The people at the Oxford English Dictionary always manage to surprise me. This time they’ve done it with a little campaign they call Save The Words (requires Flash).
Save The Words encourages you to adopt obsolete words to make sure they don’t become extinct. The interface for the site cleverly combines the ransom note collage concept with a lot of the same principles employed by interactive DVD menu designers. A frame that scrolls with your mouse highlights a number of words that appear to have been pasted onto a wall which, sometimes randomly sometimes when you mouseover them, by getting larger and saying phrases like “Yes, yes! Me!” “Choose me!” “No, pick me!”, a distinctly British “Oy! Oy!”, and even a plaintive “Hello?” among others. A click of the mouse opens a definition window to tell you what your exotic word actually means and to provide you with an opportunity to register, adopt your word, and, of course, buy a t-shirt emblazoned with your new vocabulary term.
While the interface is clever, and most of these words have fallen out of usage, I would argue that no word, unless what it describes is overtaken by technology, is ever really obsolete. Words are only forgotten.
Take two that I found, and adopted (though my confirmation e-mails have yet to arrive 24 hours later) that I think apply particularly to the wonderful world of the Internet: blateration and sevidical.
Blateration I had a pretty good guess at before I looked at its definition. It’s clearly a noun, which makes it a ton easier. Got a guess? Roll over for a definition of blateration.
Now, given its definition and given the signal to noise ratio into today’s world, why would anyone classify blateration as obsolete?
Similarly, sevidical is a word that applies most wholeheartedly to today’s discourse. An adjective, evidenced by the -dical which indicates something akin to “of or relating to” its definition applies to both ends of the political spectrum.
I know all languages are living, changing entities, and I’m happy that Oxford is trying to revive some of our forgotten words. In addition to expanding my vocabulary, there is a certain amusement value to many of them that has a distinctly topical flavor.
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