Perhaps you remember – but then again, maybe you don’t. After all, I am joining the reader in just now remembering that I write blog entries. In fact, I have become so infrequent in my endeavors to that effect as to make my writing a blog entry “from time to time” about the same as the President’s making a State of the Union address to Congress “from time to time” as specified by the Constitution. The only difference is that I can’t even get one half of my readers to get up and heartily cheer my hot air. In fact, if I were to elicit a stifled yawn, a la Harry Reid, I would consider my work here all but accomplished.
But I was in the midst of saying that perhaps you remember that, roughly around this time last year, I wrote an article whose subject concerned the unceremonious dismissal from our glorious mother tongue many words that have fallen into gross disuse. I have not recanted one word of this. Rather, I am so convinced of my rightness in the matter that I am bringing the subject back up and adding more words to the rather short list I compiled last time. I wouldn’t have had this idea but for the fact that I recently used one of the words that will be so honored today, and thus spurring my feeble mind into action.
Since the beginning is usually the best place to start, we shall now discuss the word that I recently used and to which I just referred as having been recently used by me.* That word is “eschew”. Some readers may think of this word as being an ancient form of our modern word “chew”, from which the “es” was dropped from the front after being weighed in the balance and found to be superfluous. For still others, it is a phonetic representation of the way they sneeze (this may be hard to believe, but I have heard sneezes that remind one of anything from a traffic accident to malfunctioning machinery). But I can guarantee you that no one outside of those who are fluent in King James English really knows what it means. “Eschew” is pronounced as it looks, and it means “to avoid or shun”. Since most of us usually say “avoid” or “shun” when we are trying to express this concept, I move that this word be eschewed and thrown out of the dictionary on account of its not being used at all anymore.
Another word of very dubious merit which I found on my random walk through the dictionary is “secern”. Just looking at the word confuses the reader, because it is hard to even guess what it might mean, even if you know how to pronounce it. It turns out that “secern” has a soft “c” and has an almost identical meaning with a word that sounds similar – “discern”. It means “to discriminate in thought” or “to distinguish”. I have never seen or heard the word used before I saw it in the dictionary, and since we already have a frequently-used word with a similar sound and meaning, I submit that “secern” is a candidate to be thrown out of our vocabulary.
Our third word in this second gallery of misfit words is “rathe”. I will give the dictionary credit in at least identifying this word as indeed archaic, which it must be since it is never used in our day. It has nothing to do with “wrath”; “rathe”r, it means “appearing or ripening early in the year”. My father loves to garden, and yet I have never heard him apply this term to any of his work with plants. I suppose this word has a use if one is to study very old literature, and I will admit that the dictionary’s admission that the word is archaic may be the one thing that could keep it in the dictionary on a technicality. Even so, such a technicality is slim support in my book.
“Flinders” is our next word. To some readers this may look like a British name, and to others it may resemble other words in sound, but I doubt many of us have used it or known it to be used. It means “small fragments or splinters”. I have to say that to my ear it is a very interesting word, and even a poetic-sounding one, and for that reason maybe it ought to be used more. But if not, let it fall into disuse and oblivion – for, after all, words are meant to be used, not to sit under glass as in a museum (where no one will ever look at them out of either interest or sympathy). And I find it more than a little interesting that a similar-sounding word, “Flanders”, was once used to identify a major European country or region. But even that has fallen into disuse in exchange for a different name – “Belgium”.
We have time for one more word, and that one is “younker”. It is not a phonetic representation of the German word “Junker”, although it could serve as that. Rather, it is a fairly old term for “young man” or “child”. It sounds almost like our word “youngster”, but I have never heard anyone use it. I find references to it in literature of the 19th century, but nothing extending into the 21st century, when we would prefer to say “kid”, “boy”, or even “lad” if we lived in the United Kingdom. It’s another very strange and interesting word that I didn’t even know existed, but it seems all that it is today is a curiosity, and worthy to be thrown out with the rest of our unused words.
And so, there you have it – Klatch and his kin have ridden again and now ride off into the sunset, to go wherever it is unused words go. I wonder if anybody uses them in that far-off land? Perhaps we’ll never know. And now, as is my custom, I shall try to used the unused words in this volume in one sentence – perhaps I can raise their public visibility a bit and in so doing save their reputation.
The younker secerned that, in consequence of his having picked the old lady’s rathe flowers, he should eschew the neighborhood at all costs, lest the old lady catch him and shake him to flinders.
*Author’s Note: It may here be objected by some nit-picky readers that it is an incorrect, unwieldy, inefficient, and (in my case) just plain cheesy use of language to use the passive voice in the manner in which it was just used by me. It would be replied by the author that this article is being written by said author (and him alone), and that the right is retained by him to use the language in any way that is seen fit by him.
