Published February 2, 2009 | 
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
~Richard Wright, American Hunger
Eleanor Roosevelt’s Amphibole. A word for a lizard with a forked tongue.
Public Service Announcement
Every day once-popular words fall out of common usage. Gradually they become shunned and shabby, less and less acceptable in ordinary conversation. In the end they’re even dropped from the dictionary. These words are still strong and useful. They want to be employed again.
Now you can help. Adopt a word or two at the OED-sponsored Save the Words website. Do your part to keep these lonely words in the dictionary. Thanks to 14cyclenotes for the link. (Flashplayer needed, which is why I haven’t actually adopted a word.)
A poem on the word “if” — and not by Rudyard Kipling.
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I’m taking phoenigm, if I can learn how to pronounce it.
*cough* High praise indeed. :D Thank you!
May I have permission to link to your Poe/try image?
Please! I love links.
One thing I appreciate about you is how often you post just the right thing to round out a link collection.
Personally, I’ve always been rather fond of shan’t and mustn’t…don’t know why we pretty much scrapped them…
I adopted “pregnatress”… it seems fitting for my life right now.
I have had people comment on my use of “thus” and “hence” in the past.
But enough of my blateration. I must attend to more senticous issues, now.
The Poe inspirational poster leaves me with the thought, “I guess the refrigerator hadn’t been invented then.”
What a great idea!! I went right out and adopted the words “modernicide” and “stigmatypy”. I’m trying to come up with a witty way of using both in a single sentence.
I’ll not be adopting a word.
Language is a living, breathing beast. Like life itself, language evolves. New words are born, others die a natural death or become co-opted (a local favorite example being the begging of a question). It is in the nature of things. The OED is comparable to, say, the American Museum of Natural History. It is partially a statement of what the world should be, true, but it is more a repository of what the world was. There is great value in preserving that knowledge but less, I aver, in resuscitating the moribund.
I love several.
But you’re absolutely right.