the caducity of words

the definitive oxford english dictionary lists 171,476 words in current usage. these do not include a plethora of inflections, derivative words, interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, or for that matter, distinct senses of nouns and adjectives, and hyphenation... ah! the beloved hyphen, but let’s not even go there!

in trying to ascertain a final word count for the english language, there are all sorts of claimants of dubious legitimacy: 84 million chemical substances; at least a million species of insects; and numbers ~ are they words too, and if so, wouldn’t that take us pretty close to infinity?

then there are all those other languages that have so seditiously crept into our everyday parlance. all this morphing and mating means that etymologists (or do we call them linguistic anthropologists) can be kept busy trying to distill the DNA of the english language.

how many words does the average english-speaking person need, or actually use, in life? how do we organize our wordbanks? like luxe stores, are there elegantly sumptuous words used exclusively for pick-up-plays, but not necessary to navigate a fresh vegetable market?

what are the linguistic lines of communicative competence between a haute couture practitioner of style, a molecular bio-geneticist and a marketing person like myself when we interact in a variety of life (or death) situations? are there exclusive and common buckets of language which we can engage at an instant? what the synaptic threads that build our own personal lexica of life?

does a language have a saturation point beyond which it cannot grow? what happens then? is the expansion of language inorganic? who invents new words? is there a panel of wizards who vote on new entrants? do they have a period of probationary usage?

i have more questions than i can answer; it is my search for the disambiguation of the english language.

but just in case there is indeed a finite space for words, every now and again the language oracles issue a pink slip to the under-utilized. here is a list, from the collins dictionary people, of words soon to be expunged:

abstergent: cleansing or scouring
grestic: rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth
apodeictic: anquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
caducity: perishableness; senility
caliginosity: dimness; darkness
compossible: possible in coexistence with something else
embrangle: to confuse or entangle
exuviate: to shed (a skin or similar outer covering)
fatidical: prophetic
fubsy: short and stout; squat
griseous: streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey
malison: a curse
mansuetude: gentleness or mildness
muliebrity: the condition of being a woman
niddering: cowardly
nitid: bright: glistening
olid: foul-smelling
oppugnant: combative, antagonistic or contrary
periapt: a charm or amulet
recrement: waste matter; refuse; dross
roborant: tending to fortify or increase strength
skirr: a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
vaticinate: to foretell; prophesy
vilipend: to treat or regard with contempt