Revenge of the Word Nerd

Yeah, yeah, I've got a 2-month old daughter and I'm writing a post about word geekery. Sometimes you need hobbies!

So yesterday I heard a story on NPR about the Oxford English Dictionary. Scintillating stuff, let me tell you. And I'm not being sarcastic; I really liked the story.

You hear every year about new words that get into the dictionary. Most of these are related to pop culture or technology. I remember a couple of years ago when "Doh!" was added, and "blog" made the list not too long ago.

But for every word that gets added, there are some that fall out of favor and get dropped from the dictionary. It's not a one-to-one ratio, but it happens. And it's totally understandable. The Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 600,000 words. I've heard different numbers, but the average English speaker uses 1200-2000 words on a regular basis, and typically, that's about 10 percent of the words he understands. So you figure that the average person only knows about 200,000 words. (In case you're wondering, I have no idea where I fall. I wouldn't even know how to figure it out. That would be one heck of a vocab test.)

No wonder then, that the dictionary drops a few now and again. But where do these words go (Aside from the latest edition of Balderdash)? I hate to see knowledge of any kind just fall away. Luckily, folks marketing the Oxford English Dictionary in Kuala Lumpur aren't the sort of people to just let that happen. Thus, www.savethewords.org was born. They put together a list of these out-of-date and disappearing words, just so no one forgets their small contributions to the language. I'm a little late to the party on this, as geekdad linked to it last August, but it's worth pointing out nonetheless.

And so, while I'm not an inveteratist, neither do I wish to be considered a foppotee. So I will engage in no further quibbleism and get right to the point.

Do your duty to the English language and adopt one or more of these obscure, but sometimes awesomely insane, words. I'm taking frutescent and pessundate, because I like describing things as similar to shrubbery and very strong verbs.

Words may go out of style, but being a smart aleck never will.