IV. _Dying Words_.

Our language is always suffering another kind of impoverishment which is
somewhat mysterious in its causes and perhaps impossible to prevent. This
is the kind of blight which attacks many of our most ancient, beautiful,
and expressive words, rendering them first of all unsuitable for
colloquial use, though they may be still used in prose. Next they are
driven out of the prose vocabulary into that of poetry, and at last
removed into that limbo of archaisms and affectations to which so many
beautiful but dead words of our language have been unhappily banished. It
is not that these words lose their lustre, as many words lose it, by
hackneyed use and common handling; the process is exactly opposite; by not
being used enough, the phosphorescence of decay seems to attack them, and
give them a kind of shimmer which makes them seem too fine for common
occasions. But once a word falls out of colloquial speech its life is
threatened; it may linger on in literature, but its radiance, at first
perhaps brighter, will gradually diminish, and it must sooner or later
fade away, or live only as a conscious archaism. The fate of many
beautiful old words like _teen_ and _dole_ and _meed_ has thus been
decided; they are now practically lost to the language, and can probably
never be restored to common use.[2] It is, however, an interesting
question, and one worthy of the consideration of our members, whether it
may be possible, at its beginning, to stop this process of decay; whether
a word at the moment when it begins to seem too poetical, might not
perhaps be reclaimed for common speech by timely and not inappropriate
usage, and thus saved, before it is too late, from the blight of
over-expressiveness which will otherwise kill it in the end.