It's time we all voted for words which we want to save from oblivion. Harper Collins are editing their new dictionary and words like caliginosity (which means dimness or darkness) are in danger of being excluded because they are not used enough. Well, that made me think. Firstly, how do they track this usage? How do they know that people like me, who live in a small hamlet of nine houses, don't sit in the pub each evening being all fatidical about the future of the planet and the amount of recrement that is clogging up the landfill site near Abbeye Village. I don't think I've seen a surveillance camera in the pub, (just a sign which says 'Be careful how you treat your children because they will choose your retirement home!') so how do they know what we are talking about, or, more pertinently, what words we are using?
Anyway, then I thought, if it works like search engine optimisation, maybe we should all use our blogs to promote endangered words up the rankings so I'll leave that gauntlet thrown down for all of you ...
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Ha, Caliginosity is the name of my blog soley because I wanted to save the word!
What I heard was that they are just using the internet, searching words and seeing if there are lots of results and lots of uses froung by search engines.
But that was a while ago.. I hope they decided to save ALL the words (which were ALL awesome)
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