thy thigh etc.

[Larry Trask]

--On Monday, May 21, 2001 2:50 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives
> in a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a
> language, others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

Debatable.  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
in spite of the best efforts of lexicographers to prune any items which
seem to have dropped out of use.  It seems that very many of the new words
do not replace anything: 'geopathic', 'mogul' (in the skiing sense),
'cellphone', 'hahnium', and, of course, 'tzatziki'.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)