OED editor removed ‘foreign’ words

I just saw this interesting story about how a former OED editor outtook some words from the wordbook because they were ‘foreign’. It is worth reading the story, but you must keep a keen mind about it. For when they say ‘foreign’, they are referring to words that Roots English doesn’t really worry about: those which came in to describe local culture or animals, and some ‘Americanisms’. The former are good and welcome within their contexts, and the latter welcome everywhere. Yet by ‘foreign’ they don’t mean French, Latin and Greek words. That is, English borrowing from FLaG tongues is good, but from other tongues? Oh no, not good.

Foster a Word?

Save the Words would like you to foster a word so that it does not wholly die out. They have brought together a whole load of little–said words (along with a rather annoying interface) so that you can choose one and swear to say it as much as you can in your everyday life.

While this is a nice thought, I am struck by how many of them are FLaG words. I do not know why this is, and cannot choose between:

a) they don’t think not–FLaG words are worth saving, or

b) these words were so outside everyday speech in the first place that they were always bound to die out.

I’m going for the latter, and heartily recommend not fostering any of them. But if it is the former, what words should we save if we did something like this?

Visualizing English Word Origins

No sooner had I posted about word origins in popular songs, then an interesting post on how to visualize such origins came to my attention. It’s certainly a neat way to show how standard English is composed of words from many different languages, though it is a little basic. Well worth the read however.