Acrasial diners should refrain from using sevidical language at a restaurant, lest their entrée arrive covered in a sinapistic sauce.
As archaic as that sentence might sound, all of those words are at present still contained in the Oxford Dictionary — but they may not be for much longer.
Oxford has created a website specifically to promote the use of old words slated for removal from the dictionary in an attempt to reinstate them into everyday conversation.
The site, savethewords.org, allows users to “adopt” a word or words and pledge to use them in conversation as often as possible.
The site is a large, interactive wall of words displayed in varying fonts and colors. Clicking on a word pulls up its definition, part of speech and a sentence using the word.
According to Oxford, hundreds of words are removed from the dictionary every year, many of which were once commonplace.
More than 90 percent of everything written today is done so using only the same 7,000 words, according to Oxford.
Although individual words often become unused and disappear from everyday speech over time, University linguistics professor Hugh Buckingham believes languages are rarely in life-threatening danger.
“As long as you’ve got one speaker you haven’t lost a language,” Buckingham said. “The only way you can lose a language is if the last person who knows it dies, and then does the language die or just the person?”
Language, Buckingham said, is an amorphous, fluid entity that is constantly evolving and changing, and the decisions about grammar and word usage are rarely made by academies or dictionaries.
Instead, young people often influence the evolution of language the most. Buckingham said he loves when his students use phrases and words in ways that are unfamiliar to him.
Buckingham remembered the first time he heard a student say “my bad” and had no idea what he was talking about.
Often, words get dissected or rearranged, rather than disappear completely, and return to everyday speech as new words, Buckingham said. Words can also undergo a process called conversion, where nothing about the word is changed except its grammatical category.
“The word ‘nasty’ used to be only an adjective, like in, ‘That’s a nasty thing to do,'” Buckingham said. “Now you can ‘do the nasty.’ Now it’s a noun.”
Despite new words and phrases gaining popularity and becoming part of the English language, the fight to preserve old words resonates with students.
Barbara Kelly, architecture freshman, particularly liked the word “maleolent,” an adjective that means “having a foul smell.”
“It’s very maleolent in Lockett,” Kelly said.
 
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Contact Andrew Price at [email protected]