Today is National Tree Day, but according to a study, words to describe nature (such as leaf or branch) are used less and less in our texts.
Terms such as “branch”, “meadow”, names of trees or flowers are used less and less in our daily lives.
Miles Richardson, a psychologist at the English University of Derby, used the Google Books Ngram Viewer tool to find out how often, in the period from 1800 to 2019, literary authors used 28 words associated with nature. The results show that these terms have decreased by approximately 60% from the mid-19th century to the present.
The decline of nature. The study confirms what was discovered in 2017 by researchers at the London Business School: studying works of popular culture in English from the 20th century and beyond, the authors highlighted how the frequency of 186 words related to nature (general terms, names of trees, flowers and birds) had steadily decreased since the 1950s in fiction books, song lyrics and film plots, while references to the man-made environment show no decline.
Urban life. According to Richardson, the words we use to describe nature are slowly disappearing from our common language, replaced by technological terms or terms linked to urban life, due to a lifestyle increasingly detached from the natural world.
