2020-09-16
9 分钟It would be nice to have a selection of obscure words which are kind of aggressively useless.
Coming up on this special edition of Word Matters, obscure words of the useless variety.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode,
Merriam-Webster editors explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Sometimes, a perfectly good word will, through no fault of its own, fall out of use.
Other times, a word gets tossed because it's a victim of its own specificity,
or because it doesn't actually do anything.
Today, we're joined by editor Amon Shea with some highly obscure and,
ultimately, rather useless words.
The other day,
we were talking about obscure words and how many people have this fascination with obscure words in English.
And we did an episode where we tried to bring to light some of the lesser known obscure words,
which might be useful in everyday life.
As we did that,
I also was thinking it would be nice to have a selection of obscure words which are kind of aggressively useless.
Words which have almost no likelihood of being applicable, we hope, in your everyday life.
Because they are beauties in and of themselves.
They serve no one purpose.
Words for word's sake.