Obsolescence

Text 5

Discuss the text in class.

Present a summary of the text.

Summarize each paragraph from the text in one or two sentences.

Use the vocabulary practiced in tasks 1 and 2 to make up short conversations on the subject.

Explain the meaning of the following words and word-combinations in English. Adduce examples of the corresponding phenomena.

Find the Russian equivalents for the following words and word-combinations. Use them in the sentences of your own.

Tasks

Deliberate; it is unlikely that they will survive as…; permanent additions, unidentified flying objects; necessarily used; appropriate; suspect; to form a memorable acronym; acronymic premeditation; the preceding examples show; successive words; a major source of additions to the vocabulary; especially popular; a multitude of governmental agencies; names too long to pronounce in full; to look forward to; a steady increase in their importance; shortening of a word; fraudulent; to alter; to imply; to refer to; in the course of; for example; a very learned man; in the spontaneous defense of; to acquire; occasionally.

Borrowing, deliberate creation, abbreviation, initialism, acronym, the acronymic pronunciation, the New Deal, morphemes, combining two or more morphemes or fragments of morphemes, synthetic processes, clipping, quacksalver, metanalysis, the original structure of the word, a fused compound, the reverse of the usual process of derivation.

3. Make your own list of key–units and topical vocabulary.

The disappearance of words is easy to observe because even today many are in the process of being lost. We may recognize such words when we see them (they are more often seen in writing than heard in speech) and even use them under certain special conditions, but they are clearly not part of our everyday vocabulary, having about them an air of poetry. Dictionaries use the labels obsolete or archaic for such words, for example, holt 'a wood' and palmer 'pilgrim,' neither of which is likely to be found in normal current use. Some archaic words survive in common use in fixed expressions or related forms. For example eke, once a verb 'to increase, lengthen' has survived in the expression to eke out.

Similarly, the obsolete couth 'known, familiar' sur­vives in uncouth, and sooth 'true, pleasing' has related forms in to soothe, soothing, and soothsayer. The verb wend is hardly in general use nowadays; when it does occur, it is usually in the alliterative formula to wend one's way. The noun strand 'seashore' (the noun meaning 'string' is altogether a different word) will have exotic or poetic overtones for most speakers, although the verb to strand and its participle stranded are prosaic enough. Words can be rare in one place and still much used in another. Shire 'county' and heath 'wasteland' are familiar to an Englishman, but to an American they are poetic words, distant in time and space from his humdrum world.

All of these words are obsolete or archaic in America, but there was a time when they were common, familiar words to the American's linguistic ancestor, as any reader of Chaucer can testify. Indeed, all the words we have just examined are found in the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales and were familiar everyday terms when Chaucer used them. There is, however, no need for us to go back to Chaucer for examples of obsolescence. There are those still living who can remember when nickelodeon was a word of everyday, or at least every-week, occurrence, and when the zoot suit was fashionable dress for movie stars. Other words, of course, have become completely obsolete, so that only those who have studied the history of English would even recog­nize them: gale 'sing,'fold 'the earth,' thrim 'power,' wanhope 'despair,' gnorn 'sad,' ellen 'valor,' and shathe 'enemy' are a few. Few present-day speakers think of nightingale as meaning 'night-singer' or recognize the 'enemy' in unscathed. It is a great pity that many words of this sort have disappeared from English. There is something darkly descriptive about wanhope, for ex­ample, and ellen is at least as courageous-sounding as the Franco-Latin valor.

From time to time obsolete words may be revived for special uses. Thus, when J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings writes about mathoms 'things with no use that one is nevertheless unwilling to part with' he has borrowed the name from Old English, where it meant 'treasure.' Similarly, the ores, monstrous antagonists of the Hobbit heroes, are to be found by name in the Old English poem Beowulf. Because Tolkien was an Anglo-Saxonist with a fondness for the old words, he resurrected some of them for the use of the inhabitants of Middle-earth. There are also less exotic revivals, when an obsolescent word is given new life. For instance, waistcoat went out of general use in the United States, being supplanted when a term was needed by the synonymous vest. Then, around 1950 there was a revival of waistcoat with the traditional pronunciation and sometimes even the spelling weskit. Cloth­iers apparently felt that the older word had tone, which the Babbittish vest lacked, although ironically the weskit form is unfashionable in England (the OED calls it "vulgar"), where the standard pronunciation is /weskot/. The American revival of the word waistcoat coincided with a revival of the gar­ment itself, thus demonstrating that both words and things are subject to the whims of fortune.

A word may become obsolete for either of two reasons: because the thing it names has passed from the scene (like nickelodeon and zoot suit) or because it has been replaced by some other word (like holt and wanhope ). There is, however, no great variety of processes involved in the death of words to match those found at their birth.

From birth through growth and changes to death, most words have a long life-history. Because words are borrowed by one language from another, the history of an individual word is not limited to a single tongue. As English-speakers, we will naturally be more interested in the development of words in our language, but we must not forget that many of them had a long history before they entered English and became naturalized. The etymology of a word is its life-history, the development it has undergone from its origin through its changing forms and meanings to its present state. Like many other facts about a word, its etymology can be found, at least briefly de­scribed, in most dictionaries, and it is to the dictionary, as the chief source of information about words, that we will next turn our attention.

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