Only two weeks after Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced that he’d discovered books (which, he told his thunderstruck acolytes, “allow you to fully explore a topic… in a deeper way than most media today” – you don’t say), and a new campaign started in the US for “slow reading”, in which adherents visit a café together, silence their mobile phones and read together quietly for a whole hour, now academics at Wayne State University in Michigan have discovered that lots of “Dead Words” exist. Words that define things still relevant to modern life, sound pretty good but have fallen out of usage.
They have recommended that students investigate their “glorious variety” – and have offered a Top 10 of favourite “lost words” to be resurrected in 2015: caterwaul, concinnity, knavery, mélange, rapscallion, opsimath, obambulate, philistine, flapdoodle and subtopia.