What Will Be In The Word Museum Of The Future?

 

  

Every year brings us new words, often reflecting the changes and transitions of culture, technology, and invention. Ebonics, Spanglish, textspeak, and GenZisms sprout new ways to say what we feel, think and do. These words reflect the acts, beliefs, norms, and knowledge of the day. So, for all of the new words coming about, what becomes of the words from the past that no longer are in use - where do they go? 

One author, Jeffrey Kacirk, has found a home for them in his published book, The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten. The book was published in 2000, nearly a quarter-century ago. Think of how many new words have come about since then with the Internet, social media, diversity, globalization, and the smart phone. 

Now think about words that got displaced over that same time period. There’s little reason to keep around words that reflect things that are no longer in use, that no longer capture the views and feelings they originally elicited, and that would seem to be lost in today’s society.  

Words are always behind the times. They come after the thing they define existed. For instance, you didn’t have a word to describe a skyscraper or a motorcar until such things came to be. Any resulting behaviors or related objects and inventions would need new words to describe them, too. Whole professions and industries would develop as a result, fostering the need for new words to adequately reflect the expanded landscape.  

There are still many things and concepts that will need to be labeled and named. Perhaps the size of our dictionary will double over the next century. Think about that. For this to happen, it would mean we may only know half of what the 100-year future holds, or does it simply mean that each generation knows the newest version of the world but lacks a practical capacity to retain knowledge or know of the past, just as we today, would not know from many of the words in The Word Museum. 

Some words go out of use simply because they reflect things that are no longer in use. Others describe things that do exist today, but perhaps got replaced by a different word. Why did “haggersnash” disappear?  It means “a spiteful person.” We still have such people, don’t we? 

Admittedly “slut” sounds better than the outmoded “hurrion.” 

One word, “lant,” which is used to describe “stale urine,” is an odd concept to begin with, one seemingly not needing a word. One word that should come back, describes being over powered by fatigue: “quanked.”  

One word that could describe me well, “quidnune,” means “an inquisitive person, always seeking for news,” but it is no longer in use.  Same goes for “one who talks or disputes on any object, “a quodlibetarian.” I also like “ramfeezled,” to describe one who exhausts oneself with work.  

Many words that are no longer in use seemed to revolve around drinking alcohol or matters pertaining to marriage and sex. For instance: 

methomania = an irresistible desire for intoxicating substances

adulteine = a child born of an adulteress

barley-child= a child born of wedlock but which makes its advent within six months of marriage 

bedswerver= an adultress, one who swerves from the fidelity of the marriage bed

bleezed= signifies the state on one whom intoxicating liquor begins to operate 

blinked-beer= bad beer

brandy= checks the palsy in the leg in consequence of hard drinking 

buckswanging = a punishment used by grinders and the other workmen for idleness and drunkenness 

clamberskull = a heady liquor (quite strong)

potvaliant = heated with courage from strong drink 

minnock= a favorite darling who is the object of one’s affection  

Some words no longer in vogue seem perfectly relevant for today, such as these: 

jack-at-a-pinch = a man whose services are used only on an emergency  

cabobble = to mystify, puzzle, or confuse 

cag-mag= unwholesome or inferior meat

ninnybroth = popular name for coffee 

gutterblood= those who have been brought up in the immediate neighborhood of each other  

One word, pornocracy, struck me as one ahead of its time. It describes how prostitutes and the dominating influence of courtesans impacted the government of Rome and elections to the papacy throughout the first part of the tenth century.  

Here’s a word whose time hopefully has passed, used to describe a custom of certain cannibal tribes that prohibited the eating of persons of their own tribe; exophagy. 

And finally, here’s a word that faded from its historical reference to be co-opted into today’s slang: glory hole. 

It used to be “a place for rubbish or odds and ends, as a housemaid’s cupboard or a lumber room.” Now it’s just a crude term for one’s ass. It’s interesting to see how language evolves and morphs into relevancy or obscurity. 

Wordsmiths will enjoy The Word Museum. Many of these linguistic fossils reflect a time and place in culture and history that should not be forgotten so quickly. These expressions and phrases offer a deeper understanding into how life used to be and allow us to see the nature of how language illustrated the customs and inventions of days long gone.  

You can see how our present and the immediate past will be obliterated by the future. There may come a time when generations of other centuries forward will have little capability to really feel for what life was like now. As we march towards the technofication of humanity, where more robotic parts, laboratory cocktails, and new elements invade our body, the very notion of what it used to mean to be human will sound so foreign to the 22nd century world. We will seem like cavemen compared to what the new hybrid humans will be like. They will be bigger, stronger, live longer, smarter, and more agile. They will be a blend of human and manufactured components, mixed in with drugs that will cure what kills us now. 

This book of abandoned words stirs great feelings inside of me. It shows me how the past gets extinguished and how such worlds are becoming harder and harder to be understood by present and certainly future generations. Language shows us our limits. If we don’t have words to define and describe all that there is or could be, we are not progressing as fast as we could or should.  

We should create a dictionary of imagination, to describe the uninvented. This bookkeeping of concepts, theories, and dreams will help us convert the imagined into the real. Many people thought of traveling to the stars many, many centuries, perhaps millennia, before we landed on the moon in 1969. In order to create something, we have to at least visualize its possibility. 

There will also come a time when what we visualize comes true and then unimagined offshoots or combinations of offshoots will then yield even more inventions, each bringing in a tidal wave of new behaviors, beliefs, and activities, all of them needing a word to describe them. 

Perhaps the best inventions and discoveries come by accident, from miscalculations, and from outright failure of some other intended consequence. There should be a word to describe that. 

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About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2024. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent.  This award-winning blog has generated over 3.9 million pageviews. With 5,000+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and director of publicity positions at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.