New Words
Every decade a new volume of the Merriam-Websters Dictionary of the English Language is issued, complete with a list of new words added during the previous decade. This is almsot always greeted, when it is noticed at all, by surprise that the newest words are those used by the most economically active segment of our population. The decades of the rise of personal computer gave acceptance to words like 'nerd', 'geek' and the greatly misused 'hacker'. The Internet decade has finally brought acceptance of that ugly word 'blog'.

Our language is constantly adding and dropping words. Every language does. Without writing the process would take place much more rapidly, but without writing we wouldn't notice it happening. Individuals don't see their spoken language changing within their social group within their lifetime, even though it does. The change is too subtle for that.

How many words are there in a language? Your personal word set may run between 15,000 and 50,000 words, depending on your level of education and the amount of reading you do. There are, of course, people whose vocabularies are much greater than that, highly educated, well read people, but Joe Average will probably not have a really big collection of word tools. If you know multiple languages, the number of words you know in your primary language has probably increased due to contamination with new concepts.

But you use only a fraction of that total for most of your daily communications. When you encounter a new word, its meaning usually is clear, to some extent, from the context in which you heard it ... or you get feedback and it is explained to you. The process is automatic and unconscious. You don't catalog it, saying, "Okay, this is word number 50,273". You hardly notice that you've learned a new word. Forgetting an old word is even easier.

But people do catalog written words. Written words have a history, they leave footprints, they can be tracked back to the first time they were published. It may be necessary to determine their meanings from the context of that first use, by the roots of the word or by the way people have come to use it. Then some authority, often self-appointed, decides whether the word is legitimate or not.

My "Webster's Third New International Dictionary" is an old volume having 2,728 pages and defining 450,000 words, a large portion of the modern English language. It's a large, awkward, heavy tome, only to be resorted to when smaller, more streamlined dictionaries fail me. It is also rather old and battered. My most recent dictionary is the "Random House Webster's College Dictionary" which was discontinued because the German firm who acquired the rights was uncomfortable with a long term commitment to maintaining it. I also have specialized dictionaries, such as Eric Partridge's "Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English" which, unfortunately, is slanted more to British than American word use.

I find it enjoyable to prowl through these dusty word bins. You never know what kind of gem you'll run across. I even have a friend who makes his living playing with words, a most enjoyable manipulator of word and phrase and one of the world's most formidible punsters, Richard Lederer. Several of his books are in my collection and I sometimes listen to his radio program on KPBS radio on Sunday mornings.

Don't worry about the new words. If you are going to learn them it will happen so naturally you will hardly notice the process. If you don't learn them, well, that's tough. But you probably won't miss them. You'll just use several words you do know, like 'thingy' or 'whatzit', to talk around the situation, like all of us do at some time or another. That's probably where words like 'widget' or 'wicket' came from in the first place.