{"id":3892,"date":"2023-08-26T15:43:21","date_gmt":"2023-08-26T14:43:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clueclinic.com\/?p=3892"},"modified":"2023-08-26T15:43:21","modified_gmt":"2023-08-26T14:43:21","slug":"blog-post-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/2023\/08\/26\/blog-post-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Going, Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Like old soldiers, old words in the English language never die, their memory being preserved by dictionaries such as Chambers. The Big Red Book has a number of classifications for words which are not in common use, including &#8216;old&#8217; and &#8216;rare&#8217;, but the largest groups consist of those categorized as &#8216;archaic&#8217; or &#8216;obsolete&#8217;. There is, I think, general agreement that when such words appear in puzzles they need to be flagged by the setter, eg &#8216;old chestnut&#8217; for the obsolete term FAVEL.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There seems to be a tendency among setters to treat archaisms and obsoletisms identically, but let&#8217;s consider what the two classifications mean:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li><em>archaic<\/em>. Describes words which are &#8216;not absolutely obsolete but no longer in general use&#8217;; they will typically have been common at some point in the past, but that could have been a long time ago. Examples would be <em>immeritous<\/em> for &#8216;undeserving&#8217; and <em>mouldwarp <\/em>for a mole.<\/li>\n<li><em>obsolete<\/em>. Words classified as obsolete may once have been common but are now completely out of use. Among such words are <em>disembrangle<\/em> (&#8216;to free from dispute&#8217;) and <em>ellops<\/em>, a kind of sturgeon.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I recently saw the definition of a word shown by Chambers as &#8216;archaic&#8217; being qualified in a clue by &#8216;dead&#8217;. This seems wrong to me &#8211; terms indicating total absence from today&#8217;s language are fine for obsolete words, but archaic ones are still hanging on in there, so although &#8216;once&#8217; or &#8216;former&#8217; is fine for an archaic word (or an archaic sense of a word), I don&#8217;t think &#8216;dead&#8217; is valid. An &#8216;extinct sturgeon&#8217; could be ELLOPS, but a MOULDWARP surely isn&#8217;t an &#8216;extinct mole&#8217;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like old soldiers, old words in the English language never die, their memory being preserved by dictionaries such as Chambers. The Big Red Book has a number of classifications for words which are not&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":false,"span_bottom":false},"number_of_votes":0,"sum_votes":0},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3892"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3898,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions\/3898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}