Culture | Johnson

Why words die

How to keep lexical treasures from keeling over

BIOLOGISTS reckon that most species that have ever existed are extinct. That is true of words, too. Of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 231,000 entries, at least a fifth are obsolete. They range from “aa”, a stream or waterway (try that in Scrabble), to “zymome”, “that constituent of gluten which is insoluble in alcohol”.

That is surely an undercounting. The English have an unusually rich lexicon, in part because first they were conquered (by the Vikings and Norman French) and then they took their turn conquering large swathes of the Earth, in Asia, North America and Africa. Thousands of new words entered the standard language as a result. Many more entered local dialects, which were rarely written down. The OED only includes words that have been written.

Dedicated researchers have managed to capture some of the unwritten ones. For the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), researchers conducted thousands of interviews—usually with older country folk—who still spoke their regional dialect. They found such treasures as “to pungle up”, meaning for someone to produce money or something else owed, and “the mulligrubs”: indigestion and, by extension, a foul mood.

The smaller and more local a word, the more danger it faces of dying out. DARE’s editors trekked out to find old people in the countryside precisely because younger urban speakers are more likely to adopt metropolitan norms, whether “broadcast standard” in America or “BBC English” in Britain. Other factors gave this homogenising trend a boost: advertising, which tends to standardise the names of things bought and sold in national markets, and the rise of American popular culture and global mass media in the second half of the 20th century.

A study published in 2012 found some evidence for this homogenisation. It looked through a huge trove of books published since 1800, scanned and made searchable by Google, and found that the death rate of words seems to have speeded up in English (and also in Spanish and Hebrew) since about 1950. One cause is the death of perfect synonyms in an era of mass communications: the words “radiogram” and “roentgenogram”, both meaning the same thing, were eventually edged out by “x-ray”, the world having no need for three labels for the same thing.

But DARE’s editors resist the standardisation hypothesis. What people call their grandparents—for example, “gramps and gram” or “mee-maw and papaw”—is more immune to the steamroller of national norms. In fact, these words are especially stubborn precisely because they give people an emotional connection to where they come from.

Some words were never a great loss in the first place. The OED has “respair”, both as a noun and verb, meaning the return of hope after a period of despair—an obvious etymological kissing-cousin. But the great dictionary’s only citation for this dates back to 1425. For whatever reason, “respair” is a word that English-speakers decided they could happily live without. The OED also includes a host of terms from the “inkhorn” period of English word-coinage, when writers readily made up new words from Greek and Latin roots. These include such forgettables as “suppeditate”, meaning “subdued” or “overcome”. Good riddance to them.

Some words hang on in a sort of life-support state, frozen in a single usage but otherwise forgotten. Who uses the verb “to wend”, except in the fixed expression “to wend one’s way somewhere”? (Bonus fact: the past tense of “wend” replaced the old past tense of “to go”, which is why we say “I went”.) Had Shakespeare not memorialised the name of a small siege explosive in the phrase to be “hoist with his own petard”, meaning a small bomb but also linked to the French word for “fart”, that would probably be gone, too.

Those who get the mulligrubs thinking about great old words dying can pungle up for a subscription to DARE, helping those lexicographers keep adding words to the online edition. But a word needs to be used to live. So DARE has teamed up with Acast, a podcast platform, creating a list of 50 endangered American regionalisms, and trying to get Acast’s podcasters to use them. Who can resist “to be on one’s beanwater”—meaning “in high spirits”? And isn’t “downpour” a bit workaday for heavy rain, when you could be calling it a “frog strangler”? No one wants to see English submit to boring homogenisation; using a few of these lexical rarities might offer some respair.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Lexical treasures"

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