I'm sort of fascinated by dictionary purists who bemoan the use of any word not found in the OED when you consider the origin of so many words in our language.
These are the same sorts of people who fawn over William Shakespeare for creating ‘tranquil’ and ‘gossip’, yet any modern writer who dares to turn a noun into a verb is scoffed at as uneducated swine. It’s fascinating that we hold so much value to the words that exist that we’re reluctant to see new ones form. They’ll begrudgingly accept a few, things that had no purpose before (adding the word ‘internet’ following its invention). But fuck you if you want to use ‘oranged’ to describe something that turned orange - that’s not a word. That’s not proper English.
Even though there is a precedent for it. Even though nearly every other colour can be used as a verb (you can blue metal and your face can redden), orange hasn’t, so you can’t use it.
Taking patterns in English and expanding them or taking things that aren’t uniform and making them uniform. We have ‘terrestrial’ and ‘celestial’, and changing one to match the other. ‘Terestial’, perhaps. I’ve always thought that ‘mer’, for ‘ocean’, could be adapted into a similar sounding word to the other two. The way we’re taught to think of words and language now makes this seem silly and strange, yet this is how a great many words came to be - and is perhaps the source of every alternate spelling our language has to offer. Fitting a pattern or defining a new one.
It just bothers me to see people treat language as though it is defined by the dictionary, instead of the other way around. And it makes me sad to see how few writers create new words or use old ones in new ways. They’ll search the depths of the OED to find a beautiful word nobody’s used in centuries instead of creating their own. One that better suits the times and the context they want to use it in.
“People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it—that makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an arbitrary distinction; it doesn’t make a word any more real than any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real.”
— lexicographer Erin McKean
Former OED editor covertly deleted thousand of words, book claims
guardian.co.ukAn eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.
Robert Burchfield’s efforts to rewrite the dictionary have been uncovered by Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist, lexicographer and former editor on the OED.
Ogilvie worked for 11 years to research and write Words of the World, published by Cambridge University Press, which challenges the widely held belief that editors of the OED between 1884 and 1933 were Anglocentric Oxford dons obsessed with preserving the Queen’s English, and that it was not until Robert Burchfield’s four supplements, produced between 1972 and 1986, that the dictionary was opened up to the wider world.
“I observed a pattern, that actually it was the earlier editors who were dealing with words in a really enlightened way. They certainly weren’t these Anglocentric, judging kind of editors – they were very sensitive to cultural differences and they seemed to be putting in a lot of foreign words and a lot of words from different varieties of English, which must have been amazing for that day when colonial varieties of English were just emerging,” said Ogilvie.
She undertook a detailed analysis of Burchfield’s supplement, comparing it with the 1933 supplement by Charles Onions and William Craigie. She found that, far from opening up the OED to foreign linguistic influences, Burchfield had deleted 17% of the “loanwords” and world English words that had been included by Onions, who included 45% more foreign words than Burchfield.
» via The Guardian
Dictionary compilers create endangered words list
guardian.co.ukguardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 August 2011 19.25 BST
Collins experts remove obsolete words – including aerodrome and wittol – from smaller dictionaries
What really tickles me about this article is the thought that in the future, text analysis tools like Google Trends will reveal a strange spike in the use of these obsolete words, thanks to this article and the comments on it.
OED Finds ‘OMG’ Usage From 1917
blogs.wsj.comI can think of only one proper response: LOL!
