![]() “I spend my days piling through books like The Language of American Popular Entertainment and pulling out words I find interesting,” he says. Since then, Jones has made it his mission to rescue unused expressions from extinction. “I got a big illustrated kids’ dictionary when I was eight or nine – I got it for Christmas off my grandparents – I just sat and read it cover to cover, like you would a normal book. “I’ve been obsessed with language ever since I was a kid,” he tells BBC Culture. For Jones, who blogs and tweets under the name Haggard Hawks, it has been a lifetime of word geekery. In September, academics in Britain uncovered 30 words ‘lost’ from the English language: researchers spent three months looking through old dictionaries to find them, in the hope they could bring the words back into modern conversations. While it offers titillation for the curious mind, it also serves a more noble purpose – retrieving words from languishing unread and unspoken. It has a different phrase for every day of the year (including 29 February) – with entries ranging from ‘ambilaevous’, or ‘equally clumsy in both hands’, to ‘stirrup-cup’, ‘one last drink before a departure’. Now, Paul Anthony Jones has compiled 366 ‘forgotten words’ in his new book The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities.
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