Monday, October 27, 2008

The Caducity of Words

When I was in graduate school my friend Matthew and I had this goofy idea to create a list of rare and impressive words. The goal was to see who could incorporate these words the most in our research papers. It made the writing of some tedious papers a little more fun when we could slide "tergiversate" into a sentence. Now the challenge has been made for all of us to participate in comeback of some seldom used and underappreciated words.

A recent article in Time Magazine alerted me to the potential extinction of some fabulous words. This niddering campaign to exuviate the dictionary of some fabulous words is oppugnant and olid. That some of these words are passed their expiration date is apodeictic, but there are some that have a nitid quality. At the risk of sounding like an old Oxbridge English Don, I hate to see our English vocabulary become fubsy and…well…just dumbed-down. Is it worth trying to salvage some of these words or is this abstergent necessary.

1 comment:

ThaiTopher said...

You see there is this really beautiful tree that stood in the middle of the forest towering above all the other trees. Then some loggers came and cut the tree down. Here's the deal...As majestic as the tree was I never saw it. As far as I am concerned the tree never existed. So, with incredible vocabulary words being taken out of the dictionary, I imagine it would be a loss for some. For myself, eh.....not so sure...