Lexicon: A Love Story

Lexicon: A Love Story

On the words we’ve abandoned, the artifacts they live in, and what it means to love language in an age of reduction.

Artifacts of Alphabet

The other day, while helping my daughter with homework, she paused mid-sentence and asked, “What’s the word for when the leaves make that sound in the wind?”

Her question jolted me back to my childhood, to the custom shelf where three rows of encyclopedias stood, one for each letter, heavy with promise. They were artifacts of their time: brittle pages that breathed dust, gilt spines that caught the light like reliquaries, the alphabet itself broken into solemn volumes, A through Z, a cathedral of letters neatly arranged. I remembered pulling one down, not for schoolwork but for the quiet thrill of flipping through, running my index finger down the rows of definitions, never knowing which entry would catch my eye.

And there, lodged in memory as much as on those pages, was the word, “susurrus” – a murmur, a whisper, the sound of leaves in soft motion. She mouthed it tentatively, catching on the soft serpentine sibilants, and then repeated it until it seemed to belong to her. Watching her, I realized the word had been waiting all along, stored in paper and memory, but nearly absent from use.

Fossils in the Lexicon

A single word can feel like a fossil, an imprint of thought in linguistic amber. “Threnody,” once used for songs of lament, now lies buried in anthologies of verse. “Maugre,” an old preposition meaning “in spite of,” lingers only in the strata of early English poetry. We live among these absences, whole families of words lost to disuse.

Technology accelerates the extinction. A feed prefers brevity; a platform prefers compression. Acronyms collapse syntax; emojis stand in for nuance. Language no longer ambles; it sprints, and in sprinting, it leaves much behind.

Power in thy Tongue

This isn’t the first time English has shed its garments. By the nineteenth century, English had even coined the verb “to lexiconize”, meaning to turn something into a dictionary, a verb nobody has uttered in seriousness since. Orwell fretted about “Newspeak”, and though his fictional vocabulary has not arrived wholesale, the spirit of his concern, the contraction of thought through the contraction of words, feels prescient. Even The Economist recently lamented our shrinking vocabularies, warning that fewer words might mean fewer ideas.

The politics of language has always been a politics of power. When colonizers renamed places, they were not merely changing labels; they were overwriting the very grammar of belonging. When regimes restricted vocabularies, whether by decree or by pressure, they constrained what could be imagined. Every lost word, then, is not only an aesthetic absence but a political silence: a confiscation of possibility, a narrowing of the very field in which thought itself can act.

But there is a comedic side. Who now, outside of crossword puzzles, knows that “quidnunc” means a nosy gossiper? Or that “apricity” once meant the warmth of the sun in winter? Our language, it seems, suffers from collective amnesia, and we, its speakers, from a kind of selective ignorance.

Garden in the Graveyard

And yet, before we drape ourselves in mourning, language is not only a graveyard. It is also a garden. For every lost “threnody,” a new “doomscrolling” appears; for every vanished “maugre,” a fresh “mansplain” is coined. Words die, but others are born, sprouting from the collisions of technology, culture, and play.

This raises a tension: to love language, should we act as archivists, preserving its ruins? Or gardeners, welcoming its mutations? Perhaps both. The very act of loss teaches us something about vitality.

Not long ago, my daughter taught me a word herself. At six, she came home delighted with “omnomonopea”, her valiant version of onomatopoeia. The error made it truer somehow: a word about sound bending back into sound, as if the word itself were performing what it named. In that moment, inheritance reversed its flow. Language was not only handed down but handed back, alive again in her play.

Antithesis of Silence

Words are not neutral. They are vessels of thought, carrying not just definitions but possibilities. When “susurrus” disappears, so too does the invitation to notice the specific hush of wind in leaves. When “threnody” vanishes, mourning risks being flattened into mere “sadness.” Precision begets nuance; nuance begets imagination.

At the same time, the arrival of “ghosting” or “yeet” expands what we can say and how we can feel. Language thins and thickens, contracts and expands. To love it is not to fix it in amber but to stay alive to its motions, its susurrations.

I wonder what words my children will inherit, not just from books, but from the shifting currents of their own age. Will precision become luxury, nuance a relic? Or will they carve out new lexicons, carrying forward not just what we have preserved, but what they will invent? To love language is also to imagine its future, to believe that words not yet born may save us from silence.

Mutable Words

Later that evening, my daughter went out to the backyard and shouted, “Listen, it’s a susurrus!” The word was hers now, alive again, not because it was preserved in a book but because it had passed her lips.

Perhaps that is what loving language means: to keep saying the words we love, whether ancient or newborn, as though leaving a light on or tending a flame, in the hope that someone else will see them, speak them, and carry them forward, leaping from our lips to another’s, and living on.

This piece grew out of my love for words that have nearly vanished. What’s your favourite forgotten or rarely used word? Share it below, I’d love to see which ones you carry forward.