Redefining Nature

"Comment Editorials" from Toronto Star of 11 December 2008

Canadians learn from a young age that the industrious beaver is a survivor, building dams in harsh conditions against all odds. But our national rodent is being replaced in the revised edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary by a wave of new words like blog and broadband.
Targeted at 7-year olds, the dictionary has room for mere 6,000 words. The editors believe children's lives have shifted from the world of nature to the World Wide Web.
So they pruned the vocabulary of flora and fauna to clear space for cutting-edge infotech lingo. In the cutthroat world of dictionary editors, our beloved web-footed beaver is roadkill for trendy web terminology.
In Britain, the press is having a field day with Oxford's shortchanging of Mother Nature and with the seemingly heretical deletion of religious terms like parish, pew, psalm and pulpit. Clearly, the devil is in the details - except that the world devil itself has been exorcised from the dictionary by the diabolical editors.
Just don't call the editors weasels. Your children wouldn't be able to look that one up, either.