A Restless Language One of the delights – and occasional frustrations – of English is its protean quality, its limitless capacity to embrace and abandon words and usages. In 2011, an article in Science, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” (courtesy of Google), estimated that our lexicon grew by some 8,500 words per year between 1950 and 2000, though many of these additions will never make it into a dictionary. Even as words are born or employed in new ways, others wither from disuse, and what was familiar and acceptable to our grandparents may well be alien to us, and vice versa. Take the [...]