An Atrabilious Assessment

Greetings America.   I don't wish to sound atrabilious, but the English language is in crisis.  And that's official. 

Atrabilious?  That means melancholy or bad-tempered.  You know that and I know.  The problem is almost nobody else does. 

The English language is the richest laguage in the world, but our use of it is getting poorer and poorer.  The dictionaries may be getting fatter, but the vocabulary we use is shrinking.  William Shakespeare in his thirty-seven plays used a total of 35,000 different words.  

A middle-aged university graduate on the UK or the US would be expected to have a vocabulary of 15,000 words.  A recent survey of cell phone conversations between contemporary teenagers revealed that modern youth has a spoken vocabulary of just 500 words.  Something must be done.  And it is. 

The Oxford University Press, who publish England's largest and most reputable English dictionary, have decided to launch a campaign to get us all to improve our word power.  They have just published a list of 500 unusual words that they want us to learn to help us enrich our vocabulary.  Atrabilious is one of them.  Snollygoster is another.  That's a dishonest politician.  Guess what a gammerstang is?  A difficult woman.  And how about an angletwitch?  That's a worm used as bait in fishing.  All the words - from apocrisiary meaning a person chosen to give answers, through to zedonk, the offspring of a zebra and a donkey - are genuine, most have a long pedigree, and every one is designed to encourage us to relish our language and use it with more colour and imagination.  It's kenspeckle.  That means: It's obvious. 

There are those over here who tease your President about his way with words, saying that what he does to the English language already is enough to calamistrate - that means curl your hair.  Now the dictionary makers are calling on all role models - from the President downwards - to infiltrate their public pronouncements with interesting and challenging words and set an example to young people everywhere. 

By Gyles Brandreth