Dictionaries for dinner
typed for your pleasure on 12 March 2009, at 11.41 amSdtrk: ‘Each today doesn’t lead to a tomorrow’ by The caretaker
Some of you may have noticed, in skimming through ‘Shouting etc etc’ looking for stuff about Dolls, that I’m quite keen on words and language and all that fumfuh. You are correct! I like language, and it’s never done me wrong, for the most part. Further cursory glances at this godforsaken blog will reveal I have a certain fetish fascination with the obscure and the obsolete. So when I stumbled across the site Save the Words a couple of days ago, it was like a collision of… stuff that I like.
‘Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the dictionary,’ they say. ‘Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie abandoned and forgotten.’ The site is teeming with terms I’ve never previously heard of, like operiment (a covering), or somandric (pertaining to the human body), or vacivity (emptiness), or pication (application of warm pitch to the skin as medical treatment). Granted, it’s easy to see why some of those words have fallen out of the popular vernacular, but still. A broad vocabulary is something to be encouraged, especially in this day and age — have you seen my new category, the Surly Grammarian? — and dragging a forgotten word from the past and jump-starting its usage is a fun way to do it.
It took me about ten minutes of searching for a word that would be something that I’d actually use, as well as something that I’d identify with. I registered with the site, selected a word, and seconds later, they Emailed me a certificate of adoption.
What does affictitious mean, you ask? ‘Artificial; counterfeit; fake.’
But of course.
Do your part and adopt a word today! Someone needs to bring ‘pication’ back into use again; why not you?
Random similar posts, for more timewasting:
*picks up monitor, flings it across room* on February 22nd, 2005
Yet another death-knell for Mistress English on June 6th, 2007
March 14th, 2009 at 2.08 am
I was home skewled.
You’re lucky I can spell my name.
March 15th, 2009 at 3.37 pm
Well, you mispelt ‘home’, there. 🙂