Take, for instance, the long-defunct activity called upknocking, the employment of the knocker up, who went house to house in the early morning hours of the nineteenth century to awaken his working-class clients before the advent of affordable alarm clocks. In my schooling, I found that teachers and historians, because of their socially prescribed curricular attention toward larger social concepts, often bypassed the smaller and more personal expressions of social custom and conduct, often leaving the novel as the best lens with which to view forgotten elements of everyday life.
Of particular interest to me have been the myriad elusive details of earlier times that tend to go unnoticed. Sensing the story that these archaisms had to tell, I began to compile a notebook of my favorites, and eventually developed the goal of organizing these gems into a form that would allow others to conveniently sample a diverse cross section of the best lexicographers without undue tedium. As I located more of this type of historical reference, I began to realize that, despite their undeniable dusty-dryness, these yellowed time capsules could provide intimate glimpses of the past, while charting the evolution of English.
But a few years later, I found renewed inspiration in Joseph Shipley's Dictionary of Early English, a work densely packed with intriguing vignettes of bygone eras. Coupled with my initial enchantment was a bit of discouragement brought on by the sheer volume of words that had changed surprisingly little over a century and a half. I still remember my first browse through one of these nineteenth-century lexicons, in which I failed to find a noteworthy entry for some time. Fortunately, before their quiet disappearance, many of these reflections of antiquity, the "remnants of history which casually escaped the shipwreck of time," to use a phrase of Francis Bacon, were recorded in a variety of published and unpublished writings, including dictionaries and glossaries. The English language, as the largest and most dynamic collection of words and phrases ever assembled, continues to expand, absorbing hundreds of words annually into its official and unofficial rolls, but not without a simultaneous yet imperceptible sacrifice of terms along the way.
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