I was driving around town a couple of days ago listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio (NPR) when my ears pricked up at an interview about a new website called Save the Words. Its purported goal is to save esoteric and obscure words that are gradually falling out of favour and being replaced by words like "bromance", which is towards the top of my personal list of words to hate. The project is a clever marketing ploy devised by an advertising agency hired to promote the print version of the Oxford English Dictionary, but don't necessarily let that dissuade you.
The Save the Words website claims that over 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words. The source of this estimate is not named, but the claim does not seem to be too outlandish if you look at an example of the 100 most commonly used words. That being said, I suspect that translators do tend to use more lexical variety than the common writer, as we are undeniably word artists. We play with words, find synonyms and change their form until we have the right combination. On a somewhat related note, I still believe that the best £50 I spent starting out as a translation student was to buy Roget's Thesaurus and the BBI Dictionary of English Combinations. I have those two books on my desk today and their tattered state and coffee marks bear witness to their use.
Anyway back to saving the words again. I decided to support the project for fun and registered with the website. I admit that I did not "adopt" the first word offered to me via the random selector. I wanted to find a word that I would have an opportunity to use on an intermittent basis. The words run the gamut from squiferous (characteristics of a gentleman) to mingent (discharging urine); I even ran across a word that I had used recently - recinerate - although this is hardly surprising given the field in which I specialise. In the end, I settled on ecstasiate, a verb meaning to go into ecstasy or to cause to become ecstatic. Feel free to go and visit and "adopt" your own word. You might be ecstasiated that you did.
Note: The image at the top of this post is a Wordle generated from this blog.
1 comments:
hey, just wanted to say that we adopted the same word. ecstasiate. I think it's such a beautiful word, the word itself ecstasiates me. my first choice was also squiferous, but then I found ecstasiate, and it just captivated me. funny story. :)
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