Background Music: Blossom Dearie, Someone to Watch Over Me
Last Visited: Yelp, Hacker New, reddit, and my Mail
Random Thought: I really need to live in London for at least three months; how hard would it be to make that happen this summer?
Mood: jet-laggey
Researchers at Reading University in England have come up with what they think the oldest words in the english language are; unsurprisingly, "I" leads the list, followed closely by "we," "two," and "three;" what can i say, our ancestors certainly found a way to distill what was important.
Yet as fascinating as this list is - the list of what we needed to say so badly language had to be invented - a line at the beginning of this article caught my eye more than the rest: the words we might loose first.
(Or, perhaps to be more correct, the next words we could loose from the language, as we have to have already lost a great deal of our earliest words, especially those that only existed before we discovered writing. Writing, which, as an act in itself is a pretty remarkable invention; our need to persist what we had to say was so great that we all agreed how to consistently, concisely, compactly describe what until then we had only said.)
So what are these words we're bound to loose? And how did they pull these particular words out of the ether? And for that matter, do we have any say about whether or not we want to loose these words? Personally, I'm not ready to let go of "squeeze;" and, while i know i over-use "bad," i'm not ready to let it go either. What is a gymnast to do other than "stick" her landing? And what are little boys dissecting a worm in the summer going to scream besides "eww, 'guts'!"
We have been trying to speak for tens of thousands of years and over that time words have entered and left our language as we migrated, met, experienced; words lost would not have registered or been recorded, they would have simply been washed away like writing in the sand when the wave came and went. For the first time, though, we as a civilization are able to identify and categorize what we stand to loose. I wonder if that will end up changing the outcome; maybe we'll be able to find a way to save those words from being erased from the sand.
Expression: 
