I stumbled across this recently and couldn’t not post…
The Oxford English dictionary is determined to prevent thousands of words from becoming extinct. And so am I ;o)
How can you help?
Be a good custodian. Understand your new word’s meaning as best you can, keeping in mind that troubled words can be difficult to get close to and need patience. Use it often with loving care. Invite some of its friends over, especially the ones that might be harder to place in a good home. Like Ducenarious. Nicrocopy. Essomenic. Sinapistic.
Poor lonely sinapistic. It has no definition at Wordnik.com, which compiles definitions from other sites. No prospects for bettering itself by finishing school and landing a good job with words that have benefited from better socia-economic backgrounds.
I found sinapism, though, at TheFreeDictionary.com: The use of mustard plaster for medical purposes. A plaster containing powdered black mustard; applied to the skin as a counterirritant or rubefacient. From the Latin sinapisumus. From the Greek sinapismos, from sinapi mustard. Egyptian origin.
Could this be a long-lost cousin? A heritage that sinapistic could find its way back to?
One can only hope. And get involved, because getting involved in a word’s life is the first step toward helping it reach its full potential.
So, there you have my endangered word for the day–sinapistic.
What’s yours?
I laughed at your post. I have always jokingly called big and unusual words “seventy-five-cent words.” I may have started using that phrase in college which I attended with a man who truly used a lot of seventy-five cent words. We were good friends. I had an English class with him and our professor once assigned us the task of writing a 1500-word essay on just any subject we chose to write about. The day the professor returned the papers, I heard John laughing to himself. After class he called me aside and showed me his paper. The professor had given him a “B” on his essay, but had written across the top of the first page, “I don’t understand a thing you are saying.” John got a real bang out of that. But that was pretty much how John talked every day.