Little lists for word lovers

In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’.

In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’. The metaphor was taken from the street in Soho, later occupied by the film industry, once the place for dealers in antique, or imitation-antique furniture. Among Fowler’s examples of Wardour Street English were anent, aplenty, forebears, perchance and well-nigh.

‘As always,’ boasts the preface to the new edition of The Chambers Dictionary, ‘we have resisted the temptation to discard rare, literary and historical words; in fact we have gone out of our way to celebrate these and other intriguing or charming words by highlighting them on the page.’ Well, one woman’s charming is another woman’s twee, not to say kitsch. Which of these highlighted words would you care to pick up from the dealers’ stalls? Urchin-shows, grum, rantipole, had-I-wist, Newgate fringe, fogle, thunder-plump. If you took them all aboard, you’d be in danger of sounding like a novel by Jeffrey Farnol.

Chambers (the apostrophe having being discarded in 1972, the year after decimal currency came in) has developed a queasy notion that it appeals to ‘Word Lovers’. ‘At Chambers, words are our passion,’ it declares, unafraid of cliché:

Our awareness that our love of language is matched by that of our users also motivated an exquisite new  supplement, The Word Lover’s Miscellany, which truly celebrates words and the word lover’s dictionary.