Save the Words is a really fun webiste. You can see a couple hundred words in threat of extinction in the English language and choose one for adoption. In fact, you can choose several. It’s full of color and sound and you can even buy the t-shirt. If you’re a word lover like me it is fantastic.

But there’s something missing. Community. Once you’ve adopted your word there is really nothing else you can do. You can’t know how many other people have adopted that word. There’s no way to discuss with other lexicograpical nerds like yourself ideas for promoting archaic words. It’s a dead end.

If you’ve read Seth Godin’s book, Tribes, you know that a powerful idea collects fellow fanatics. According to Godin, you as the leader of this tribe need to do more than lead. You need to 1. connect the members of the tribe and 2. make it easy for them to share that idea with each other and 3. also with outsiders. Now, Save the Words, does have a “spread the word” function. And it’s quite humorous with ideas like change your name to “Acraisal Nubivagant” or drop archaic words into your conversations. This latter tactic has been taken by another group of lovers of old words recently featured in Time. But there are no widgets for your webpage or Facebook or a way to email it to your friends. So close. But so far.

Think about the big idea you have and the tribe you’re trying to lead. Are you connecting your tribe and making it easy for them to communicate? I’ve got some thinking to do about my project in Mozambique. I’ve been busy communicating individually with my members but I haven’t done a very good job of getting them talking to each other and spreading the word about our project.