Daily Archive for November 22nd, 2007

one of my former london based orange colleagues posts occasionally to his journal – usually focusing on design topics. recently he reflected on some of his favourite words that were disappearing from common use in england. no surprise that many of the words that his misses are in full use here in nz. (the ones in bold red i hear or see most days.) it seems due to it’s isolation nz is serving a bit like a seed bank – but for language. once the uk has fully become usa-east they can send a ship to nz to and retrieve a few inhabitants to bring their language back from the brink.

A list of words that are disappearing from the English language, most of which will be dearly missed. I’ve been noticing language and word choice more as Tallis’ vocabulary grows.

• pram - they’re all strollers now
• hire car – rental car seems the fashion
• children – being replaced by use of the vapid “kids” instead
• serviette - now napkin
• panache – too 70′s by half
• nappy
• infant – once common over all school entraces for younger children, now defunct
• deliver – companies will ‘ship’ products, actually ‘delivering’ is too boring
• film – movies instead
• medley – those pesky 70′s again, though I did see a melon medley for sale in M&S last summer
• pushchair - wheelchair
• diary – now journal
• holiday – vacation
• cardigan – sadly dissapearing
• jumper - as above
• shop - I hear all shops quietly turned into stores at some point
• cake - maybe this one’s just me, I don’t hear it enough
• lorry – now truck
• lolly - the decline of this one is a real shame as it’s one of the English language’s finest words
• flat - as in “do you want to go back to my flat”
• moped - now scooter, though apparently a moped has pedals to distinguish it from a scooter
• torch - another great English word
• lamp – both this and torch are replaced by the mundane “flashlight”
• dislike – sadly the fashion is for the extreme ‘hate’ word instead.
• properly - being replaced by the more ponderous ‘correctly’ or lazy ‘right’ instead
• football – now this one’s odd and needs some explanation for its inclusion. Everyone *not* on television or in print calls the game of kicking a ball around ‘football’. It’s close to being a ‘world word’ in that it means the same to the majority of people in the world who have heard it. When written down in magazines and on television it seems to be increasingly called the weird and forced-sounding ‘soccer’. This one is particularly odd as a disappearing word as its usage or lack of seems to be transport-dependant.
• programmes - the ones on television at some point became ‘shows’