from page 112 of a mid-ninth century manuscript of Priscian’s Institutes of Grammar; at the top of this page is a poem written by an Irish monk. Source.

“After all, archaisms are not essential. You don’t have to know how to use the subjunctive in order to be a wizard. You don’t have to talk like Henry the Fifth to be a hero.* Caution, however, is needed. Great caution. Consider: Did Henry the Fifth of England really speak like Shakespeare’s Henry? Did the real Achilles use hexameters? Would the real Beowulf please stand up and alliterate? We are not discussing history, but heroic fantasy. We are discussing a modern descendant of the epic. *Note (1989). I’m more certain than ever of the second statement, but I think the preceding one is wrong. Wizards operate in the subjunctive mode.”

I sometimes have almost feared Language was done between us - if you grew too dear, except for breath, then words flowed softly in like some a shining secret, the Lode of which the miner dreams

– Emily Dickinson, I sometimes have, [to Otis P. Lord], n.d. [about 1880 (source)]

right inuff ma language is disgraceful ma maw tellt mi ma teacher tellt mi thi doactir tellt mi thi priest tellt mi ma boss tellt mi ma landlady in carrington street tellt mi thi lassie ah tried tay get aff way in 1969 tellt mi sum wee smout thit thoat ah hudny read chomsky tellt mi a calvinist communist thit thoat ah wuz revisionist tellt mi literati grimly kerryin thi burden a thi past tellt mi literati grimly kerryin thi burden a thi future tellt mi ma wife tellt mi jist-tay-get-inty-this-poem tellt mi ma wainz came hame fray school an tellt mi jist aboot ivry book ah oapnd tellt mi even thi introduction tay thi Scottish National Dictionary tellt mi ach well all livin language is sacred fuck thi lohta thim. (Tom Leonard, 1984)

Strangest of all these strangenesses, though, was the revelation in the week I finished the book, that its originating dream of a glossary of landscape-language so vast it might encompass the world had, almost, come true. That revelation came as a letter sent by a scholar of languages living in Qatar, and reading the letter made me feel as if I had stepped into a story by Borges or Calvino. For the last 15 years, he explained, he had been working on a global glossary of landscape terms. His name was Abdal Hamid Fitzwilliam-Hall, he had been born in Cyrenaica, now eastern Libya, had grown up among the kopjes and veldt of what was then Southern Rhodesia, and it was while studying Arabic, and walking the black lava fields (harrah) and granite domes (hadbah) of the Hejaz mountains in western Saudia Arabia, that he decided to begin gathering place words from the Arabic dialects, before they were swept away forever. But his task soon began to grip him with the force of an obsession, and he moved into neighbouring Semitic and African-Eurasian languages, then to the Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Nordic and Slavic language families, and then backwards in time to the first Sumerian cuneiform records of c3100 BCE. The entries for individual words grew, some to several pages in length, as a meshwork of cross-reference thrived between languages and usages. Topographically, he ranged from mountain tops to city forms. Linguistically, he worked through more than 140 languages, from Afrikaans to Zande. His hope, he said, was to show “that the land is layered in language as surely as the rocks are layered beneath its surface”. The work had become, he told me, so complex in its structures and so infinitely extendable in its concerns that he did not envisage completing it, only bringing it to a point of abandonment that might also be a point of publication. “The project has,” he said almost embarrassedly, “something of the fabulous about it.” Later, he emailed me as an attachment the section of the glossary covering those words beginning with the letter “b”. “I hope the file size can be accommodated,” he wrote. I double-clicked it. The document opened in Word, and I watched the page count tick up as my computer ascertained the extent of the text. The count hit 100 pages, then 200, then 300 … it settled at last on 343 pages. All those pages in 11-point font, just for “b”. Then I read the note preceding the first entry (“bā (Akkadian, jungbabylonisch lex.): water”): “This glossary is a work in progress. At the present time … it is some 3,500 pages long and contains around 50,000 separate terms or headwords.” I sat back in my seat, amazed and haunted by this extraordinary scholar, out there in the desert, gathering and patterning a work of words that might keep us from slipping off into abstract space.

• The verb enthuse from the noun enthusiasm, which was used as early as 1827 but STILL angers people? That’s just how language works, y’all, if you gon’ be mad about enthuse you can’t use the rest of these words. That’s just how it fuckin’ be.
• Singular pea from Middle English plural pease, which was originally singular and collective (like with “wheat” or “corn”).
• The word mix was originally in Middle English myxte which sounded like a past participle, even though it wasn’t.
• Chemist comes from alchemist, where the “al-” prefix is actually the Arabic definite article “the”. Full etymology is something like greek khuma, fluid, to khumeia, art of alloying metals, to Arabic al-kimiya, to early Latin alchimista, to Medieval Latin (al)chimista, to French chimiste, to Early Modern English chymist to our chemist of today. Of course, we still have the word alchemist but it means finding the ultimate panacea and eternal youth and making gold from, like, iron or something. I fucking love historical linguistics.
• The verb escalate from the noun escalator, which was a brand name made from the word escalade plus the suffix “-tor” as in “elevator” (originally the stress was supposed to be on CAL in es-CAL-a-tor, but you don’t always get what you want) and the word escalator was trademarked but rip you really don’t always get what you want. Oh, and then eventually escalate replaced escalade entirely, so, there’s that. (Another side note, the word wasn’t commonly used until its more metaphorical meaning came into play during the cold war)

• donate from donation
• edit from editor
• televise from television
• babysit from babysitter
• laze from lazy
• grovel from groveling
• surreal from surrealism
• back-formate from back-formation (how fucking meta is that, eh?)