When you wrote your tome, Mr Webster,
so many years ago,
did you know where it would lead?
Why did you choose
to abandon spellings
that had served so well?
Was it a desire to distance your new world
from the old one?
Yet how mild are your changes,
how innocuous a dropped vowel
here and there,
compared to the subversion
taking place today;
when
truth means deception,
honorable means belligerent in denial,
patriotic means bigoted,
right means loudest.
Come back, Mr Webster,
we need a new idioticon.
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Author Notes
Today's word: idioticon (n.) a dictionary of a minority or geographically localised language.
My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.
Thanks for reading.
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