Grandmother Tongue
“Phew, that kitty litter is downright olid!”
No, I’m not talking Siamese, but endangered English, our mother tongue with an inbuilt caducity – or perishableness.
In order to make room for some 2000 new words (like wii and wiki and frappuccino), Collins English Dictionary is facing a reluctant spring-clean – in with the new, and out with the outdated.
Yet any old-fashioned lexicographer has a shine for calignosity (or darkness), and can’t bear to discard exuviate (or moult). Hence the latest scheme to encourage well-known scribblers such as columnist Stephen Fry and poet laureate Andrew Motion to adopt a pet archaism.
Poetically, Motion has opted for skirr, a sound effect of birds in motion. While Fry has plumped for fubsy, describing a human being with the opposite physique of his long-limbed self.
Given the list presented by Lingua Franca, the lingo show on Radio National, I’d be too niddering to handpick malison, favouring the philosophical charms of compossible, describing the possibility of one thing coexisting with another. In other words, disco and good taste were hardly compossible.
Have you encountered an underused word in danger of becoming recrement?