Friday, December 26, 2008

Use it or Lose it

Neologisms have always been a delight of mine. The number of new words added to our dictionaries is stunning. So when I was reading an article in the January 2009 issue of Realm Magazine, I was stunned to see that some English words become extinct by none use. The Collins Dictionary will subtract 24 words if they are not used. The article explains that if the word is used at least six times in the body of readings Collins uses, then the words will remain in the dictionary.

The following paragraph contains a dozen of these words on the list of extinction. See if you can identify those dozen words and can provide a definition for each of them. Next, you will want to use them in hopes of saving them from extinction.

When he walked out onto the stage to begin the evening's entertainment, I was searching for the word, when it came to me. He was such a fusby. Calling him anything else would have been an insult. He wasn't a munchkin or a leprechaun. He was a short, stout, squat man, he was a fusby. As I was reconciling this, my nostrils were olidly assaulted. The foul smelling recrement was a vaticinate of what was to come. The assaulting aroma was waste matter that leaked onto the stage when a sewage pipe burst. The niddering fusby slunk away and hid, cowered in the corner of the stage. He was a scoundrel. The fusby's griseous hair was well groomed. The grey streaks didn't reveal his true age. There was no way we could embrangle the nidderly griseous fusby with a brave man. He was a malison apparently. I was told that whenever this fusby appeared on stage something bad always happened. It was compossible to see why the audience villapended the fusby as we heard a skirring sound as he fled the stage. When we found him he was trying to wash the recrement from himself with an astergent soap and not a gentle one causing a tearing of skin from his arms. When we turned to go, we were on the street and the theater had collapsed behind us. Then just as suddenly I woke and realized that these words would soon be gone and only a memory, not real.


There are a few words on this list of extinction, I surprised to see there. As far as I'm concerned some of these will not be extinct as I plan on using them in spite of what Collins does.

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