It’s high time to review some words in the “obsolete” pile to see if we should bring them back and start using them again.
Here’s a word we should resurrect: teterrimous. Back in the 1700s and 1800s when it was in use it meant “most foul”, as in “beware the teterrimous monster living in the basement of that spooky old house on Elm Street”. But come on, centuries ago they didn’t have computer graphics or armies of animators actually showing us teterrimous monsters any time we want — these days we need as many words for this stuff as we can find! So put teterrimous on the list of words to use whenever you can, baffling everyone you know, but maybe starting something viral.
On the other hand, here’s a word we can probably leave lying in the shallow grave it’s inhabited since the 1600s: “tragematopolist”. It sort of sounds like something to do with monsters, or as if it might have some relationship with theater arts, but in fact it was just a way, back in about 1615, to say “candy seller.” Since we seem to be getting along just fine by saying, for example, “candy seller”, we probably don’t need “tragematopolist”.
“Airgonaut”, though, we definitely need back. Those folks in the 1700s coined the term to mean “balloonist”, which was a novelty in those days. But now we’ve got balloons, blimps, airplanes, helicopters, parachutes, ultralights, even a few flying cars — all sorts of ways to travel through the air, so we need a generic term for all of them. “Airgonaut” would be perfect.
I’m not sure we need “dromograph” returned to the land of living language. A dromograph was some sort of contraption in the early 1800s that measured blood flow. I don’t even want to think about how they would have managed something like that in those days, so “dromograph” stays on the “still useless” pile.
A “dicaearchy” is a government that’s fair and just. Apparently somebody in the 1600s was optimistic (or deluded) enough to think there was such a thing, or at least could be. Now that we know better, we’re definitely not going to need this word.
But in these latter days we do find ourselves in need of the term “fallaciloquence,” which means “deceitful speech.” Or at least it did a few centuries ago. Although on second thought I’m not sure. My first idea was we could definitely use a word for “deceitful speech,” but I’m not sure we don’t already have such a word. Nowadays when we mean “deceitful speech” we probably just say “speech.”
