Call Me Brainsick, But Should Words Be Rescued?

Feb 6, 2009

I’m a wordie.  I confess.  I often indulge in words no one else uses any more.  I even play favourites.

So when I came across the site Save The Words, I will admit my first reaction was a rumbling purr.  The premise of the site is to have people adopt and then promise to use words that are in danger of being dropped from the dictionary, based on the fact that no one uses them anymore.  By reintroducing these words into popular speech, they can be rescued from a fate worse than obscurity.

I’ll even admit to having adopted a word or four from the site.  I have no idea how I’m going to casually slip sevidical, squiriferous, or foppotee into a sentence, but I’ll have less difficultly with aquabib, I’m guessing.

On the other hand, one of the beautiful things about English is the way it grows and changes.  Without the natural evolution, we’d not need a translation to understand Beowulf.  Ten years ago, nobody tweeted or friended other people.  Today, ten cent store is on the chopping block, probably because dollar store has taken over.  A dime doesn’t buy squat these days.

There is a common misconception that if you love words, you have to use big ones, preferably old ones, and even better if few people understand them (thus showing your educational background.)  Do you like how I slipped in thus there?  Well, bullshit.

Sometimes it’s best to just let go.  Embrace the newness!  Love the evolution!  Free yourself from the fetters of, uh, fetterhood.  I love to make words up (like fetterhood), to play with them, to create new meanings and flip them upside down.  If the price we pay for that is that squiriferous has to meet its end, well then, so be it.  Call it collateral damage.  It seems the human collective is only capable of knowing so many words, and if I have to kill off foppotee for the sake of writerly, I’m prepared to do it.  So I’m a ruthless bitch.  I never said I wasn’t.