Pied beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swíft, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Oxford University Press has removed most of these words from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

Vineeta Gupta, head of children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said: "We are limited by how big the dictionary can be – little hands must be able to handle it [there are no more desks upon which a book might be laid and opened? ed.] When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed. [there are no more seasons? How far has global warming got? ed.]

"We are also much more multicultural. People don't go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as "Pentecost" or "Whitsun" would have been in 20 years ago but not now."

She said children's dictionaries were trailed in schools [trailed through what exactly? PC ordure? ed.] and advice taken from teachers. Many words are added to reflect the age-related school curriculum.

Angels needs a dictionary to find out what 'age-related ' might mean in the New Labour context.