Friday, February 09, 2007

rindle

rindle - noun - a small water course or gutter

Today, I start a series of words from Charles MacKay's Lost Beauties of the English Language which I find fascinating. MacKay generated his own short list of words in a rudimentary dictionary which was sold in the 1870's. He had a rather pedantic view that a nation's barbarous language was an indication of the barbarousness of the nation as a whole, and he set about to change that. His dictionary was, perhaps in his view, a call to return to some of the less used, but beautiful words of the English language.

1 comment:

Jack said...

I can't find the book on Amazon, and the idea that the OKC library would have a copy is laughable, but it sounds like he's the author of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (1841), which also sounds interesting. I will search high and low for a copy of "Lost Beauties." (I wonder what he would think of today's spoken English?)