An Elegy for the Languishing English Language

With Moby-Dick, it's not just the big things: the grand scope, the multi-layered meanings, the galaxy of symbols. Sometimes it's the small things: the well-turned phrase, the small joke, or even the one word. So, let's allow ourselves a moment to cherish even as we mourn those portions of Melvillean English now fading into disuse. Certainly, "bosky" is a fine example and "bosky beards" a splendid phrase. Note how unselfconsciously it's woven into the narrative below:

The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooners, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.- M.D.

 I invite you to savor it now. Use it appropriately with your friends and acquaintances - though I wonder who outside the Taliban, the Castro family, and the occasional motorcycle gang member actually sports a bosky beard anymore. And, in an age of parking lots and strip malls, how much of our landscape is legitimately bosky anymore? Perhaps we could bring it back in some small way. "Sweetie, the backyard is looking a tad bosky these days. Maybe it's time to break out the hedge trimmer?"

Alas, I fear this is a rearguard action, battling against inevitable attrition. Our language itself  feels less and less bosky, with growing numbers of etymological parking lots where there were once verdant vistas. I, of course, realize there are plenty of new words being created, with corporate speak and techno-babble regularly springing up like weeds through the expanses of modern tar and concrete, but they don't feel like much recompense to me for the losses to our increasingly shorn and unshaggy language.