On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Adam Heyman wrote: #Mark A Mandel wrote: #|| 2. The words introduced in the past four centuries have mostly been #|| highly technical words that most of us wouldn't even recognize, let #|| alone use. Lessee... pharyngealization, cytochrome, #|| intertextuality... well, maybe in THIS crowd, but not to the average #|| English speaker. # #Not all technical words are "highly" technical. Car, plane, radio, #radar, stereo, etc. are words that are not considered technical but #have been added to common parlance in the last century due to #certain technologies becoming common. I completely agree. That's why I said "highly technical" #Balanced against this addition must also be considered the words lost #due to technology gains. The profession of cooper, for example, is not #as important now as in Shakespeare's time and most people today would not #even know what a cooper did. Wainwright is another example of the same. I think I hit this in, was it point three? -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel