Perhaps it was the glamour that attracted me, the lure of foreign travel.  At the time it was the career of choice for boys from the better public schools.  With my nets and traps and baits - not to mention trunk upon trunk of reference books - I traversed the globe.  Certainly it was dangerous, but the pay more than compensated for the risks.  And when I returned home, triumphal, bearing another hitherto undiscovered specimen, I could feed off the adulation for weeks.  I would do the social round from my modest rooms in Kensington, in demand everywhere as a raconteur and adventurer.  Eventually, though, the urge would be upon me and I would set out once more, doing what I do best.  Maybe I would hear the rumour of a long-forgotten tribe deep in the Namibian desert, a tribe untouched by civilisation, who maybe, just maybe, knew the whereabouts of that which I sought.  Or an ancient Peruvian hermit, isolated atop some lonely mountain, whose knowledge of the local biota was considered to be unrivalled.

I was employed by Oxford Dictionaries as a field agent, on a strictly freelance basis. Though my position was lost to me some years ago, even now they pay me a modest pension.  For many years I was their most successful bounty hunter and in some specific areas my record remains unsurpassed to this day.  My job was to seek and capture, to record on paper and to render harmless, those words which were free-roaming in the world, undiscovered and unsaid and unwritten save but by a few.  Those words we call "Lacuna Ferae".  Untamed and dangerous, they could only be discerned by the highly trained.  The manner of their capture is a matter of personal pride and you will forgive my reticence to pass on my secrets at this stage of my life.  I grant you the methods we used weren't always orthodox, and there are those who would say we were in some way immoral or unethical in our treatment of those words, once committed to paper.  But it is easy to say that, seventy years down the line and with all but the smallest and most innocuous words safely tamed.

My responsibilites always ended once the capture had been effected and the bounty returned to HQ.  There were guys there, neat-suited and bespectacled, who would make careful, controlled studies of the samples I brought them. They would collect data, analyse, collate.  They would draw together all the evidence, and then finally they would define.  Once a word was pinned to the page in this way, it would never be free-roaming and meaningless again.  Now it existed to be read and heard, to create order and meaning; not ambiguity, discord and chaos as is the lot of the Lacuna Ferae.  These cartographers of lexis would spoonfeed the words until they were fat and meaning-laden, ensnared by their own obese mass of significance.  And I would be off once again, trapping more and more words, never thinking of the consequences.  But words must be fed and maintained, if they are to remain tame and harmless.

Eventually, the dangerous words were all locked away and the Lacuna Ferae essentially tamed.  I was made redundant, pensioned off at the still-active age of forty-one.  I pursued other interests; learned the clarinet, bred Staffordshire Terriers and kept an allotment.  But still I felt the lure of the words, and my mind was never truly at rest when I was away from my personal collection, some thirty volumes I had amassed over the years, of the words I had caught and tamed.  Nonetheless, years passed.  Peaceful, happy years.

I first had an inkling something was wrong when I espied an illiterate oik crouching in my cabbages.  I caught him by the collar and was ready to give him a sound thrashing, but the stream of glottals and dipthongs which emerged from his lips was so unworldly that I was quite taken aback, and the little wretch escaped.  Surely this was no idiolect I had heard before?  And yet how could such a thing be possible?  For I had devoted my life to the study of such matters!

Aghast, I proceeded to the nearby village and accosted several similarly unfortunate examples of British youth.  Again and again I bade them speak to me, encouraging them with words and with signs and eventually with blows.  But nary a word of sense could I extract from their lips.  Eventually I was cautioned by the local constable, who considered it somehow an affront to the law that I should berate the little ruffians with my walking stick, so I desisted and returned to my cottage.

In recent years, then, I have noted with growing concern the declining standards of our young.  It is a decline to which those of middle years are sadly not immune.  We are returning, I fear, to the grunts and gestures of our cavemen ancestors.  And at what price?

Words, when they are not used, become restive.  In the end, they fade from memory and from print altogether.  Those keen young chaps at Oxford who once toiled so assiduously to maintain the records became doddery, forgetful old buffoons to whom nobody will pay a blind bit of notice.  And so the words begin to escape.  I noticed it first with my own collection.  There were blank pages where once had dwelt my most prized captures.  I have the mind, too, of an old man.  I forget what wonders once filled those pages.  Was a Ghoralber an unusual disease which afflicted the Morrocan fig?  I no longer remember.  Hoidypoidy, then, might have been an obsolete name for a girl with spots.  But I am not certain.  I endeavoured to commit as much of my collection as possible to memory.  The more I learned, the more words would be trapped in my own mind.  Those words at least would not escape.

Attempting to trap words in the mind of an old man is like trying to trap water in an already-saturated sponge.  The more redundant verbiage I forced in there, the more leaked out.  I would burn the candle at both ends, but even my lucubrous attempts were but the small boy's finger in the dyke of history, attempting to stem the already-significant flow.  Because the little bastards, the words, had spotted an opening, and they were vanishing by the day, free-roaming in the atmosphere, intent on wreaking vengeance upon those who had enslaved them for so long.

The words are coming for me.

As I reach the desition of my apologue therefore, pray forgive my euphuistic grandiloquence.  It is symptomatic of the saprogenesis I now undergo.  The logolepsy has taken hold, sarcomatoid. I shall succumb to my teliferous debellators, those fiendish aggregations who swarm ever closer.  And now amid the pullulating morass, I descry individual words.  KILL, SLAUGHTER, MASSACRE, ANNIHILATE, TERMINATE, ASSASINATE, EXTINGUISH.  Their intent is murder, pure and simple, as we for so many years have butchered the language I hold dear.

And now, to the place where there are no longer any words, mirroring the demise of the language with my own.