I couldn’t finish the article without signing up, and can’t be arsed to bypass that right now.

That being said, “the dictionary” has always lagged behind common usage. Until a language dies (and one can argue that it’s damn near impossible as long as a dictionary and grammary exist for a posts language), a dictionary that isn’t backed by a formal system making it proscriptive can never get ahead.

I’d argue that even then, what happens is that a rift forms between the formal, official dialect and the living language.

Look at the languages that do have a body of some sort keeping a formal set of rules and pronunciations. None of them are exclusively used, even by the people operating that body. Well, afaik, anyway, I’ve never looked at every single one and every single person involved in that regulatory field.

I can be a bit of a stickler for defaulting to an established dictionary when usages, spellings, or pronunciations are contested in usage, but the truth is that any given language is going to be “right” only when that “right” is what is actually being used by a significant portion of its users.

Ain’t ain’t a word, but except it is. Look at that again. That’s a perfectly valid sentence in a local dialect. If you change it to: ain’t ain’t a word, but it turned into one, then you get a sentence that’s valid everywhere English is spoken. Because ain’t wasn’t a word that was established in usage by a majority, but it is now. Everyone knows that the contraction implied by ain’t, ain’t a contraction in the usual sense, and they know that enough people use it that it wouldn’t matter if it were in dictionary at all, because it’s a living word.

Besides, part of the beauty of language is in how we can make all these weird sounds convey meanings that are actually just mental frameworks for thoughts and ideas. “Box” isn’t the same thing as a container, it’s a bunch of sounds a bunch of people agreed to use when sharing information about a container. That’s fucking glorious.

It’s also glorious that not only do synonyms exist, but that there are so fucking many of them. You want to say something is big? Large, giant, huge, massive, positively Brobdingnagian! That list can keep going too.The list of big synonyms is gargantuan!

But guess what? If we want to make up words, we can! Ever hear of a vorpal sword? It was a sound from a poem in a piece of fiction that turned into an imaginary thing in a game! And there’s prodigious amounts of people that know exactly which story and which game that is, and what a vorpal sword does, and the word didn’t exist until one crazy bastard made a poem out of nonsense, then shoved it in a book.

Anyone not know what a muggle is?

Guess what!

Every single fucking word I just used was imaginary at some point. They’re all made up, they’re all just random sounds that caught on. Ask deadpool what “?donde estas la biblioteca¿” means. His answer is just as right, in one sense, as the more standard one, you pumpkin fucker.

So, no, dictionaries can’t keep up. We don’t want them to, because then we lose the life of language, and I fucking love that life