…still waiting for that ‘Author’s Call’ from the Oxford English Dictionary’s NEW WURDS department…
…I’m all for new WURDS coming into usage… the latest I see from an announcement from the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘selfie’… more a reflection of modern technology’s insinuation in modern life… coupled, it must be said, with the narcissistic practice of pointing one’s mobile telephone at one’s own physiognomy with the camera lens ‘live’ and, basically clicking one’s own clock… and just as a parenthetical point here, I think it should be called the ‘Oxford WURDS-Culled-From-Just-About-Every-Known-Language-On-The-Planet-Including-English Dictionary’… probably among the finest proponents of manipulation of the English tongue was the great Sir Winston Churchill, of whom it was quoted, ‘…he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle…’ …I’ve always liked trying to experiment with WURDS… at school, some of yeez may remember having to do ‘Composition’, known in the posher seats of learning as ‘Essay’ in English classes… my practice back then, which drove my teacher nuts, was to plunder the dictionary for a long, strange-sounding WURD, get its meaning, then contrive sentences around it… the more syllables the better… a kinda ‘never-mind-the-meaning-feel-the-length’ sort of thing…on one occasion I discovered ‘flounced’, duly imbedded it in the narrative and waited for acclaim from the tutor… no such luck… ‘…that WURD doesn’t exist,’ he declared and red-pencilled the passage… my first run-in with the editorial dictator syndrome… I hastened to show him the entry in the dictionary, alas, to no avail… he greeted that with a derisory snort and banished me to the trouble-makers section, never to be asked to show him my WURK again that semester… betcha Chuck Dickens and Billy Shakespeare weren’t treated like that in their educational cloisters… at moments like these, it’s good to remember that even the aforementioned linguistic genius, Sir Winnie, was regarded as the backward dunce of his class back then… fast forward to the present, and I find myself still ‘at it’… I like the ‘taste’, the ‘ring’, and the ‘sound’ of WURDS, and in my blog posts, often spell them as I think they should be spoken, as yeez can clearly see… it occurs to me, however, in the absence of that ‘Author’s Call’ from the New WURDS department of the O.E.D, I can only surmise that it is populated with direct descendants of that Luddite professor of English from my vocabuleric-inventive youth… a real scunner that, huh?… see yeez later…
