re: Discussing the Writing Challenges -- July & August
Actually, that gap, the knowledge that the right word exists, that I have met it and been introduced even if we were not intimate friends, and now there is a word-shaped gap in my vocabulary I'm forced to fill with a grovelling subordinate phrase, has been occurring quite a bit before Cul started his culling of the dictionaries.
Somebody else has, for some time, been imprisoning words, dragging them out of circulation and into durance vile, where they appear, lonely and unloved, on nothing more comprehensible than legal documents and contracts.
Our most valuable commodity, the ability to communicate, is being diluted and devalued. Soon the once proud English language will have no more synonyms than French, or Spanish. Already, in the poorer quarters, every third word which is not an obscenity unsuitable for a family-friendly forum is "innit".
Free the seventy five (and lock up "innit" while you're there).
*(And if anyone thinks it would be amusing to choose "innit" as a word that must be incorporated into the next challenge I propose the reintroduction of the ducking stool.)*
I see Twitter are pushing "drabbles", a similar theory if less exacting, with a hundred words.
