Quote:
Examples of Burchfield's deleted words include balisaur, an Indian badger-like animal; the American English wake-up, a golden-winged woodpecker; boviander, the name in British Guyana for a person of mixed race living on the river banks; and danchi, a Bengali shrub. The OED is now re-evaluating words expunged by Burchfield, who died in 2004, aged 81.
"This is really shocking. If a word gets into the OED, it never leaves. If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it never leaves," Ogilvie said.
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As one of the comments on the article says, Sarah Ogilvie should get out more. "Really shocking"? It sounds to me as if Ogilvie is trying to turn a matter of a few mildly disputable editorial decisions (presumably Burchfield didn't feel that these words had really entered the language) into a case of rampant xenophobia, which seems unlikely, to say the least.