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by nomilk 1589 days ago
2 counter points:

1. Language needs to be somewhat homogenous. At an extreme, if the languages spoken by two academics are entirely heterogenous, they (literally) won't understand a word the other is saying!

2. I recently investigated why there were 300 (!!) words I did not know the meaning of in a single George Orwell novel. Google N-Gram Viewer shows around 60-80% of these words to have been in common usage in 1934 when the novel was written, but not in common usage for some decades now [1]. Using these words today would increase lexical diversity, but at the expense of communicative effectiveness!

[1] https://tinyurl.com/2p8ujk7e

2 comments

I'm surprised you were unfamiliar with words like "mauve", "wanton" or "sallow". These are fairly common in today's UK, but maybe less so in the US vernacular?

Jocosely is the only one I had a question over, until I realised it had the root "jocose".

It's because British people have such bad taste they still have mauve stuff. In French, the language it comes from, this color is synonymous with ugliness and the 60s hehe
Quick, someone make a 1934 version of Wordle!
I can hear the steampunk aesthetic from here.