Words, words, words

“Words, words, words,” Hamlet complains to Polonius about some dry text he has been reading. But while Hamlet might find words to be dull and incapable of expressing truth, Ian Crouch and Brad Leithauser, both writing on the New Yorker blog, find words to be endlessly fascinating.

Crouch, speculating about neologisms (the coining of words), argues,

If neologisms seem suddenly ubiquitous, perhaps this proliferation is the result of our current pace of life. If we are expected to multitask, then shouldn’t our language have to, too?

Leithauser, meanwhile, worries about words that exist past their usefulness or are otherwise abandoned:

Words become unusable for all sorts of reasons. Though “niggard” and “niggardly” have a rich pedigree running through Chaucer and Shakespeare and Browning, they’ve recently fallen out of currency as the result of being near-homonyms to a hateful epithet.