I just used the word 'hence' in an email

[GoodGirlFaith]

AIBU to want to punch the air?

Pray tell me your favourite olden day words.

Pedants'

Sorry ;)

Also apropos of nothing

I don’t think it is being outdated as such, more that due to a lot of American content and tv, people are being exposed to word less and so don’t know/think to use it.

I am going to try to use sennight! Thanks for that

I could write one tomorrow pertinent to my work.

My concern regarding the focus on ouputs over outcomes has now been minuted thrice in our Team Meetings. In order to thrall the current obsessive focus on outputs to the detriment of considering any outcomes, and to enable the team to thrive through recognising and measuring the outcomes for our Service as apposed to just outputs, we should be looking to thwart this developing trend in our organisation.

I could happily send that on Monday morning to my manager😂

Shenanigans - reminds me of my irish grandmother. Skullduggery, capers and tricksy are also good. I have 3 boys and i work in a college, so there are plenty of occasions to make use of these words.

Oh, i love using jiggered as well. It can mean tired, but i also use it instead of fucked when in polite company.

Knocked up is great. I love using "tight" for meaning tipsy/drunk, i think i picked it up from a 1920s play, an inspector calls maybe? Or from jeeves and wooster - there's some great words in those books.

Is anyone else faced with a conundrum over all of this?

I am not Scottish but I like outwith too.

My 3 year old used to like to say 'how remiss!'

As in "whereabouts are you from"? Or "do you live hereabouts"? I didn't realise that was a Scottish thing, it's normal to me and I've never lived in Scotland.

Lummy

I told my 17 yo yesterday to close the living room door but not properly and he asked if I wanted it 'ajar' it's such a nice word that isn't used that often

In German you can use pingelig and I love that too.

My DH is very pernickety about things, so I use it quite often :)

Yes, I’d say that @Well1mBack’s colleague just didn’t know the term for some reason. It’s definitely widely used in England. Not just for ascertaining where someone lives or is from, but where they are currently, as in “do you know mixedpeel’s whereabouts today?”

If the colleague was in a London office I can imagine they may be perplexed - in that 'whereabouts' or even more so 'hereabouts', are relatively local. And workers could come from Norwich, Southampton, etc, for the day.

‘How so?’, to ask for clarification, is one of my favourites!

I remember MIL replacing some older fixtures in her house because they were, she said, “antediluvian” which is a lovely underused word!

It’s a really good word

Wow! Had to look that up , “before the biblical flood”. Impressive. My dad says “as old as Methuselah“ who lived to be 986 and “when Adam was a lad” to indicate the age of something.

Yes! I also look for opportunities to say
“very well”

Ooo I like that. Ergo I shall employ it henceforth!

This is a great thread, thanks OP!

@DramaAlpaca I am also WEDDED to an Oxford comma and get very annoyed when people take them out of stuff I've drafted.

Someone mentioned "whilst" - I use this loads and have a colleague who objects to it, and I can't remember why.

I use "former" and "latter" all the time, also "grateful for", as in "Dear X, grateful for your thoughts on the below".

Someone above mentioned that people had been confused by "counterintuitive", which is surely crazy! That's just a normal word!

Just to add another example, 'coterminous' (or co-terminous).

This does have a specific mathematical meaning but it also has a wider meaning.

However, in each case it does seem to be more of an "old timey" word.

The last time that I saw that word in print was in 2017. It was a judgment from the Court of Appeal in a divorce case.

The late Sir James Munby, then the President of the Family Division, opined (I'm sneakily borrowing that word from @beyondyuck ) that the then divorce law was wildly out of date and wasn't fit for purpose.

He said at paragraph 38 regarding the then current divorce law:

"...It is well known that many hold the view that this is not what the law should be, that times have moved on since 1969, and that the law is badly out-of-date, indeed antediluvian.

That may be, and those who hold such views may be right, but our judicial duty is clear. As Sir Gorell Barnes P said in Dodd v Dodd [1906] P 189, 206, our task is jus dicere non jus dare – to state the law, not to make the law."

Prepone (the meeting).

'Cos I likes it.