Thursday 5 March 2009

Wonderful Words (1): Save the Words

A colleague of my husband's has just sent a link to this extraordinary site. You can learn new words and help to 'adopt' old ones. A real Aladdin's Cave (unless you are of the belief that words live for a season and then die, in which case you may like to read this entry on Ronnie Knox).

A parcel of secondhand books arrived at my door wrapped up in pages from The Guardian, 9 February 2009. I unravelled the newspaper and was particularly interested in the Country Diary feature by Mark Cocker. It was about Claxton, a small village on the Yare in Norfolk, a few miles up-river from Bramerton, where I spent my teenage years. I can still smell the beautiful scent of the rush matting in St Andrew's Church in Claxton!

As readers of this blog will know, I was captivated by Cocker's Crow Country, which you can buy via my Amazon widget to the right of this page. In the Guardian column, Cocker ponders the origin of the name, godwit, and offers the evocative local alternate, yarwhelp.

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