2020-08-14
10 分钟Our language is full of words which are hugely, hugely useful and which never really caught on.
Coming up on this special edition of Word Matters, useful words that have been lost in time.
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.
English has been around for about a thousand years, and in that span,
it has become a behemoth of a language,
with a current lexicon reasonably assessed at approaching or even exceeding a million words.
But what about the thousands of words it jettisoned along the way?
Next up, we're joined by our obscure word expert, Amon Shea,
who has some lost words you might want to dust off and throw into a conversation sometime.
People like to find that there is a word for something that they didn't know there was a word for.
And that's also great, but a lot of times you feel like people get stuck on words like philtrum,
the little groove above your lip, or ferrule, the little metal bit at the end of a pencil.
I always felt like there are words which are potentially,
I wouldn't say more useful, but potentially,
if you can believe it,
more interesting than the word for the little metal bit on the end of a pencil.
These are some of my favorite kind of useful slash useless words.
And I think top of that list is this word, which by the way,