Ian McMillan: Join the fight to save the endangered wittol

I know: that’s not really news in a changing and shifting and scary world. It’s more Olds than News, I guess, more of an “and finally…” than a blaring headline.

On the other hand, it’s really sad when a word goes; it’s like when the last Gropious Beetle fades away under a stone in Upper Arkengarthdale because it can’t find a mate or the last Copse Daisy withers and dies in a shady copse somewhere near Thorne that’s just that bit too shady. I made the Gropious Beetle and the Copse Daisy up by the way, because in the end I love words more than I love beetles and daisies.

Ruth O’Donovan, a spokesperson from Collins Dictionaries, said: “When words get below a certain threshold we see them as being obsolete”.

That got me wondering about what the threshold was. I imagined the dictionary people sitting around in a room, surrounded by books and magazines and newspapers and printouts of blogs.

One of them looks up, takes off his glasses and says: “Well, I think we can declare that word obsolete!” Another dictionary person says: “Which word is that?”

The first dictionary person says: “I can’t tell you that, because if I do it’ll creep over the threshold again!” They laugh in their dictionary-people kind of way.

The words that have become extinct are a motley bunch; they include words that I’ve never used (until now) like “wittol” which is “a man who tolerates his wife’s infidelity” and “drysalter” a “dealer in certain chemical products and foods”.

However, there were other obsolete words that came as a bit of a surprise because I thought they were still floating about somewhere: “aerodrome”, for example, and “charabanc”.

I know an airport is where planes fly from, but I’m sure that little airport near Retford is also referred to as Gamston Aerodrome and I’m convinced that I heard an old bloke at a bus stop the other day turn to his mate and say: “What time’s that flipping charabanc coming?”

Although he may have said “chara”, which is an entirely different kettle of drysalt.

Having read about the words I decided to perform an act of revival, a linguistic kiss-of-life on some struggling syllables, by writing a sentence that contained as many of the words as possible, and here it is: “Fred the drysalter was a contented wittol who, every Tuesday, piloted his cyclogiro to the aerodrome which was where he kept his stauroscope.” Not bad, eh?

If you didn’t know, a cyclogiro is a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades (not, as some people have suggested, a dole cheque for unemployed Co-op delivery boys) and a stauroscope is an optical instrument for studying the crystal structure of minerals under polarised light. The thing is, now that those words have been printed in the Yorkshire Post they’re not extinct any more, are they? Welcome back, drysalter: we’ve missed you! I’ll let the dictionary people know right away!

There’s a serious point here, of course, which is that just because a word isn’t written down doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Like lots of people, I love reading the “As I was Saying” feature in the Yorkshire Post on a Saturday and for many of those words and phrases their appearance in the paper will have been the first time they’ve been printed.

I guess that’s why the spelling of lots of these words varies so hugely; if you never write something down then you never have to spell it, which again doesn’t mean that it’s not a real word.

This is real oral culture at work, folk-memories and proverbs and sayings and vivid descriptions that remain gloriously unofficial because they mainly only live between the lip and ear.

This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be collected and celebrated on a Saturday, of course, as long as the writing down doesn’t lead to fossilisation.

The other serious point is a kind of contrary one; as global warming makes us shed our cardigans earlier and earlier in the year and climate change makes us always put an umbrella in our briefcase and species after species of plants and animals begin to teeter on the brink of not being there any more, should we care about words? Well, I reckon we should.

Even though I’ve only just met the word “wittol”, I quite like it. It has the right sound someone who is a tolerant cuckold. It sounds a bit like “witterer” and a bit like “whisper” but because I’m having to use lots of words to describe one word means that “wittol” does its job.

So that’s our mission: no words extinct! Keep them all going! Mind you, I’ll have a bit of trouble with stauroscope. There’s not much polarized light in Darfield. Especially now the nights are drawing in.