First Blood: Words on the brink of extinction

BREAKING GRAMMAR NEWS: Reading University (UK) researchers revealed that they have identified the oldest English words, which are tens of thousands of years old.

To do this, they had to what always has to be done in situations such as these: they built a super computer.

Most of the languages from Europe to Asia fall under the category of Indo-European languages, and the vocal sounds they use to express a certain concept are very similar. This means that when new words arise, you can spot them because they don't sound similar. So using their super computer, the boffins at Reading University could work out the age of a word.

'You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future,' Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading told BBC News.

'From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.'

The words they found that had been around for the longest were  I, we, two and three. MC Grammar can't be sure why two and three were so popular back then – maybe things only came in sets of two and three – we will never know.

They could also predict what words will be going out of style very soon. They were squeeze, guts, stick and bad as probable first casualties.

'We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time'.

And now, to tip our grammar hats to these dying words, we can do no better than to celebrate one of them by looking back at the glorious hey day of the word bad, with a cameo by Michael Jackson.