Drat! Spiffing Old Words Dying Out - soz
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Cripes, you could be talking balderdash and a growing number of people won’t know what you are talking about.

Such words are dying out because of the popularity of shortened text message-style terms, a survey suggests.

Researchers found a significant decrease in the use of words which our parents and grandparents would have uttered on an almost daily basis.

Bally, laggard, rambunctious, verily, felicitations and spiffing were among other words they claimed would confuse the text generation.

Researchers questioned 2,000 adults to mark the launch of Planet Word, a book which tells the story of language from the earliest grunts to Twitter and beyond. Read on and comment » | Thursday, October 27, 2011

My comment:

Good grammar is dying out along with the old words. How many people know the difference between 'who' and 'whom'? How many people know the difference between 'I' and 'me'? Moreover, how often do we hear people saying 'less' when the should be saying 'fewer'? The general standard of language today is saddening, sometimes even alarming. Added to this, to the young, adjectives often just mean swear words! – © Mark

This comment appears here too.

German Language Adds 5,000 Words
BBC: Around 5,000 new words have been officially added to the German language - many of them from the English-speaking world.

The newcomers appear in the latest edition of the respected German dictionary, Duden.

Germans can now go to "eine After-Show-Party", as long as it is not "eine No-Go Area", and meet "das It Girl" - if she does not have "der Babyblues".

Fans of social networking can also "twittern", which means to Twitter.

The financial crisis has inspired many of the new entries in the 135,000-word dictionary.

'Kreditklemme'

Appearing for the first time are "Kreditklemme" (credit crunch), "Konjunkturpaket" (stimulus package) and "Abwrackpraemie" (car scrappage bonus).

The word "Ehrenmord" (honour killing) also makes it into the dictionary, which was published on Wednesday.

The German language is known for its extremely long compound nouns.

And the new edition includes a 23-letter example: "Vorratsdatenspeicherung", which means the saving of data relating to supplies.

The first Duden dictionary was produced in 1880 and consisted of just 27,000 words. [Source: BBC] | Wednesday, July 22, 2009