Should unused words be removed from new editions of English dictionaries?

No

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by Bradford Barrett

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There exists a secret world. One that exists beyond the concise business thesaurus and out of sight of word's spell check synonyms. It is a wild land of untamed words, where beautiful words mean horrible things: Limicolous-dwelling in mud or nasty sounding words with pleasant meanings-gnastration : purification ceremony before the wedding of two Christian virgins. In all my studies of linguistics in English and languages beyond, I have never found a collection of wacky and colorful words quite matching the line-up found in English.

In George Orwell's, 1984, the English language is cut down by ratios of ten in order to stifle imagination and control the population. Every word referring to speed-becomes speed: Speedful instead of rapid or intense and speedwise instead of snappy or quickly. Hungry is hungry, there cannot be starving, peckish, ravenous, famished, or even esurient. English loses its luster and personality in favor of general consensus and unity. Our beloved language is reduced to drab mumblings; the radiantly flamboyant and quirky side of our ability to communicate, and therefore ourselves, is crushed. With no way to express and define the complex emotions that are the glory of the human race, these emotions die. With no way to communicate the diverse intelligences and dizzying array of ideas humans display on a daily basis, our intelligence perishes and our diversity with it.

Unused, implies, but does not necessarily mean unimportant. True, if we exclude the slightly forlorn and forgotten cast-off words in the English language, repercussions will be minor. Academics will huff and mutter in their shut-in libraries, beat-poets will have less to rhyme with, and literary snobs will have less to be snooty about in the presence of the general population. However, where do we draw the line? How much of our vocabulary will be struck down in the name of making the dictionary lighter? What if some or even one of our beloved useful words is accidentally dismissed to the cutting room floor? I know I'm making a huge fuss over the theoretical loss of vestigial vocabulary, but what are the moral implications of rejecting the unused? Shredding unneeded books, burning history's unappreciated art, erasing the obscure music of our past, demolishing unvisited buildings, and what of people? What is the philosophical end of this idea, but deciding what people are and are not useful? Ridiculous? Heinrich Heine, a German writer penned, in 1821, the following phrase Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people. His countrymen did just this over a hundred years later. Burning books can start with burning words. So, if given the choice to destroy our secret far off land teeming with untamed verbs, wild adjectives, and feral nouns, the unused words of our time, I humbly suggest we do not. Our language defines us, to sacrifice our language, is sacrifice our very souls.

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