So I stumbled across this number yesterday:
The GLM [Global Language Monitor] estimates that in the modern world a new word is created every 98 minutes (approximately 14.7 new words per day). Each year, an estimated 800 to 1,000 neologisms are added to English language dictionaries.
That’s a lot of words, and English is already admitted have the largest vocabulary by far of any language. Maybe because languages like French, German and Spanish only average 200 neologisms a year. So what effect does this have?
Well, according to the law of supply and demand, words inevitably lose their value. The invention of new words, pressed out like license plates in the prison shop, floods, cheapens language as a whole. It’s been said words are cheap. They’re getting cheaper.
It’s been estimated that there are a million words in English, though the American Heritage Dictionary lists only 350,000. Which makes for a huge chunk of words that are floating around in the ether and could blink out like phosgenes any second, never even recorded or cast away like old ichthyosaurs. Moreover, the number of words one needs to know to be fluent in English is estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000, so English can be thought of as the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. We’re only seeing the tip on our cruise.
And all those obsolete and unused words? They can be thought of as lost or undiscovered species in the Amazon rain forests, species which may hold miracle cures if we can only catalogue them before clear-cutting wipes them out.
So many words lost in the shuffle. And more, the weight of so many words must inevitably over-run the silences, which like rests in music, impart the language its form and power. Light a candle for St. Harold Pinter.
Now I know that English’s Latin-Saxon agglutination is considered one of its glories, the source of its agility. And its thievery of words from other languages like a mad mynah bird is looked on fondly. And a living language must grow or die, just like a cancer or any capitalist economy. I don’t want to take away English’s rizz,
Just…search the garden before you plant a new flower. And take a favorite word to dejeuner today, huh?