And Then A Wall...

Over at Head Rambles it seem the good Grandad is stuck in front of some concrete. This got me thinking, which is an accomplishment of some magnitude in itself, so well done you.

So, having been prompted to think, this eventually encouraged me to do some research. Hay, relax, research for me is typing a few words into Google, okay? Is this going anywhere or are we all trying to make sense of the same blank concrete wall?

Sorry, wot my research discovered is copied below. Why say ‘below’? Where else is it going to be?  Above? If it was above, you’d already have read {for read, read red} it, right? Hay, for heavens sake Foggy! Stay with the post damn it!
The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries.

Then it gets yet more interesting;
We have seen that the Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current use, whereas a vocabulary of just 3000 words provides coverage for around 95% of common texts. If you do the math, that's 1.75% of the total number of words in use!

So, see wot I’m getting at yet? Wot he and indeed we are facing isn’t a lack of ideas, it’s that we’re running out of new ways to arrange the few words at our disposal into new forms that both make sense, inform and/or amuse and – most importantly – haven’t previously been thusly arranged by someone else as when you think about it and think of all that has been written to date, we must be getting awful close to the limit that those few words can be newly arranged without hitting the golden age of ‘repeat’.

Okay, okay I’ll step away from the keyboard now... Hay, is that a new arrangement? No? Oh.

Quote;  Doug Larson.

“If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.”