by Northsage

Created on: May 13, 2008

Archaic words: Does anyone still say, "Here's mud in your eye?" It seems to be a toast or salute. Mud has been in my eye, and it is to be avoided at all costs. Another pass phrase that doesn't get used anymore, "I've been hornswoggled!" Does anyone know how one is swoggled, and how a horn is used to swoggle someone? It certainly sounds painful! Ask a young child what "whippersnapper, buggy whip, crooner, pitcher pump, celluloid, burlap, tin Lizzy, Victrola, ear trumpet, shoe horn, firebrand, whipsaw, coal scuttle, brimstone, scythe, soup stockpot, lamp chimney, lamp lighter, town crier, etc. means and they will look at you as though you have lost your mind and are speaking ancient Egyptian.

Have you ever used the words, "entwine, wench, flogged, varlet, midsummer, fortnight, forlorn, lovelorn, methinks, yore, hither, thither and yon, or whilst," without quoting the "Bard of Avon?" Then there are all those bible words, used when one is feeling particularly holy. Thee, thine, thou, begat, scourged, smite, you know the ones. Only in Bible quotes or sanctimonious, righteous ranting, (often the same thing) do these words get used in many modern lives.

It is sad to realize that language apparently comes with a built-in expiration date. Languages are fluid, dynamic and ever changing. Pejoratives are eventually embraced by those who were defamed by their use, only to become proudly proclaimed to now be descriptive and complimentary, by the victims of such verbal abuse. The "N" word, and "redneck," come immediately to mind. "Bad" transforms practically overnight, to suddenly mean "good," adjectives become verbs, nouns and pronouns become adjectives, prefixes suddenly stand alone, and immediately represent whole words, as in "being dissed." Perfectly good words fall out of use and are replaced with others that are not nearly as colorful or descriptive.

Then there are words that don't exist yet, but will or should. We need words that can replace some that aren't adequate or are generally unacceptable. "Foxy" describes a gorgeous woman. The only word I can think of to describe the male counterpart is "Hunky". Yuck! Let us erase that one from all of written history as the Soviets did with people, past, present or soon to be "never was."

Dictionaries have to be revised often, to keep up with changes in usage, and to include new words that until recently did not even exist. If we were to somehow be transported to Elizabethan times, we would be hard pressed to understand their spoken words or be understood, because tiny changes in language and its usage due to the effects of assimilation of foreign and domestic influences, accumulate over time, changing the language completely.

The average adult lives their life using only 2,000 words in everyday conversation, but most of them understand thousands more words, often picking up clues from where and how these words are used in a conversation. Two-year olds have a unique ability to absorb speech and learn multiple languages, all at the same time, without even realizing it, if they are exposed to multiple languages during the brief window of time that humans can easily learn language. Once this brief window closes, it become MUCH harder to ever completely pick up language skills.

Animals learn to interpret body language much better than we humans, because vocalization among animals is much more limited, and speech centers in their brains are comparatively tiny when compared to our own. Be very glad that we did not spend the second through forth years of our lives in a coma, because if we had, we could barely learn to communicate with each other, upon awakening, no matter how hard we tried.

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