English’s Feminine Spin | Language Magazine
When English speakers think about “vocabulary,” we tend to think of words that were borrowed into the language from Latin or Greek or French—like the words vocabulary and language. So many new words from these foreign or ancient sources entered English that, by the mid-1500s, there was a backlash against them, and a movement arose to create words with Old English roots to displace Latin borrowings. For example, some writers used words like forespeache to mean “preface” and endsay for “conclusion.” A few of these are still with us; naysay was an artificial concoction invented during this period to provide
