Now whenever your friends reproach you, you can now have a brand new snarky reply at the ready: “I saved a word, what did you ever do?” will make all the (gender or genders of your choice here) come running for you!
As I was about to go to bed (you know, it’s not really “going to bed” if you don’t procrastinate for about 5 hours by checking your tumblr dashboard one last time and seeing what all your friends are blogging about. Oh, this strange new century!) I came across a very interesting story in a friend’s blog: several amazing and astonishing words are seemingly vanishing from English vocabulary. Thus, the Oxford University Press and the Oxford English Dictionary have come up with the idea of allowing people to adopt words, akin to adopting Bengal tigers to help them stay safe in the face of extinction. However, as saving English words simply requires us to use them more rather than having to donate money for campaigns and habitat conservation (for the time being) it’s free. Yes, you’ve read that right, dear reader: you may now adopt one word, free!
How do you do it? Well, here’s the catch: you have to use the word you pick. You read its definition, and then it’s your responsibility to feed its wordiness by using it in Scrabble games, saying it in tea parties to impress people, or using it in your NaNoWriMo novel. Or by tattooing it, which I don’t doubt someone, somewhere will do. At any rate, it may be a hard job, but someone’s got to do it.
So head on over to the website and adopt a word!
ps. A post on this will come soon, after I actually sleep after the 5 hours of lurking Tumblr.
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