familiar locutions
falling into abeyance before the
decade is out. Including:
“Cricket” — Reduced by the ECB
to a contest involving a single ball
fired out of a cannon by one of the
Kardashians at an Indian billionaire
armed with a mechanical bat the size
of a garage door, while fireworks
explode and dance music plays, the
game will now be calledInstead of a ‘king’ or
a ‘queen’ we’ll have a
series of rotating hosts
Giles
CorenThere will be no place for Eton or
Harrow in the successor to “cricket”It’s the end of the road for ‘diesel’ and ‘dogs’
In ten years we’ll laugh at how we used to crank up the heating and watch things called ‘cricket’ and ‘comedy’ on TV
A rare blue jewel
S
ome positive things are stirring
within our insect world. The
holly blue butterfly, once known
as the azure blue, seems to be staging
one of its periodic revivals. This jewel
occasionally escapes from the
restraints of a tiny wasp which
parasitises its larvae. It last did so
some 30 years ago. A strong
candidate for Butterfly of the Spring
2022, it could go on to produce a
sizeable second brood after
midsummer. It is the blue butterfly
that flits around bushes and shrubs,
in town and country, delighting all
who notice it.
Better still, the painted lady is
arriving in fair numbers — worn
pilgrims from the Saharan edge.
These long-haul adventurers seldom
bother to journey here in poor
summers, so their arrival suggests a
long hot summer ahead.
They are being accompanied by a
variety of migrant moths, headed by
the striped hawkmoth, one that I
have never seen. Look out for a
giant greenish hummingbird-like
moth with broad white stripes,
hovering in front of red valerian
flowers in the evenings. Yell if you
see one.@MatthewOates76rampant. Butterflies and day-flying
moths abound in sheltered combes.
The most ethereal of them is the
cistus forester moth, whose iridescent
greens make one want to believe in
fairies and fairyland. After rain, giant
roman snails wander ponderously,
only to vanish during droughts.
Spring climaxes here with the
buttercups, flowering now, to stain
toecaps yellow with pollen. Soon the
slopes will turn pink, with summer’s
thymes, fragrant orchids and
knapweeds, but that is another,
rosier story.Midsummer comes early
T
ravelling last Saturday from the
Wiltshire-Gloucestershire
borderlands to the Low Weald
of West Sussex, I found myself
leaping forward two weeks in time.
Spring, or rather summer, is so much
more advanced in the sunnier
southeast. In old money, I had
journeyed into the second week of
June, yet it was just past mid-May.
I was stung, almost, by the sight of
elder blossom and sycamores in full
flower and by sentinel oaks
darkening towards midsummer
already. In the woods, the bluebells
were going to seed, primroses and
celandines lay swamped and
forgotten; dog roses and foxgloves
were blooming, heralding school
exam time; bracken fronds werealready waist high. Yet the swifts had
only recently arrived, late, though
that does not mean they will linger
with us longer; they will depart, as
ever, on my birthday in early August.
Swifts are the ultimate climate
change deniers.
My alma mater greeted me with a
soaring red kite, left, and a raven
making a party political broadcast,
two birds which have recently
returned to the district after long
absences. My purpose was to meet
the school’s Eco Rangers, whose
understanding and depth of thinking
made one believe that there is a future
for this planet after all: “O brave new
world, that has such people in’t!”grass, from smothering the finer
herbs, grasses and sedges. It plays
second fiddle to the beef cattle that
are depastured from mid-May and
are the key drivers of the commons’
ecology. Managing cattle around
here is not easy, as Stroud is an
epicentre for bovine tuberculosis.
Skylarks ascend on many a
morning: “Skippertee, skippertee, kiss
me, kiss me, kiss, kiss, kiss,” is a
superficial translation, the true
meaning must run far deeper.
Meadow pipits, or mipits as they are
endearingly known, occur in greatly
reduced numbers, perhaps because of
the increase in recreational use. The
bottoms of the scarp slopes are now
littered with lost dog balls, Frisbees,
and the like. These commons are,
after all, the green lung of the ribbon
of villages that straggle
through the valleys below.
In spring, the commons
offer the curious sight of
lengths of dried grass,
three or four inches long,
apparently flying
through the air, often
into the breeze. These
are carried by females of the
red-tailed mason bee Osmia
bicolor, to cover their nests in
empty snail shells. There is, as usual,
a cuckoo here, for a small red and
black nomad bee often takes over its
host’s nest. In nature, exploitation isS
pring starts slowly on the
Stroud Commons, at the edge
of Cider with Rosie country.
The banks, as the steep
limestone slopes are known
locally, come out of winter in grey
but greening mode. Nothing much
happens before dandelion time; then
the slopes yellow
steadily, with
patches of cowslip,
followed by drifts of
common rockrose and
heady-scented horseshoe
vetch. This carpet is in places
blued by chalk milkwort, a
denizen of the southwestern
chalk and limestones that
makes you believe that sapphire
can and should be a lifeform.
One key player is yellow-rattle,
a semi-parasitic plant that taps
into the roots of grasses and helps
to prevent two thuggish coarse
grasses, upright brome and torThe carpet
that keeps
changing
its colours
bfThe holly blue butterfly flits around
bushes and shrubs in town and country