Literary World
Stunned By Claims That Thousands Of English Words
Have Gone Missing
The world of literature has
been stunned by allegations that massive numbers
of words have simply gone missing from the
English language.
‘In the 1960s we
believe there to have been at least one million
English words,’ said a spokesman for the
Queen’s English Society.
‘Dictionaries that are currently available,
however, list just a few hundred. It would appear
that words may have been systematically removed,
year by year, and copies of earlier dictionaries
destroyed.’
The UK government has
strongly denied that they have been part of any
conspiracy. ‘As people get older, their
memories are not so reliable,’ said a
government spokesman. ‘It is completely
ridiculous to suggest that any language could
ever have had a million words in it. That would
represent more than ten different words for every
six hundred men, women and children in this
country. Ask any younger person,' he continued, 'and
he or she will tell you that the same ten words
are more than adequate to equip everyone for life,
twelve if you count "dunno" and "innit".'
‘Language is vital for
the process of reasoning,’ countered a
spokesman for one of the groups campaigning for
the alleged word loss to be investigated.
‘We believe that successive governments have
been complicit in reducing the vocabulary of the
public to prevent them thinking too hard about
controversial political decisions.’
Activists allege that the
systematic removal of words has been obscured by
educational policies that have kept young people
unaware of the previous depth and diversity of
the English language. They claim that teaching of
English in schools has deliberately left those
under fifty years of age unable to correctly
spell any of the words in their own vocabularies
and so has prevented them from noticing when
other words have gone missing.
They argue that English
educational policy since the 1970s has not been,
as previously thought, a product of breathtaking
ineptitude and incompetence; instead, that it has
been a deliberate and cynical plot to control the
minds of the people.
Conspiracy theorists have
pointed to unfamiliar words being accidentally
used by politicians as evidence that more English
words exist than are officially recognised. They
conclude that these words must have been drawn
from a secret source, not available to the
general public.
‘There are no secret
sources of words,’ confirmed the Prime
Minister to the BBC. ‘After all, there was
no literature to speak of before the 1970s. All
the fantasy about the existence of earlier
writers that the conspiracy theorists talk about,
such as this fictitious William Shakespeare, is
just a figment of somebody’s imagination
that has been blown out of all proportion by
repetition on the Internet.’
A difficulty encountered by
such complainants, and indeed political activists
pursuing any issue, has been in finding adequate
language with which to state their cases.
‘For example,’ said the spokesman for the
Queen’s English Society, ‘there
are no specific English words for things that
might be done by the state to help the poor, and
there are no grammatical structures to describe
“discordantia cum regimen”, as they say
in Latin.'
The UK government has
continued to try to allay fears about the alleged
disposal of words. ‘If anyone should
discover an old dictionary,’ concluded the
Prime Minister, ‘then biblioclasm can be
assured.’
Whilst this, of course,
sounds reassuring, no one is quite sure what
“biblioclasm” means.
|
