With all the words at our disposal in all the world’s myriad languages, you’d think no one would ever be at a loss for words.
And yet so often we can’t find exactly the right word – what Gustave Flaubert prefrenchiously used to call le mot juste – to express exactly what we want to say.
Incidentally, Flaubert also said, “If you knew precisely what you wanted to say, you would say it well”, except of course he did not say precisely that because he said it in French.
The other problem with making oneself perfectly understood is that words frequently lose their old meanings and gain new ones.
A “loser”, in the 1300s, was a person who destroyed things. This is because “lost”, derived from the Old English losian, meant “to perish”.
In the 1500s, however, losers lost this destructive meaning and turned into people who had mislaid their keys, phones or spouses. And in 1955, loser become slang for a deadbeat, a failure, a dud, a cretin or an also-ran.
Following in the footsteps of losers, “lost” also mostly stopped applying to items that had perished or been destroyed. We still mean it this way when we say “all is lost”, and it is sometimes still used as a synonym for dead, but most of the time we live in hope that what is lost might be found. Otherwise there would be no posters about missing budgies stapled to trees.
One thing that leaves me at a loss is the idea of a “lost and found” department. You don’t find as many of these in stores and stations as you used to – possibly because of neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, although I suspect it might have more to do with people having lost the desire to return other people’s belongings – but even when they were everywhere, the name of these arcane back rooms stuffed with umbrellas and hedgehogs and wigs and strollers and hair elastics did not make sense.
Once it has been found, an umbrella is no longer lost. So the place where goods are stored while they wait for their owners to claim them should really be called the “formerly lost” department. Or just “found”.
One can understand such arcane words dropping out of use. What should worry us, however, is when their common cousins are threatened with extinction.
Pedants may point out that the item has been lost by one person and found by another, but I still think these roles should be separated, the way they used to be in the classified sections of community newspapers.
I loved those pages. Sometimes an orange budgie would be listed as missing by its owner under the “lost” heading, and in the next column, under “found”, there would be a number for the person who captured an orange budgie as it tried to steal their strawberries.
I was always tempted to phone both parties in case they missed the paper that day. I’m sure many people actually did this. It was a joyful thing to happen. Life was simpler then.
Getting back to loss, while browsing the web for lost friends and purveyors of hair elastics (I have lost all mine, although I know if my cats could speak they’d tell me where to find them; I suspect there may be a few dozen under the fridge), I accidentally found a site called The Phrontistery, which is a vitrine for lost words.
A vitrine is a glass case in which objects of beauty are displayed, as anyone who has read The Hare with Amber Eyes will know, because Edmund de Waal uses it on what feels like every second page.
A phrontistery, which is not in De Waal’s book, is a thinking place, or rather a place where one goes to think, since most places cannot actually think for themselves.
The people who established this place of thought have crawled under fridges and through chicken coops to find lost words, some of which really deserve to be found and brought back into the fold.
There is “alabandical” (stupefied and made barbarous from drink), “colaphize” (to beat or buffet), “gleimous" (slimy with phlegm), “irredivivous” (unable to be revived), “oporopolist” (a fruit seller), “rogitate” (to ask frequently, as in “we there yet?”) and many more.
One can understand such arcane words dropping out of use. What should worry us, however, is when their common cousins are threatened with extinction.
“To be” and “to have” are the twin pillars upon which all languages are built, but in English the word “are” appears to be losing ground.
Check your messaging apps and I am prepared to bet you enough libations to make you alabandical that you will find “how you?”, “where you?”, “how you doing?” or “you coming?” somewhere in the mix. You might also find “we having drinks” or “we going to dinner” or “they on way”.
This loss of “are” was not spawned by social media. It started with telegrams, in which senders had to pay for each word wired.
Two things to note here:
(a) I do not remember telegrams. I may be old enough to have shed a tear over lost and found columns (which also charged by the word, by the way) but I’m not that old;
(b) “Wired” did not mean then what it means today.
There’s a famous story about saving money on wired words. A reporter once wired an economical question to the agent of Cary Grant, who remained the suave prince of Hollywood for almost as long as his spiritual successor George Clooney has.
The telegram read: “How old Cary Grant?”
The actor, who happened to be present when this message arrived, wired back: “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”
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