A blogger after my own heart, Benjamin Zimmer, brother of Loom science writer Carl, today posted an item explaining why a recent statement that there are 986,120 words in the English language is patent garbage.

It’s an “absurd declaration” allegedly made by Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, according to Zimmer(B). One suspects that Payack was taking the piss, because he told a “credulous” New York Times reporter that this figure was reached “as of Jan. 26 at 10:59 a.m”.

It is, of course, a joke, a spoof, a wind-up, a bit of a laugh. There is no way one could determine the number of words in any spoken language, language is fluxional in the extreme, words often have several meanings, and what is a word anyway? What is meant by hot dog, hotdog, and hot-dog. Moreover, what is meant by dog, that has a noun and a verb meaning and as all good US politicians know, there is no noun that cannot be verbized!

Thanks Ben for a fascinating blog, I will doubtless revisitize at some point soon.