Ever since I was a child, I have collected words... and before you ask, yes, these days I collect dictionaries. Indeed, one of my favourite geek pastimes when I was still in single digits was doing the Word Power exercises in Reader’s Digest.
Finding the right nuance of a term is something we, as a nation, tend to let fall by the wayside: “knowing English” is enough.
Each year, incongruously, new words are coined in Maltese from the bastardisation process that is par for the course, mostly in the spoken word but increasingly in the Media... when perfectly serviceable words for the noun or verb would already have existed heretofore.
In order to compensate for the surreptitious theft of words that become the likes of tokxinja, tippuxxja, tikklajmba, tippostja and tiwwaqxxja, and ix-xuws, il-ħorsis, il-parijies, is-siżżers and it-tutbraxx, therefore, the people who are responsible for the compilation of English Language dictionaries have to include new words each year.
Some of these additions, be they words or terms, are jargon obtaining from esoteric fields; some are...
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