Safire's word heaven

[Wendalyn Nichols]

'Obsolescent' is indeed the term, although few dictionaries make such nice
distinctions in their labeling--I suspect because it's easier to wait until
there's a consensus on a term being obsolete than it is to agree about its
relative obsolescence.



At 12:43 PM 4/23/02 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote:
>Last weekend (Sun., April 14) William Safire wrote in his column about
>words that are not completely out of use but are getting there, and
>lamented that no dictionary seems to have a label for this state. There
>is a word, though, that describes it exactly, "obsolescent", and I'm
>pretty sure I recall seeing that word, and in fact learning it, in its
>usage as a label in a dictionary, "Obsolesc." Does this ring any bells
>with anyone?
>
>-- Mark A. Mandel
>    Linguist at Large

Wendalyn Nichols
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