"Ölüm diye bir şey yoktur. Doğada hiçbir şey ölmez. Her hüzünlü çürümüşlük kalıntısından, yaşamın yeni formları doğar."
#CharlesMackay
İskoç şair, yazar ve gazetecinin aramızdan ayrılışının 136. yılında saygıyla..
An n-Gram graph showing the popularity of the expression "fine fettle" from 1700 until today. It seems not to have existed at all until the very late 1800's, after MacKay had publicized the world.
Another #CharlesMacKay post! He was a 19th century Scottish writer, who, in 1879, wrote about a archaic words he urged other writers to revive. With most, this didn't happen, but we have words like blob, forthright, and forebear because of him.
"Fettle" was a […]
[Original post on mastodon.scot]
I wish it was my posts about the Scottish writer, Charles MacKay, retrieving obsolete words from obscurity and making them commonplace again, that was going viral, rather than the post about Instagram censoring an image on my daughter's account.
I think I'm going to go back and hashtag all […]
A Google nGram graph of the frequency of the word "forthright" in books. It was barely used prior to the early 20th century, but is now common. I can't be sure this was due to MacKay's promotion of the word, but there is a pattern where these long-obsolete words took off after he wrote about them. It's so common today we might have trouble believing that it had been extinct until a little over a century ago.
I'm beginning to have great respect for the Scottish writer, Charles MacKay, who in 1879 published a list of archaic words, encouraging writers to revive them. One of them was "forthright" (in the sense of straightforward). It's in Dr Johnson's dictionary as […]
[Original post on mastodon.scot]
Google nGram viewer graph, showing the historic frequency of the use of "foreword" in US publications. There's a handful of examples in the 1700's and 1800's, at which time it came and went. But after the late 1800's, when Charles MacKay publicized this word, it became massively popular, and has remained so.
I've been sharing examples of words that the Scottish writer, Charles MacKay, rescued from obscurity, asking authors (in 1879) to resurrect them. In some cases he was very successful.
Did you know that "foreword" was an archaic term before MacKay? Look at how […]
[Original post on mastodon.scot]
A Google ngram graph for glee club. It shows nothing until the late 1800's, at which point it became popular, and remained to to the present day, with notable peaks in usage around 1923 and 1942.
When I first heard of "glee clubs" I thought it meant people getting together to have fun (or make people happy) by singing. I didn't realize the "glee" was an old word for music itself. It dropped out of use in England in the 16th cent. but kept going in […]
[Original post on mastodon.scot]
A Google nGram graph for the word blob, from 1700 to the present day, showing it to have been rarely used until the 20th century. It rose steadily in popularity until about 1970, when the growth began to accelerate. Growth in its use has slowed in the last few years, but it is still being used more frequently.
Did you know that "blob" was once a little known, archaic and regional word. In 1879 a Scotsman called Charles MacKay wrote about a number of words like it, which he urged writers to resurrect. It seems he was successful.
