The gloomy prophecy by Alan Wells of the Government's Basic Skills Agency that children's vocabularies and communications skills are being dramatically cauterised by text messaging, television, PlayStations and working parents who don't talk to them has potentially devastating consequences, not only for the affected generation's social and intellectual life, but for the future of English letters.
As both a concerned parent (my son's vocabulary is presently confined to 'Eeyore', 'duck' and 'moo', for which I can now blame my working hours) and writer, I have been anxiously seeking possible counter-measures, not least because the future of the staple Christmas game Balderdash! is also in jeopardy. For those who don't know, this is a board game which adopts broadly similar principles to the much-loved quiz show Call My Bluff , in which Frank Muir, Alan Coren and assorted guest wits would present the opposing team with an obscure word - cunctator, for example, or refocillate, or fartlek - and three plausible variant definitions, of which only one is true.
There is also a less clearly-structured pub version of this game, in which you fling difficult words back and forth at your opponent and if they can't provide an acceptable definition it's their round, although in this version you're allowed to follow a fine old literary tradition stretching from Shakespeare to Dave Eggers and make words up.
As Melvyn Bragg's recent ITV series, The Adventure of English, demonstrated, we are lucky to have an extraordinarily rich language that has grown over centuries from numerous roots and is constantly evolving. It used to be that panellists on Call My Bluff could take an educated guess at the meaning of a word by working out its etymology - whether its root was obviously Latin or Greek, what its derivatives might be - but now it would seem that, for younger generations, this kind of linguistic knowledge is becoming as endangered as vowels.
Fortunately, not everyone's outlook on the future of English is quite so dismal. Since 1994, the website A Word a Day (www.wordsmith.org) has been posting curious and arcane words daily, together with clear definitions, etymology and working examples of how to slip them into conversation. The site, founded by Indian-born Anu Garg, whose name is disappointingly not an anagram but should be, now has more than 525,000 subscribers worldwide and has been featured in publications from the Wall Street Journal and Wired to newspapers and magazines in India, South Africa, Belgium, Japan and Canada. In the US, some English teachers make it a required subscription for their students (the site is free to access and a new word is emailed each morning).
Garg grew up in northern India as a Hindi-speaker and began learning English at the age of 11. By the time he was in his teens, he claims he used to read the dictionary for fun, which makes you wonder what he must have suffered at school; for most adolescents, displaying an extensive knowledge of long words is a sure way to get yourself beaten up, which may also be a contributing factor in the widespread growth of teenage grunting.
The accompanying book, A Word a Day: A Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English (John Wiley & Sons £11.50) has been a number one bestseller on Amazon.com and the subject of surprisingly emotive feedback by hundreds of linguaphiles on the website ('Your story brought tears to my eyes. What a tribute to the human spirit,' wrote one woman). By definition, though, the book has to limit its scope and serves best as a teaser for the online version. Words are grouped thematically, though British readers may find the indefatigably jaunty hilarity of the contextual examples a little too American to stomach in large doses.
The daily subscription is a much better bet, and a trawl through the site's archive yields all kinds of delights - not just scholarly words but definitions of the precise difference between gerrymandering and filibustering, or the origins of humble pie.
Fun though it is, there is something clinical about discovering words in this disembodied way. The best way to learn any language is to see it naturally at work and for me one of the most impressive vocabularies at work in contemporary writing is in the poetry and prose of Iain Sinclair. He is one of the increasingly rare modern writers who needs to be read with a dictionary to hand, but without ever being deliberately forbidding.
London Orbital (Granta) offers equinoctial, omphalos and coprolite in the first few chapters, but he also, in common with writers such as A.L. Kennedy, demonstrates the truth that good writing is as much about using familiar words unexpectedly as levering in deliberately clever ones.