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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Fun With Obsolete Words

A good friend, who shares my fondness for fun vocabulary, sent me a link to this post at Death and Taxes about obsolete words. I didn't ask whether she agreed with the author's assertion that the words in question became obsolete before their time. I don't agree that we need all the words, but some of them are fantastic.

My favorite word on the list, and the one that I'd most like to start using, is resistentialism. My friend told me to check out resistentialism when she sent the link because she knows I have a habit of commanding inanimate objects to do things when they are being particularly spiteful; it would have been so great if we'd known there was a word for the spiteful behavior of inanimate objects when we were in college.

Another word on the list I really loved is Englishable, but I doubt I'll be able to use it much. It makes me wonder if there's a word for taking an English word that's one part of speech and turning it into another part of speech. My friends and I did that all the time in college, normally turning a noun into a verb (table and tea were the most commonly turned). Furthermore, I wonder if there's a word for using a proper noun as a verb (Google and Netflix spring to mind).

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