Vocabulation
April 25, 2006
The use or choice of words.
–William Craigie’s New English Dictionary, 1928
Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English Calendar offers this quote on language by Thomas Jefferson.
It is much to be wished that the publication of the county dialects of England should go on. It will restore to us our language in all shades of variation. It will incorporate into the present one all the riches of our ancient dialects; and what a store this will be may be seen by running the eye over the county glossaries and observing the words we have lost by abandonment and disuse, which in sound and sense are nothing inferior to nothing we have retained. When these local vocabularies are published and digested together into a single one, it is probable we shall not find a single word in Shakespeare which is not now in use in some counties in England.
What would TJ say about our present use of the language?
Dave, loving words, so he does.
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