Some of them -- like peccable - are probably truly dead. But others, at least to me, seem obvious when pointed out. If I ran into "scrutable" or "wieldly" in a sensible context, I'm not sure I would realize they were archaic. A personal favourite "tractable" is still current but already seems to be fading away. Far more things remain intractable.
I have sometimes written a word, and then stared at it, and been unable to say whether I had invented it on the spot as a (hopefully) obvious form using regular patterns, or if I had seen it before and dredged it up. And maybe there is overlap there. Recollection is recreation in memory, and the irregular patterns beckon sometimes.
We see this elsewhere, besides adjectives. English has not used the strong conjugations of Old English in a thousand years for new verbs, generally. We retain hundreds of semi-irregular verbs from that. Sing, sang, sung. Sink, sank, sunk, sunken. Think, thought. Drag, drug, druggen/drawn. Some of these may not be current in your dialect anymore. I say dragged.
What's fun is when new verbs are invented, or when old verbs morph into new forms. "To sneak" is an old verb which was regularized in Middle English along with the rest. Sneak, sneaked. For about ~500 years things could only have sneaked. Then in the late 19th century in America we start hearing "snuck" as the past tense. That's now standard in my dialect and is creeping back into UK English, even. It's irresistible sometimes. "Thunk" was once the past form of to "to think" in some dialects. It is gone from nearly all for centuries now. That doesn't stop me from saying it once in a while for some reason; it just seems natural.
Kempt is also still used fairly regularly (even though my iPad seems to think it is not a real word)… usually used as ‘well kempt’, like a “well kempt yard”
I see this as "well kept", sometimes hyphenated. Google n-grams suggests "well kempt" drifted into popularity since 2000 or so, with insignificant use before that.
I was wondering what kind of usage "well kempt" had before 2000, and one of the examples in Google books is William Safire writing about writing, where he mentions "wellkempt" in Ulysses and says that in the 16th century, "kempt" divided into "ill kempt" and "well kempt".
It goes on to say that "a thousand years ago, couth meant 'known, familiar' and uncouth meant 'unknown, foreign, strange'...[c]outh faded out but was back-formed and born again".
There’s a fascinating idea in here about how software spellchecks will alter our language over time. A few software companies / spellcheck AI’s dictating what is right and what isn’t.
> Drag, drug, druggen/drawn. Some of these may not be current in your dialect anymore. I say dragged.
"Drawn" also only really feels right for the passive voice. For using "drawn" actively, the only thing that sounds remotely right is "I drew", but that sounds super strange compared to "I dragged", I'm not even sure I would have recognized the former as a usage of the verb "drag" before thinking about all this.
Draw is closely related to drag, and draft. Draft animals that draw are dragging, at last by the dictionary definitions, though it is a little archaic sounding. Draw is dragh. The written "gg" is sometimes reduced to "gh" in Middle English between two vowels of the same closeness. Similar to the "ch" sound of German. It sort of swallows it, or reduces it to a fricative. So draggan -> draghn -> drawn. But only in some dialects. A whole cluster of related words. Also in this series is drive, draft. For some reason, it's a tendency for f and gh next to a /t/ to swap out. They do sound pretty similar, I suppose. The British still spell draft as draught.
Old English has: dragan -- ic drage, he drægþ (dragth), ic drog/droh, he drog/droh. Dragende, gedragen.
Standard Modern English has: to drag -- I drag, he drags, I dragged, you dragged. Dragging, dragged.
Variant there's also: to drag -- I drag, he drags, I drug, he drugs. Dragging, drug/drawn/druggen.
> To sneak" is an old verb which was regularized in Middle English along with the rest. Sneak, sneaked. For about ~500 years things could only have sneaked. Then in the late 19th century in America we start hearing "snuck" as the past tense. That's now standard in my dialect and is creeping back into UK English, even. It's irresistible sometimes.
> If I ran into "scrutable" or "wieldly" in a sensible context, I'm not sure I would realize they were archaic.
Archaic or not, I think most of us would find it "out of place" or awkward. When's the last time you used scrutable or wieldy in conversation? We probably could figure out the meaning but I bet most of us would find it odd. Though if more people started using it, we'd quickly get used to it.
A sample: "It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array."
Dan Dennett once quipped the he would like to see "evitable" as a word, with a similar meaning to "avoidable", but without the connotation that it is a future that we wish to avoid.
Italian, Portuguese, French (and others) have basically the same word too. You can even see how "avoidable" comes from that cluster of words, something I never noticed until right now.
This article would be much better if it had some data and evidence. A quick check on google ngrams reveals that the phrase 'well kempt' surged in popularity after 2000, relative to the two previous centuries. 'Unkempt' is still far more popular, but 'kempt' has by no means disappeared.
On the other hand: "kempt" primarily survives as the fixed phrase "well kempt", and hasn't retained its original meaning as the past tense of "to comb".
I think a lot of that is because English borrowed (stole) lots of single words from other languages, but almost never the entire system of prefixes and suffixes that the word was part of. Languages that were more closed to foreign vocabulary, like French and German, are a lot more regular in this regard.
True, though many of the examples in the article, are from Old English using English derivations. Rue, ruth, ruthful, ruthless. The middle two have been so long forgotten Firefox gave them red squiggles. We rarely use some of the Old English suffixes and prefixes productively, retained mostly in fixed forms. Core Anglo-Saxon roots had a large space of valid, or possibly valid, words: wield, unwield, a-wield, wielder, unwieldy, wieldy, wieldingful, wieldingless, wieldingfulness, wieldinglessness, wieldinghood, unwieldinghood, a-wieldingful, a-wieldinglessness, and so on.
The Old English equivalent of unwieldinghood would be something like, the condition of being unarmed or unable to control something, and I bet it had the same emasculating subtext it implies to my modern English mind. Perhaps not and maybe it would come to mean something like demilitarization, if we had kept it. Either way, we do not know as it is a long dead language without the abundance of sources like with Latin to cast light on the finest shades of meaning. 'Wieldingfulness' would be a noun meaning an abundance of wielding, close to but distinct from strength, perhaps implying confidence, and something one hopes the army has. Or maybe the Supreme Court's judges would have wieldingfulness; we still wield the law today and it could have come to mean mental adroitness and intensity, as to wield was also about will, not just physically grasping. 'A-wieldinglessness' might be incompetency at taking up arms, or holding a leadership position, or responding to a challenge, and perhaps suggests... slow on the draw, clumsy, flailing about? I think. Who knows? They are not real words after all; though they could have been.
Gruntled started out referring to pigs, in particular the little grunting noises they made when they were content. Later when it was applied to people it came to mean discontent, because people don't generally grumble when they are happy. So the modern return to 'content' is actually sympatico with its original meaning
That site has the most appalling cookie dialogue I have seen. There is no generic 'disagree' and an unending list of sites to deal with individually. I decided to accept all and delete as I left the site, but even as I went to do so the number of cookies was racing upward until it seemed to stop at 165. Having removed them I tried revisiting the page and even as the cookie dialogue came up I found I already had 51 cookies - for what possible reason?
If the author is reading this: the dark pattern in having to go through a lot of trouble to reject tracking cookies steered me away from readinf the article.
I have sometimes written a word, and then stared at it, and been unable to say whether I had invented it on the spot as a (hopefully) obvious form using regular patterns, or if I had seen it before and dredged it up. And maybe there is overlap there. Recollection is recreation in memory, and the irregular patterns beckon sometimes.
We see this elsewhere, besides adjectives. English has not used the strong conjugations of Old English in a thousand years for new verbs, generally. We retain hundreds of semi-irregular verbs from that. Sing, sang, sung. Sink, sank, sunk, sunken. Think, thought. Drag, drug, druggen/drawn. Some of these may not be current in your dialect anymore. I say dragged.
What's fun is when new verbs are invented, or when old verbs morph into new forms. "To sneak" is an old verb which was regularized in Middle English along with the rest. Sneak, sneaked. For about ~500 years things could only have sneaked. Then in the late 19th century in America we start hearing "snuck" as the past tense. That's now standard in my dialect and is creeping back into UK English, even. It's irresistible sometimes. "Thunk" was once the past form of to "to think" in some dialects. It is gone from nearly all for centuries now. That doesn't stop me from saying it once in a while for some reason; it just seems natural.