I was told about a website where you can adopt a word. It sounded like a lovely idea.
I imagined a fusty, decrepit library with a host of lonely words, hangdog and underused, desperate to be voiced and brought back into common parlance.
It wasn’t exactly like that.
The website allows you to search for and select a word to adopt, or it offers words at random so that you might stumble across one that tickles your fancy. Of course, there are a lot of words to choose from; it wasn’t an easy choice. This is what I settled on:
Squiriferous: having the character or qualities of a squire
In context: The squiriferous youth squandered his inheritance with astonishing rapidity.
I’m not sure why I chose that one. Perhaps because, on first seeing the word, it conjured up images of cute, fluffy squirrels.
I should really stop visualizing things; it only seems to lead to disappointment.
Incidentally, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is celebrating its centenary this month by publishing a new edition containing such delightful new words as woot and mankini.
I wonder who will be willing to adopt mankini in years to come when it falls out of favour, passes out of the vernacular and joins the rest of the lost and lonely words waiting to be adopted?
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