Are you aware that there are words that are becoming orphans? It’s true. These are the words we don’t use anymore. They have been discarded, put out to pasture, made homeless, and (gasp) taken out of the dictionary.
If that bothers you, now you can do something about it – adopt a word. You can Save-a-Word from becoming extinct. Lisa at Minds Alive on the Shelves tipped me off to this about a month ago and I’ve been adopting words ever since. I have the certificates of ownership to prove it. (See below)
Here’s how you Save-The-Words: Go to SavetheWords.org. When you get there you will see a big collage of the orphaned words. Move your mouse over the collage and words will jump out at you. It’s their way of saying, “Pick me! Pick me!” Follow the simple directions and you too can have your own word(s). Actually, you can buy a t-shirt of the word if you like. The Save The Words group will send you an email with your certificate. The site is sponsored by Oxford Dictionary. [Update: The link above has been fixed. Thanks Stacy.]
The goal is to use your word in normal vocabulary. I’ve been practicing using mine. (yes, I have more than one.) Here are a couple of sentences using some of my adopted words:
This past week, in a succisive moment, I ran down to the ten-cent store. There was such a feeling of vacivity in the place I couldn’t stay. I’d promised to purchase something but was forced to tenorate it.
[succisive means spare/extra; vacivity means emptiness; tenorate means to break a promise.]
what a GREAT idea! I plan to check immediately check out this website
Great idea, Margot! I plan to do this one Wednesday when I haven’t found any words in my reading. By the way, I know why ten-cent store is becoming an orphan – what can you buy for ten cents these days?
Oh we were just reminiscing about ten cent stores (and then fighting about whether items in it had to be ten cents or could be more or less than that). But then happily we got off on the subject of milk boxes, a memory about which we were in perfect sync! Thanks for adopting such a fun word!
Heading over there now and I’ll let you know what I choose. Thanks for the heads up.
The link doesn’t work. It’s savethewords.org. I adopted Vacivity too
Fun!