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DOUBLE TAKE: INVITING A MALISON
A niddering act?
A British dictionary causes a fuss by threatening to ditch some obscure words
PHILIP JACKMAN
September 25, 2008
They are, some would argue, linguistic recrement. Their caducity should be recognized and abstergent measures should be taken to expunge them from the lexicon. It seems apodeictic.
We are talking about obscure and archaic words, ones that never get used much - or at all - these days. In Britain, the publishers of the Collins English Dictionary are proposing to get rid of a bunch of them to help make room for about 2,000 new words they intend to include in their next edition.
But this has caused something of a fuss in the land where the English language was born. The Times newspaper has ridden to the rescue of these ancient terms by inviting its readers to vote online to rescue their favourite word from the blue pencil of oblivion.
For its part, Collins has agreed to stays of execution for words that garner at least six "good-quality citations" of usage "from natural language." The deadline is January.
At this point, a cynic might point out that Collins and The Times are both owned by News Corp., and that this whole thing could just possibly be construed as a publicity stunt to sell more dictionaries.
Not so, said Elaine Higgleton, editorial director of Collins English Dictionary, in a telephone interview from Glasgow yesterday. "The Times in the U.K. is very interested in language and they've run quite a lot of pieces recently," she said, particularly on spelling and language use.
Meanwhile, Collins has been getting British celebrities to "adopt" some of the threatened words in an experiment to see if they can be resuscitated.
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has adopted "skirr" and actor Stephen Fry is championing the survival of "fubsy."
"There's an MP here called Vince Cable who has adopted 'niddering,' which means cowardly," said Ms. Higgleton. "I would have thought Vince has got a very good chance of being able to get that used by people because it kind of fills a lexical gap. He's only got to be reported as saying that the Prime Minister's response to the financial crisis has been niddering ... and there he is using the word in a good natural-language context."
But whatever the ultimate fate of these obscure terms, word lovers would doubtless vaticinate that the overall exercise will be roborant for people's vocabularies.
Those to be exuviated
Some of the words threatened with expulsion from the British edition of the Collins English Dictionary.
Abstergent: Cleansing or scouring.
Agrestic: Rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth.
Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration.
Caducity: Perishableness; senility.
Caliginosity: Dimness; darkness.
Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else.
Embrangle: To confuse or entangle.
Exuviate: To shed (a skin or similar outer covering).
Fatidical: Prophetic.
Fubsy: Short and stout; squat.
Griseous: Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey.
Malison: A curse.
Mansuetude: Gentleness or mildness.
Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman.
Niddering: Cowardly.
Nitid: Bright; glistening
Olid: Foul-smelling.
Oppugnant: Combative, antagonistic, or contrary.
Periapt: A charm or amulet.
Recrement: Waste matter; refuse.
Roborant: Tending to fortify.
Skirr: A whirring sound, as of the wings of birds in flight.
Vaticinate: To foretell; prophesy.
Vilipend: To treat or regard with contempt.
Any thoughts from our British contingent
I might not be british, but I'm definatly stealing 'fubsy' to describe every dwarf my players encounter from now on.
No! How are we going to get bonuses to wisdom without periapts? Clerics are doomed!
More seriously, I need to use some of those words sometime.
Fubsy and griseous prophet covered in olid recrement and grasping a periapt in his caducity utters a fatidical malison: "I have vaticinated from skirr of swallows an abstergent caliginosity to you, who have abandoned apodeictic muliebrity! Exuviate and do no not roborant, for a nitid era of mansuetude will deliver you from your embranglements!"
Agrestic audience vilipends. Surely matters are compossible, they think, niddering.
Two words: dictionarydotcom & periaptofwiki.
The small (ie less words anyway) version students carry in their backpacks and the shared/classroom copy might be an exception. Otherwise if I am writing, I am on the computer and have a bigger dictionary available.
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Since I teach at an all girls school I will have to work muliebrity into a lecture soon. Seriously though, old obscure words like that can be a great source of character names. Just imagine your players meeting an old hermit named Olid Malison or a dwarf named Nidder Fubsy. And imagine if Nidder Fubsy was a skinny and very couragous dwarf. That can become so much fun.
Muliebrity is my new favourite word. I wonder how long I could get away with "Sorry, can't do that, I have a bad case of muliebrity today".