These Lovely “Fossil Words” Are Hiding in Plain Sight

Wend, kith, vim … shebang!

I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a distant past living tourist lives in the host homes they have somehow carved out of our alien present. These are the “fossil words,” obsolete and active all at once; common as dirt, but strange to the touch. If you saw one out alone at night, you’d recognize it as an interloper right away—they often wear their unbelonging openly—words like “wend,” “knell,” “druthers,” “eke,” and “dudgeon.” But they are adept at hiding in plain sight: “Wend your way.” “Death knell.” “If I had my druthers.” “Eke out a living.” “A state of high dudgeon.” And some are even better hidden, revealing their antediluvian sensibility only on close inspection—“point” in “in point of fact;” “needs” in “must needs;” “the” in “nonetheless,” “step” in “stepson.”

A rather marvelous but mostly forgotten 1901 book called Words & Their Ways in English Speech by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge is (as far as I can tell) the earliest text to describe these remarkable anachronisms as “fossils”:

Thus it often happens that a word which was one of a thousand, or a form which was universal, becomes isolated. Dissociated from its fellows, it ceases to…