Wednesday, September 25, 2013

A slumgullion of new words

Kate Manning, writing in the Times, offers a plea for reinvigorating your voice by resurrecting archaic words:

By perusing period novels, magazines, advice books, letters, medical texts and sermons, contemporary novelists can conjure up a fresh narrative voice not only out of the vocabulary of bygone days, but from the rhythms of speech, the values of an era. A 19th-century “swell” is not going to speak the “secret language of crime,” but will have his own “vocabulum,” one that will reflect a worldview. 

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