Forgotten Words And What They Remember
Some words fall out of use not because they were wrong, but because we became too fast to notice what they described.
There is a Portuguese word, saudade, that survives because it names something we all feel: a longing for something that may never have existed. There are hundreds of such words in dead languages — precise, quiet, unrepeatable.
Take the Latin solivagant: one who wanders alone. Or the Ancient Greek eudaimonia: the flourishing of a life well-lived, not merely happiness. To retire these words is to retire the states they describe.
Vox Antiqua began as an attempt to hold a few of these words to the light again — not as trivia, but as instruments. A word is a small tool for noticing. When we lose the tool, we lose the noticing too.
— Madame Monsieur