Talk:dustcart

Usage of dustcart

Citations supporting the current usage of the word are as follows;

The Google Books Ngram Viewer proves alternative terms such as "dustbin lorry" are far less common than "dustcart" in the British English lexicon.

[https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/dustcart "Dustcart" is the only word describing this vehicle in the English Oxford Dictionary and has yet to be marked as dated by them. This suggests the word is still used frequently within their corpus. Words such as "bin lorry" and "dustbin lorry" do not feature in the dictionary at all due to their unconventionality.]

[https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dustcart It is also the only word that describes this vehicle in the online Cambridge dictionary, and again it has yet to be marked as dated by them. No hits for "refuse truck", "bin lorry", etc.]

Also, a Google search for the meaning of the word displays a graph for mentions of the word up to the year 2010, and instead of a steady decline which proves the word is on the way out, it instead shows an uptick in the usage of the word. This is the graph in question, shown under 'translations, word origin and more definitions'.

I hereby conclude the usage of the word is well and truly alive. It is by far the most common word used to describe this vehicle in the British English lexicon.


 * I recall being mocked at school in the '90s for using this word, which all the other kids found outdated (south-east England). Equinox ◑ 11:21, 9 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Personal anecdotes are not citations. If they found it "outdated" then it was nothing more than them being woefully misinformed. Here's the full transcript of a speech by the Prime Minister recently, who also used the word.I don't recall anybody who listened to him mocking him for using an "outdated" word.


 * "I don't recall"? Nice personal anecdote, lol. Equinox ◑ 12:55, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Are you a toddler? Your responses don't seem befitting for an adult. You wanted a recent use of the word, can't think of a better example than the current office-bearer who has infinitely more influence than random journalists. Surely if he was "mocked" for the use of the word in this day and age it would by now be all over social media and the news? But nevertheless, you wanted a source from a recent book.  I just did the Googling for you. Here's the result for the years 2010 - 2019 in Google Books. 6 pages worth of books, not all of them using in the current sense as some of those are historical fiction, but I trust you get the idea.  You wanted evidence, I presented it in the form of dictionaries, graphs, speeches by prominent figures and now books.  I have yet to see anything of value from your end, besides a journalist claiming other journalists aren't using the word as frequently as they'd like.