The word “ammil” is a term from Devon, England which means “the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw.” Landscape words like this one, which names something so precisely that it directs our attention towards a phenomenon we might otherwise overlook, thrilled the nature writer Robert Macfarlane so much that he began collecting them, compiling current and historical specimen-words used across the U.K. and Ireland into a nine-part glossary called “Landmarks.” For Macfarlane, learning these words changed the way he saw familiar landscapes. Referring to an English dialect word for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal,” he writes, “now that I know the word ‘smeuse,’ I notice these signs of creaturely commute more often.”
A similar impulse is on display in Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights,” which Gay wrote as a daily-ish exercise in identifying concepts, objects and experiences that brought him joy. “I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful,” he admits in the book’s introduction. “The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. The more you study the word “smeuse,” the more round hollows there are to find in the forsythia.
On the flip side: the more you enjoy delight and precise words for the natural world, the more their absence stings. Macfarlane’s glossary of landscape words was compiled in reaction to the Oxford University Press removing words like “acorn,” “bluebell,” “heron” and “otter” from its “Oxford Junior Dictionary” and replacing them with “blog,” “celebrity” and “voice-mail.” Gay’s essay collection expresses the value of experiencing joy while being Black in an oppressive society by frequently contrasting a specific delightful experience (blowing off obligations, sitting outside a shop in the sun, having your patterned socks noticed in an airport TSA line) with its inverse (working hard till you die, being asked to leave, living under state surveillance).
Both writers’ works are supported by their authors’ opinions that these practices of archiving and stockpiling matter because the subjects of their efforts are under threat.
“The substitutions made in the ‘Oxford Junior Dictionary’ — the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual — are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live,” Macfarlane writes. “As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted.” In other words, Macfarlane assembled the book not only because he enjoys landscape words, but also because he is bothered by how they’ve been artificially eradicated from developing vocabularies.
All opinions stand in opposition to something else.
That quality is what gives opinions their power to motivate, to persuade, to structure actions and to spark debate. It’s also what makes them vital to choose consciously. For every positive opinion you can hold, you also take on the mental weight of its opposite. You take on the capacity to experience loss, betrayal, discomfort and frustration.
I bring up Macfarlane and Gay because their books acknowledge that fact in plain language. They wrestle with it. They process the dimensions of layered meaning that it offers their love of words or their celebration of things that incite unrestrained delight. Most of our daily media intake fails to do so.
Online, opinions whirl. Researchers argue that social media in particular accelerates polarization by rewarding extreme messages with more attention, quietly incentivizing the formation of fissures between people that once found common ground like a river transforming a valley into a canyon.
That isn’t an accident. Social media companies profit from the time and energy users spend on their platforms, giving them a financial incentive to design algorithms that keep tensions high. These platforms’ hyper-engineered algorithms and ads push us to form intense opinions without giving thought to whether it’s worth our energy to care — and then, offline, we carry those opinions and drag their mental weight along, too.
I want to be clear that this extends beyond politics. I’m talking about the disparate factions of Taylor Swift superfans, memes that are mean for no reason, trend crazes built on material waste and teenagers getting doxxed over arguments on Call of Duty. At a certain point, appending more opinions to your worldview begins to foreclose avenues to connect with others. It becomes an exercise in loneliness and exhaustion.
If there’s one divisive opinion I’d like to be known for holding, it’s that, in an ideal world, this issue would be eradicated with regulations that fundamentally change the way social media functions. I alone can’t magically make Congress do that for you, but I can offer you space in the pages of The Campus to participate in a forum for public discussion that — by design — aims to serve the Allegheny community, not subvert it.
