My best friend regularly uses words in common parlance that necessitate a trip to Merriam Webster. As you may know, I purchased three reproductions of dictionaries held in Thomas Jefferson's Monticello library as a means to understand how he means words. In "Pay it Forward", the teacher encourages the students to look up words they hear but do not know and inculcate them into their vocabulary. I would like to publicly thank Ms. Paula Naegle, one of my high school teachers, for her valiant efforts that helped ingrain words into me that rendered me more eloquent and helped elevate me over the din of vulgarity.
I was dismayed to learn this year that the Oxford English Dictionary has included or mentioned the inclusion of so much slang in its new edition. Like other common commercial concerns, it has become interested more with sales of books or access to online versions than with preservation of the language per se, and risks rendering itself a useless resource for those interested in and acquainted with actual scholarship. As a follow on to an article I published earlier this year, I write this petition to the OED.
Dear Sir or Madame:
About an hour ago, my friend shared a word with me that I did not know. The talents imparted to me by Ms. Naegle and subsequently gleaned from voluminous reading of antiquated books empowered me to guess at its meaning but in so doing created a situation where I coined a new word. My friend typed 'skillfulhedron', which means to be artistic in the sense of many facets. I asked him, "Is that like a paragon, talentially speaking?"
'Talentially' is, thus far at least, not a word. It is, however, grammatically correct. Unlike the 'ish' constructs of the more common vulgate, or terms like 'chillax', which made the OED this year, 'talentially' is consistent with all the techniques of verbiage imparted to me from the days of my education in the parochial schools of my youth to the days I finally perused the tomes of Tennyson and Talmadge. Strictly speaking it seems less talentially evident to coin a word by the omission of parts of two separate and distinct ideas into a compound hybrid than to apply the rules as written in the creation of new albeit as yet heretofore unused adjectives and adverbs as seen in the words 'chillax' and 'talentially' respectively.
I am, I assure you sirs, no wordsmith. I do not intend to remake English. What I do intend is to fight for its correct application, accusations of the British against citizens of their former colonies notwithstanding. It has been a problem, apparently, generations in the making. Add a word to your tome that is actually a real word, not something cobbled together from fragments of fallen phraseology. Add 'talentially' to the OED. Thank you.
I was dismayed to learn this year that the Oxford English Dictionary has included or mentioned the inclusion of so much slang in its new edition. Like other common commercial concerns, it has become interested more with sales of books or access to online versions than with preservation of the language per se, and risks rendering itself a useless resource for those interested in and acquainted with actual scholarship. As a follow on to an article I published earlier this year, I write this petition to the OED.
Dear Sir or Madame:
About an hour ago, my friend shared a word with me that I did not know. The talents imparted to me by Ms. Naegle and subsequently gleaned from voluminous reading of antiquated books empowered me to guess at its meaning but in so doing created a situation where I coined a new word. My friend typed 'skillfulhedron', which means to be artistic in the sense of many facets. I asked him, "Is that like a paragon, talentially speaking?"
'Talentially' is, thus far at least, not a word. It is, however, grammatically correct. Unlike the 'ish' constructs of the more common vulgate, or terms like 'chillax', which made the OED this year, 'talentially' is consistent with all the techniques of verbiage imparted to me from the days of my education in the parochial schools of my youth to the days I finally perused the tomes of Tennyson and Talmadge. Strictly speaking it seems less talentially evident to coin a word by the omission of parts of two separate and distinct ideas into a compound hybrid than to apply the rules as written in the creation of new albeit as yet heretofore unused adjectives and adverbs as seen in the words 'chillax' and 'talentially' respectively.
I am, I assure you sirs, no wordsmith. I do not intend to remake English. What I do intend is to fight for its correct application, accusations of the British against citizens of their former colonies notwithstanding. It has been a problem, apparently, generations in the making. Add a word to your tome that is actually a real word, not something cobbled together from fragments of fallen phraseology. Add 'talentially' to the OED. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment