Stan Kelly-Bootle:
"...whenever I hear words described as archaic, rare, arcane, or jargonic
[there¹s new one, perhaps], my reaction is SEZ-WHO? ...In fact, it would
be impossible for our omnipresent, never-sleeping lexicographers to know how to
divide all our messy utterances into chunks called words (word being one of the
hardest words to define).Do we NEED to find it in a dictionary before
understanding its meaning/usage,and accepting it as a REAL word worthy of the
word word? Will it survive or become branded RARE &/or
ARCHAIC?"
JM: In a very interesting site
(language
hat ) there was a lively discussion
about Nabokov's translation of EO (2008).
In connection to Stan's indignation against
"archaic...jargonic" words, to which we can add "obsolete;" I
selected: "we hit the mouth-filling and unexpected verb preduprezhdát',
which now usually means 'warn' or 'notify'—Nabokov translates it "prevene,"
saying "I chose to use this obsolete verb in order to stress
that the Russian word (a translation of the French prévenir or
devancer) is obsolete, too"...
A more complicated reference is to be found in the
VN&Wilson correspondence, when Wilson chides Nabokov by the way he
transposed "obsolecences" from the Russian into English, via
OED. Quotes and page numbers shall be
forthcoming as soon as I find the lines I have in mind.