Writing Problems: Old Words and New Words

Dugan, Valentine, Niedecker, Williams, Lax, Volkman, Hikmet

Poems are made of words. It’s obvious, but it’s also easy to forget. A poem’s inflection, tension, and apprehension can be altered, too, depending on whether poets use old words or new words.

English is particularly porous and malleable, and there are new words being added every year. Some of the newest words (recently added to the dictionary) are:

• cakeage, n.—a fee charged by a restaurant to serve a cake brought from the outside

• digital nomad, n.—person who works remotely especially when having no permanent address

• greenwash v.—to make (something, a product, policy, or practice) appear to be more environmentally friendly than it really is

• petfluencer, n.—a person who gains a following on social media by posting entertaining images or videos of their pet

• rage farming, n.— intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media

• trauma dumping, n.—unsolicited sharing of trauma in an inappropriate setting or with people who are unprepared

Then, there are the old words. Some of our words are very old, from when language first developed. I thought it would be fun and interesting to look at poems that use the oldest words in English.

In 2013 a British research team used a statistical model, “which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic super-family that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 years ago.” These words are some of the longest lasting tools we have.