A few days ago we brought you the news that a few (terrible) words will be added to the Oxford dictionary, and now it seems that a few others are getting squeezed out.
Researchers have a found that, as we all know, language is changing, and a few words are falling out of regular use, only to be replaced by new and different ones. Having listened to a whole pile of recorded conversations, they found that we have moved beyond the need for words like 'cheerio' or 'pussycat', as people are not using them all that often.
According to The Telegraph, the project, called the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, is still in its pilot phase but has already produced these findings, with a whole list of other words that have been on the decline too including 'marvellous', 'fortnight' and 'catalogue'.
Worryingly, 'marmalade' is also on the decline, which hopefully isn't suggesting that there is some short of terrible shortage of the delicious stuff, but either way, those words are being forced out and there are plenty of words on the increase, which the corpus argues reflect the Americanisation of the spoken language.
Words such as 'awesome', and 'essentially' are on the up, while anything to do with new technology is also being used more often, including 'Facebook', 'smartphone' and 'Google'. The word 'treadmill' is also apparently being used more often, so maybe we're all getting our workouts in every day too.
The last time a project of this scale was carried out in Britain was the 1990s, so Prof Tony McEnery, from the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University has hoped that people will send mp3 files of their conversations in for analysis, presumably about everyday stuff so it's as typical as possible of how you speak. We're sending in our recent conversation with our friends about Foucault and the philosophical works of Hegel, of course...
Via The Telegraph. Main pic via Dave Worley on Flickr
