Language and Nature
The words we use to describe things matter to our understanding of the natural world, and our responsibilities in it. Likewise, when words for things disappear entirely, our understanding of those things can disappear too. These harms are caused by three features of language’s mis- or disuse: linguistic generalization, linguistic inflation, and linguistic erasure.
When we generalize the names and concepts we use to describe the natural world, the particulars get lost, like small objects disappearing when you zoom out with your phone’s camera. Consider, as a simple example, what happens when some Islanders call any and all coniferous trees “evergreens.” It’s true that most Island conifers don’t lose their leaves (needles) in winter, but calling them all by one, generic name blurs all these conifers together. The generalization drops all the difference between, say, the shade tolerance of cedars over firs, their differing lifespans, even the distinctiveness of each’s fragrance. The result: our world gets flatter, things get smushed together, and useful distinctions disappear.
Similarly, when we use inflated language to describe things in the landscape, accuracy drops away. We post-war Americans seem to have a romance with bigness. So if things in nature aren’t big enough, we’ll inflate them. A short Island path through the woods becomes a “trail,” a simple walk on it a “hike.” An Island house on a few acres that might contain a cottage garden and a few fruit trees inflates, via language, into a “farm” or “estate.” Our romance involves nostalgia too, so much so that a neglected field left over from the Island’s agricultural era is elevated via language into a “meadow,” evoking a sepia-tinted past. Maybe there’s no harm in this plumping-up of our Island, but all the inflating does seem at the very least inaccurate, and at times collectively boastful. It can also be counterproductive to the work of improving the real Island’s real natural features.
Linguistic erasure—the extinction of ideas or names of things through cultural amnesia or official suppression—may be the subtlest way our understanding gets diminished through the words we use or, in this case, no longer use. The war on Indigenous languages in America nearly extinguished not just native tongues but a whole body of knowledge about the natural world. (Scientists are now collecting this knowledge to enhance Western ways of knowing nature.) How much knowledge of the Island’s natural systems lies in millennia of Indigenous observation, now mostly lost through language suppression? On a more recent, less grand level, what was lost when the County renamed roads on Vashon, a project around 1990 that erased many road names based on natural (and historical) features and replaced them with a grid of numbers starting in downtown Seattle? What was lost, for instance, when the former Paradise Valley Road was replaced by, in total, three different, locale-ignoring street names: SW 204th, 111th Ave SW, and SW 220th?
