Words!

[caddyman]

A sombre-looking and fubsy man with much to be sombre about has just wandered around the office distributing an oppugnant leaflet intended no doubt, to be roborant but hopefully not fatidical.

Oh, I give up. These words are too hard to remember, even when they are written down in front of you – you have to keep referring back to them both for spelling and to ensure you’ve picked the right one from the list.

The Times is highlighting a number of words that, it is claimed, are obsolete and in danger of being omitted from the next edition of the Collins Dictionary. Because the silly season is not quite over, the paper is giving readers the option of voting to save some words from the caliginosity of history, by showing where they are still in use on a semi regular basis. They wish us to separate out the nitid from the olid and recrement that in turn should be vilipended.

I think it says much that only two of the words I have slipped into this griseous (there is a third) opus have sailed past the spell checker without raising a hair. The caducity (a fourth) of the remainder is clearly apodeictic.

Give me another five minutes and I shan’t be able to remember, except possibly from context, what these words mean. Clearly this abstergent (a fifth) exercise is overdue.

It’s all done far better here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4799560.ece

Comments

[fen-wolfchile.livejournal.com]

Keep using that sort of language and we'll have to start calling you Sir Humphrey :)

[keresaspa.livejournal.com]

Periapt will never die as long as there are role players.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

These are all perfectly cromulent words.

[mezzogiornouno.livejournal.com]

Your luculent (never incondite) pleaonasticisms are enough to drive the wildest algophilist to spasms of anacreonticity, doncher know.

[fen-wolfchile.livejournal.com]

yes, exactly (scrambles for dictionary and gives up rather quickly).

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

I think it's a shame to dump these lovely words just because Collins doesn't have enough pages to include them. That's a feeble excuse. I have never used any of them, but with such beautiful expressions is the English language enriched, not with grunts such as "yo", which I am sure Collins does list as a greeting, and which I personally prefer not to allow to befoul my mouth.

Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough, but I did not see the full list of condemned words and their definitions, nor a link to one. I might be inclined to print it out and start using some of them in everyday speech, and look askance at anyone who seems confused by them, as if I have been using them all along!

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

I agree, they shouldn't be deleted, but I was all too prescient when I said I wouldn't understand my own posting. I can't remember what half those lovely words mean already!

Doesn't the link feature the words at the end of the article? It did in the newspaper version, I assumed the online version would be the same...