Give Needy Words a Holiday Home

If you speak English, you know that the English language is full of words—words like pulchritudinous, or mollycoddle, or dudgeon—that don't get a whole lot of use. Oh, sure, you might grab one from the thesaurus when you're trying to describe the awesome awesomeness of an awesome thing without necessarily using the word "awesome," or use one in a game of "Balderdash," but mostly, they sit alone and untouched in the annals of the Merriam-Webster, slowly wasting away out of disuse.

But while this sad state of affairs is a tragedy all its own, when a word really falls out of favor, something horrible happens:

It gets evicted. From the dictionary. FOREVER.

This horror must be stopped!

Fortunately, the word-loving folks at the Oxford English Dictionary have now made it possible for you to not only keep alive all the words that are at risk of winking out of existence, but to adopt them. Just in time for the holiday season! Visit the Save the Words website, and you can personally adopt thousands of endangered words (which anxiously shout at you to "Pick me! Pick me!" when you roll your cursor over them.)

So we quaeritate you: what are you waiting for? Don't let pigritude get the better of you! Eschew vappous language, and obarmate yourself against the novaturient phlyarologists who'd kill these noble words! Or we'll be forced to do something mochli—like pelting you with a mixture of lardlets and urette.

And nobody wants that.

Which word are you going to adopt?

Related post: Syzygy: Why the English Language Is Awesome!