We seem so desperate to crush our language these days. It seems inevitable that in cramming our thoughts into 140 characters, and abbreviating the English language into a new staccato short hand for texting we are losing some of our lexicon.
Huge chunks actually.
And while many people will tell you that we can get by quite nicely on our limited vocabulary, I can’t help feel a sense of loss for the hundreds of words that die out daily.
Where is the campaign against the extinction of rare words such as ‘twixt’ and ‘oft’? These delicate words that dance through the creative lands of prose and poetry are dying out like the fairies of Never Never Land each time someone brutally cries ‘There’s no such thing as a need for flowery language!’
And indeed, they might be right. Many language learning programs boast that you can get by in a second language by mastering no more than 100 of the most common words.
However, as someone who has lived in a country where English is not the first language, I can tell you that ‘getting by’ falls a long way short of true communication. Without the subtleties and emphasis provided by a richer vocabulary it becomes frustrating to explain how you feel or what you think. The lack of language is a censorship.
I fear that by stripping our language of it’s variety, we are in essence robbing ourselves of an ability to express ourselves uniquely. Our choices of which words to use are almost as important as the words themselves, if not more so, hinting at meanings that go deeper than the single dictionary definition.
Do you convey the same message if you tell someone that you feel anxious, nervous, worried or apprehensive?
Is being ‘filled with a wondrous sense of elation’ the same as ‘being happy’?
Needed or not, from now on I’ll be posting a few of my favourite words on this blog each week, in the hopes of others picking them up and keeping them alive in their own works.
YES!!!
I love the way certain words feel when you say them out loud. Scrumptious. Splendid. There are so many splendiforous (OK that one I made up but I like it) adjectives out there but people resort to the ever-bland “nice” or “good” or “cool”.
Good one! I love ‘scrumptious’. My Mum was a primary school teacher and she used to bar her kids from using ‘bland’ words like ‘thing’, ‘stuff’, ‘nice’ or ‘ok’.
One of my favorite poems in college was by Marilyn Hacker and features the line “my epithalamion circles that luminous intaglio.” Language I’d use everyday? No. But even now, reading it out loud and sensing the way the words feel… I fall in love with words all over again.