We tend to be egocentric about words. If we don’t know a word we encounter, we suspect it isn’t really a word or maybe it’s a dead word. But old words never die; they just end up in the dictionary.
Writers have often given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to breathless words.
When the Oxford English Dictionary began to appear, Thomas Hardy—the English poet and novelist—found words said to be archaic or obsolete and stuck them into his literary works. Finally, James Murray, the editor of the OED, wrote him a letter and asked him not to do that. The one example of acoast (“ashore”) that Murray had found was from 1579; Hardy used it in a poem in 1898, so it wasn’t obsolete any more. This seemed to Murray not to be playing by the rules. But who made the rules, and who enforced them? Nobody.
It’s easier than ever to locate the first uses of words. So far, the earliest example of OK in the record is from March 1839. Lots of people have looked for earlier ones, but so far without success.
But how do we discover when words stop being used?
At last we have a way of getting evidence. At Brigham Young University, Mark Davies has created an on-line file of 450 million running words of American English from the 1810s to the 2000s. You can sign on to it, though after 10 searches he will ask you for information about yourself. After that, you can use it to your heart’s content.
Take the word galluses (“suspenders”). It first turns up in the 1880s and is in limited use right down to the present day. The high-water mark for galluses was in the 1920s, but there are only 50 examples in all that great body of American English.
How about serensified (“satisfied”): “I have had a sufficiency and am fully serensified,” says the diner pushing back from the table. Sounds like a blend of serene and satisfied, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t turn up in Davies’ big collection—though Google finds it in song lyrics from 2007. (Thirty years ago, Frederic Cassidy, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, used that very sentence at my dinner table. He related it to the fondness of Americans for high-sounding words like sockdolager, bodacious, and rambunctious.)
Twenty-three skidoo (“scram”) seems to be gasping for air.
It hasn’t been used lately, and I suspect anybody using it would suffer from a queer and puzzled look. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand” means just about the same thing, and I know someone who says that fairly regularly.
There is a mathematical model for the phenomenon we’re discussing: Zipf’s law. That law states that the rank of a word in a large body of text is inversely proportional to its frequency. Thus, the most frequent word in a large collection of English is the; the second most frequent is of; and the third most frequent is and. The occurs twice as often as of and three times as often as and, and so on.
Natural languages, including English, have distributions with very long tails. By far the most words will appear just once, and, if we enlarge the size of the text collection, more words will appear twice but even more will appear once.
The size of the English vocabulary is thus infinite. If Professor Davies’ collection doubled (or tripled) in size, the frequencies would follow Zipf’s law, and he would capture even more outliers.
Frumicate (“to put on airs”) probably came to New England with the Pilgrims, but we don’t have any evidence for it. How many words would we have to search to find it? And even if it never turned up, we couldn’t be sure that it never existed.
Contest: Can someone tell me the meaning of the rare word in this sentence:
I’m hoping to hire a frumberdling to rake my leaves.
Submit your answer in the comments section below.
Aaron Ohlrogge - 2003
frumberdling: a youth or adolescent
Professor Bailey: I was in your American English class in 2002. I’m now an ESL teacher. I always enjoy your columns in this publication.
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Carole Cooper - 1977
adolescent ?
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Barbara Beaton - 1981
I’ve got one at my house!
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Paula Greene - 1992
What fun! Took me a while but it appears your looking for a “youth” to rake those leaves although that was spelled “frumbyrdling”. But I believe what you would call the root is “fruma” and that could also be your first born? Does your first born know you want them to rake the yard?
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Monica Orians - 1979 SDSU
Frumberdling = the child of an honest, perhaps devoted, hardworking individual or an honest hardworking youth.
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Cara Wahl - 1976
Frumberdling- a poorly or shabby dressed child
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Steve Schwartz - 1969, 1974
I have no what “frumberdling” means. However, a charming article. Mr. Bailey, you write far too well for an academic.
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Joe Combi - 2001
frumberdling means a youth or young person
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Wystan Stevens - 1970
Re: “serensified.” After a hearty meal, my father (the late A. K. Stevens, another U-M English Professor) sometimes employed a similar saying for comic effect: “My sufficiency is amply solensified.” For years, I assumed he had made it up, or perhaps found it in a volume of erudite literary arcana, but when at last I quizzed him about the derivation of “solensified,” he admitted that it had been the catchphrase of a popular vaudeville comedian of his childhood. (Dad told me the comedian’s name, but I have forgotten it.)
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Jan D. Hodge - BA '63, MA '64
I’ve long had a love affair with words (my degrees are in English Lang & Lit) and writing, especially poetry. My recent collection of “anagram challenges”* includes this, relevant to your article:
NEW WORD FILE
His eyes scan quickly down the yellowed page
Hoping to find
A baffounding word, a pleasure at his age
When what he writes is mostly persiflage.
But never mind.
He’s mined these volumes like a truffling snout
Under an oak,
And most of them have long since been played out.
Still, one gem might be found that he can tout
In a masterstroke.
He smiles, recalling the time he first heard
‘Velleity,’
And thought how exquisitely apt a word
To be possessed of, deftly sepulchered
In an elegy.
But some, like refricate or fluckadrift,
Just fall away,
Never enliven a poem or give a lift
To a word-weary world, as forgotten a gift
As yesterday.
*The title of the poem must anagram a poet’s name, and the poem itself imitate the form of a poem by that poet–in this case Wilfred Owen, “The Send-Off.”
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Kevin Devine - 1980
Frumb – Anglo Saxon for “original” or “first” + Byrdling — Anglo Saxon for tortoise = “young turtle” however, I think the intended/evolved meaning is more like a young person “still under the parents’ roof” perhaps — a frumberling.
Or, more concisely, “frumberdling” or “frumberdlinges” means “youth” or “youths” according to the Bosworth and Toller Anglo Saxon dictionary — from “frum-byrd” meaning “birth or nativity.”
Best of luck getting a frumberdling to help with the leaf raking — If you’re in Ann Arbor and if you’re serious, I have two frumberdlings at home, ages 15 and 11, who are looking for some leaf raking and odd jobs, or as one might say in OE, onwrigenness iobs.
–Kevin Devine
kevinSdevine@gmail.com
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Austin Thomason
Regarding the quiz, I had to Google the word to find the meaning. Since I cheated, I won’t post the meaning. I did want to say, though, that I always save your article for last. It’s like dessert — the perfect finish to a good experience, and my favorite part. Keep up the great writing!
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Kevin Hawkins
Other good corpora for exploration are http://catalog.hathitrust.org/ , http://books.google.com/, and http://dfr.jstor.org/ .
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Carol Watwood - 1978 -- MLS
According to the OED, it’s a youth, from “first” plus “beard.” The frumberdling in my house would rather play video games than rake leaves.
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Jan D. Hodge - BA '63, MA '64
Oops! Since formatting lost in transmission, please pardon this repeat to show lineation. . . .
NEW WORD FILE // His eyes scan quickly down the yellowed page / Hoping to find / A baffounding word, a pleasure at his age / When what he writes is mostly persiflage. / But never mind. /// He’s mined these volumes like a truffling snout / Under an oak, / And most of them have long since been played out. / Still, one gem might be found that he can tout / In a masterstroke. /// He smiles, recalling the time he first heard / ‘Velleity,’ / And thought how exquisitely apt a word / To be possessed of, deftly sepulchered / In an elegy. /// But some, like refricate or fluckadrift, / Just fall away, / Never enliven a poem or give a lift / To a word-weary world, as forgotten a gift / As yesterday.
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Herbert Winter - MSE '50
I must take issue with your statement that the number of English words is infinite. With a finite number of letters (26) and presumably a maximum word length (say 50, or any number you may choose), the number of letter combinations is clearly finite, although very large.
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Dean Bellinger - 1964
Hopefully, no one works them into a swivet over this.
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edward weisberger - 1971 (MD)
Can it also mean first born?
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Michael Wallace - 1974
I love this. (It is) Fabulous stuff. So much of what we can pass on to others about our world is preserved in language. The words we use are our personal Mount Rushmore. They are the definition of who and what we, yet they also are the potential for bringing in the new. Our capacity for change is parked on almost every library shelf.
EG: A cruel man can learn to use kindness, but if the word did not exist, would he ever find it?
The tools to carve and shape the soul are usually found in Webster’s or the Oxford.
Words: our use of them carves out the nature of the person behind the utterance or inscription.
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Sandy Balkema - 1979 and 1984
Hi Dr Bailey! Hope you’re well. I read -and require my students to read- your columns regularly. Also talk about you and your classes incessantly (only a bit of an exaggeration). I’m still at Ferris-in my 27th year. Again, hope you’re well. -Sandy
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Michael O\\\'Connor - 1969
My Chief of Staff was known to say after finishing a large meal, \\\”my satiety has been serensified\\\”. I always found its redundancy and pretentiousness amusing, even though I was only assuming the meaning of serensified never being able to find it in a dictionary online or otherwise. Perhaps vague familiarity and mystery is one of the appeals of dead words.
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Anne Taib - 1982
A frumberdling is a youth who is just starting to get a beard showing the first signs of beard growth. Frum (first) berd(beard) ling (the one who is)
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Kathryn Neff
I used the words “sufficiently serensified” at a dinner party in San Francisco in 1966 when I was a freshman in college. My father had used the words on numerous occasions at dinner at home. Who was I to doubt my father? One of the dinner guests called me on it. He even brought out a dictionary. We couldn’t find the word, no matter how we spelled it. When I returned home at the end of the semester, I asked my father about the word. He told me he had made it up. My niece just sent me a copy of this article, 52 years later. Someone is vindicated but I’m not sure who.
Thanks,
Kathryn
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Deborah Holdship
Thanks for your note. What a great story!
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