David Astle: Experts save a fishy word from extermination

Daleks terrify me. Their whiny voices creep me out, their eyestalks, those giant salt-shaker bodies. But the real bugaboo comes down to their classification. Clue-wise the Daleks are scary to label.

Making a crossword a few years back I was stupid enough to define them as robots. Big blunder. If you're going to anger a lobby group, then I suggest the CFMEU over Dr Who fans. The wrath of Khan was a sunlamp compared to that little backlash.

Given my chance, I would've travelled back in time to amend the clue, taking a smarter tack like: Armoured mutants from the planet Skaro (6) Or: Terry Nation's creations. Or: Croaky cyborgs that can't tap dance. Anything but robots.

Hence my caution last month when tackling Daleks again. For a Wordwit puzzle I was playing with variations of exterminate: the Dalek catchcry. By the same logic, a refugee Dalek would yell Expatriate, a Dalek digger might bellow Excavate, while a blowhard comrade would scream Exaggerate.

Simple joke for an offbeat puzzle, asking solvers to extricate other ex-ate words from their passive vocab, reviving the likes of expectorate and expurgate. I ruled out expiscate, however, since Microsoft added a red squiggle to the word. The iPhone was equally freaked, its autocorrect convinced I meant to say explicate.

Well, I didn't. I meant expiscate, to fish out, to snare by skill. You can see the obvious Pisces swimming in its midriff. The word appears in nine mainstream dictionaries, confirming expiscate exists, albeit in the shadows. Still, I chose to skip the obscurity. For a man scared of Daleks, I can be cajoled by machines.

But just like my last Dalek encounter, the story didn't end there. After making the puzzle, I tweeted the story's moral, saying no autocorrect on God's green earth will recognise expiscate. The observation bounced around the net for a day, and that was that, I figured … wrongly.

Enter James Harbeck, a Canadian writer who keeps a vibrant word-blog called Sesquiotica. Every week or so, Harbeck expiscates a word from English – like schmooze or sphygmomanometer – and explores its roots and nuances. Sort of like a Whovian gushing about a random episode, but here the idolatry is aimed at language.

Last week, prompted by my tweet, Harbeck exhilarated over expiscate: "It is a crisp and succulent word, echoing spice and pixies and sex and expiate and so many others…" Despite those riches, we've largely abandoned expiscate, failing to give its fishiness enough oxygen.