A baffling news report appeared last week in the newspaper that I read while I was waiting for my husband to have his hair cut — long enough considering how little he still has. ‘Traditional British words are dying out, because text speak has become so popular, research has found,’ said the report.
Right, texters favour short words. So what are the words that are meant to be dying out? Cad, bogus, swell, smite and bally were among the top 20 given. They do not seem very long. A long word was included in the list: rambunctious. It can never have been very frequent, and is a mere variant of rumbustious, itself a variant of robustious, a word that I have never head anyone use.
The obvious point about rambunctious is that, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, it is ‘originally and chiefly US’.
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