Charles Darwin would have made a great linguist. In his thinking of life and evolution it is not someone who decides on what survives and what dies. It the larger mechanism of existence that “decides” so. Similarly, words should survive if there is a need for it to do so, not to be forced so because a small group of “elite” thinkers deem it so. If by argument these people can convince the world that it is important for a word to survive then so be it. Those words have a value within the larger picture of a language. But when words that have been lost they should not be revived just because someone has a fetish for signs.
I truly doubt the linguistic survival of ‘snout-fair’ would have any communicative value in English. There are so many other words which could probably give the same nuance. But truly do we need this word in the first place any more that we need a word for ‘man-love’, whatever that would mean.
To give one more analogy trying keep a dying word alive is like continuing to keep a dying medical patient on a life-support just for the benefit of others without regard for the patient’s quality of life (note: there are many cases in which life-support will save an important life). If words are outdated or fall out disuse then there must a reason for it to become so. No amount of life-support will 1) save them, or 2) make the world a better place (as cold-hearted this statement may seem) by them being here.
ghoti 