How discovering lost words could help us feel connected to our past

Could rediscovering phrases and expressions that have been lost over time help us reconnect with the world around us, and renew our sense of belonging? Let's find out!

There are words that open windows to lost worlds. Words that we don’t use anymore but, in learning them again, reawaken connections between us, our ancestors, and our homes.

These are words that delight with their organic sounds; as poet Caroline Mellor writes, they ‘dance and trip and slip/ and drip like honey off the tongue’.

As we relearn them, these words teach us of times when human existence was paced by the rhythms of the natural world. They describe huge seasonal changes, but also minutiae.

Caroline writes that a ‘smeuse’ is a gap at the base of a hedge made by the regular comings and goings of a small animal. This word is onomatopoeic. It sounds like the squishing and wiggling of an animal as it pushes itself past twigs and leaves.

Caroline’s poem, ‘We Need to Teach the Children the Old Words’, is a gentle lesson and the words stay and play in my mind.

“Gubber and slub and stodge and pug” are old Sussex words for mud, she explains. I think of them as I negotiate what will be a pathway in a few months, but, for now, is a porridge of wet mud, twigs, and leaves. “These ancient words make us feel like children again, with the wonder and excitement we felt, because these words have feathers and wings. They move, they roll, and they’re beautiful,” says Caroline.

Caroline reads the poem when she visits schools, and has noticed that children are especially receptive to the words. She says: “They like them in that they make them smile, they make them giggle, they remember them and they repeat them. There’s something innate in us that responds to these sounds.”

I told my children to stop “brabbling” the other day. It stopped the bickering because it wasn’t a word they had heard before, and it made them laugh.

In a paper published in the journal Knowledge and Power, Dr Peter Gärdenfors writes that children learn “an average of nine to 10 words per day during childhood”. This means that by the time they have finished school, they have mastered about 60,000 words of their mother tongue.

There is a huge amount of evidence on how learning a new word every day – whether in your native language or a foreign language – increases concentration, boosts memory, and improves our communication skills beyond childhood and into adulthood.

A study in 2007 by Wang et al. even found that different languages alter the brain in unique ways. It showed that speakers of Chinese have different brain structures from those who don’t know Chinese.

Learning ancient words, though, has a very specific magic beyond creating neural pathways. “They allow us to notice things that weren’t there last week, and won’t be there next week,” says author Lia Leendertz. She is about to publish her fifth seasonal guide, The Almanac, which celebrates the unique nature of each month. She is also the presenter of the podcast ‘As The Seasons Turn’.

She recounts that when she first embarked on what has now turned into a series of beautifully evocative annual tomes, she was fascinated by how language allowed her to connect back through time.

“When I started researching for The Almanac, I looked up the names of the months in different languages like Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Manx. The Gaelic name for January is Am Faoilleach, which comes from the word meaning wolf. It was the time when the wolves would have been howling to find a mate. Wolves have been extinct in Scotland since 1743, which shows how old the name is. The word conjures the atmosphere of dark January nights full of howling.”

She also looked at the names for the different moons throughout the year, and how they connect to the agricultural jobs that needed attending to at those times. The majority of people nowadays might not be waiting for a clear night to push on with hunting, haymaking, or ploughing, but the light from a full moon does have an impact on what we are able to do. We are seasonal beings, even if we don’t recognise it.

Leendertz describes how we feel differently in January from December, or August from September. But the impacts can even be day-to-day, or night-to-night. An evening stroll becomes more appealing when you can see your feet, and even more so when you can take your gaze to the stars. To return to Caroline’s poem, moonlight means it’s less of a “grubble in the dark” and more a chance “to watch the sky for flittermice and yaffles”.

In his book, The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane describes how ancient pathways “connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history, and inwards to the self”. These words also have this power, too, says Caroline, and help us to rediscover connection.

“There’s a word that I came across recently: ‘unforgetting’. I really liked it because it touches on the fact that we belong to the world and to each other. We know this; we can feel in our bodies and our hearts that things are off-kilter,” she says.

“A lot of these old words come from a time when nature wasn’t a commodity to be extracted and exploited, or just a pretty place to visit for a day trip, but when it was more deeply interwoven with the daily fabric of life, a matter of survival, and also a deeply felt and loved and respected part of existence,” she continues. “All of this is still relevant. We still depend utterly on nature, but we have become dangerously detached from it.”

Learning these words, and then teaching them to our families is, therefore, a way of using language to nurture this connection in our disjointed lives. These words are also a gentle call to action – for us to relearn, to value, and respect the natural world.

As Caroline says: “These disappearing words are not so much just like a postcard of an idyllic past, they’re a lexicon. They’re connected to a deeper, more intimate, interdependent understanding of the world. Language is a keen way of knowing the landscape, wildlife, nature, and the weather. It’s a means of coming to love the world and to restore our sense of belonging, which I think is in such peril at the moment.”