EACH year hundreds of words live under constant threat.
Once valued members of the lexicon, hard working and dedicated, they are no longer useful, no longer valued by the younger generations. Dozens become extinct, branded obsolete by the dictionaries designed to cherish them.
Collins Dictionary has rallied to the cause, sort of, by creating a list of words presumed to have become extinct in the past year. Bye-bye charabanc, wittol and cyclogiro. Oh no, not the cyclogiro. Drysalter – gone. Alienism, stauroscope, succedaneum: gone, gone, gone.
Woolfell, I weep for your loss.
A couple of years ago Collins threatened to drop from its English Dictionary a list of words, to be replaced by newly minted phrases, if right-thinking wordists did not come forward in their defence. Hmm. Why not just make the book bigger?
Anyway, we must stop this. As the great Madonna said, we must express ourselves (though, of course, stop short of becoming blatteroons) and how to do that when the world shrinks with the death of each word?
Curiously, while writing this, a marketing lady for The Chambers Dictionary has sent me an email boasting of its newly-released edition and all the newly-added words therein. It includes the observational line: “Words are not sandwiches.” With all those to choose from you’d think the spokesman would come up with a jauntier noun. It boasts of leaving “big society” out of this year’s dictionary but does include “broken society” for the first time. Hmm.
At savethewords.org they have already come up with daedalian plan, sharp as a ferrule, to rescue suffering nouns. Peruse the site, gaze, if you can bear it, at the wide, fearful eyes of fallaciloquence and vicambulate and adopt them. Pledge to use them once a day in conversation. Save the Words also recommends immortalising struggling words by tattooing them about your person, scrawling them prominently in graffiti (The Herald does not condone anti-social behaviour) or writing them in the sky with vapourising fluid (perhaps pay someone else to pilot the plane, which you won’t be able to land at an aerodrome as that word’s also gone).
Instead of becoming the office quiddler, make yourself useful. Your mothertongue needs you.
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