The Angry Grammarian

Words we miss. by Jeffrey Barg Vanishing Spells Good words are like muscles. They can be really strong and beautiful, but if you don’t use ’em, they’ll atrophy and eventually disappear. A reader wrote in a few weeks ago lamenting the loss of the word “vicissitude,” meaning changeability (like, for example, language itself). Indeed, a Google Blog Search indicates the word has been used just six times in the last month on the whole Internet. (Not that blogs are the be-all-and-end-all of language, but they aren’t a bad real-time barometer either.) And one of those six times was a weekly blog feature on fancy, underused words. In that spirit, I solicited reader suggestions of words that aren’t used enough anymore. A few of the best ones: “Let your faithful readership use the N-word,” writes Earle Spamer, titillatingly.... [read full story]