Hospice for mortal words

This is a book about words that are on their way to the dictionary cemetery where they will be stamped with the labels ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’. Of course, unlike us, these dying words will achieve a kind of eternity through being permanently displayed in dictionaries, but the time will come when no living person possesses them as part of their actual speech. Ruth Wajnryb proposes that a hospice should be set up to provide sanctuary and comfort for these weary and largely forgotten lexical bits and pieces, a ‘hospice of fading words’.

Lexicographers, too, have tried to develop a way of dealing with words in this category. One short-lived idea was to label such words as ‘obsolescent’, in the sense ‘becoming obsolete’, but this was a bit of a mouthful, and in abbreviated forms the terms ‘obsolete’ and ‘obsolescent’ were likely to be indistinguishable. More recently, the label ‘dated’ has been introduced (for example, in the second edition of The Australian Oxford Dictionary [2004]) to ‘indicate a word no longer used by the majority of speakers, but still encountered occasionally, especially among the older generation’. Thus dictionaries have also begun to respond to this special category of words that have become outdated, old hat, anachronous, and demode, or, to go back to eighteenth-century nomenclature, ‘fogram’ and ‘trunk-hose’ (both used as adjectives as well as nouns).

The term ‘old hat’ is mentioned in chapter ten, ‘Hats’. Apart from baseball caps, akubras, and sun hats, we now live in a largely hatless world, and this change of fashion places pressure on the numerous phrases, such as ‘old hat’, that grew out of a world in which hats had everyday meaning. In the days when a woman would never dare take the tram or bus to go into the city to do the weekly shopping without wearing hat and gloves, the wearing of an old hat would certainly have been judged declasse. As hats go out of fashion, many of the literal and figurative phrases involving hats, such as ‘old hat’, are threatened with obsolescence and thence obsoleteness: ‘to buy a straw hat in winter’, ‘at the drop of a hat’, ‘Oh my hat!’, ‘throw one’s hat in the door’, ‘keep your hat on’.