I love using words that have grown almost completely redundant. You know, the ones the English language forgot to evolve in its own sick etymological-darwin method. These are words that just fell by the wayside as spoken word evolved and clear definition went the other way. It’s not like these words stand for anything anymore. They’re just there. Lying sad and puppy-eyed, asking to be used in some half-meaningful conversation. People haven’t really forgotten them. We happen upon them in some weird crevice of a memory where ages ago an Enid Blyton novel had implanted it with all the might of the three golliwogs.
Like ‘flabbergasted’. That’s just one of the words that sounds like it makes sense but if you ask most people, they’re simply too flabbergasted to answer. We all know what it means... but do we? Then we Google it, which kind of means we didn’t. No one knows where it came from. And it had nowhere to go towards. That doesn’t seem like latin to me. It just seems like a bunch of alphabets flabbergasted at finding themselves being taken seriously. It’s a word that’s dying. It never got the fair trial of an abbreviation. There is no #flbbrgsted.
It’s not just the long words though. There are a few short little quips that beg to be recalled, but aren’t because few would understand what a quip is. Which poses, what I still like to call; a conundrum. Or rather a word that just sounds made up. Of course you might try to solve this by pointing out synonyms. But that’s the point! Such phrases are synonyms for things we use every day yet we choose the many others and forget these rhinestones of vocabulary. These are just the bastard words of the 20th century. Except barely as precious and half as likely to survive without our help. As a collective whole we have decided to leave them behind and move on with our hash-tags and our ever growing urban dictionaries.
Yet every once in a while, these words just creep up on me and grab at my mental tongue, twisting it into shape. They arrive at these uncomfortable places in life where I’d least expect to run into them. There’s this awkward silence as these poor, neglected, uncared for ‘expressions’ find a way to be themselves. And it’s on my able voice that they hope to somehow leap into the limelight once again. So that someday they too can leave people flabbergasted at their utterance.
