INSTITUTIONS CRUMBLING

As someone who rants about the abuse of English as often as I take a breath, I was sure that I had a long diatribe coming when I was told about an article relating the latest changes to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Alas, I was wrong; the author of the article not only did the job for me, but with a little more conviction than I might have done.

The article, for those too busy to look, discusses the slang being added, the errors being standardized, and the words being "kicked out" of the dictionary.

The addition of slang is probably the area where I disagree most with the article. The author, Robert Hartwell Fiske, mentions the ephemeral nature of slang, and suggests that it's life-cycle rarely spans one edition of a dictionary. While this might be the case, I question whether a dictionary should only cover words in standard use, or whether it can also be used as a reference when reading older works. The term "dis" is still in use, unfortunately, and I myself have been asked more than once as to its origin. Even if the «word»'s usage dies out, media of today might need translation in the future. We do, for instance, have many entries that are noted as archaic -- or are those words the very ones removed to add the new ones? Of these archaic words, it's true that some people might use them, but others have been relegated to the rank of obscure crossword references and Scrabble®.

As for words that are dropped from the dictionary, I agree with Fiske that a book containing these words would be interesting. More interesting than the list, however, would be the rationale behind their removal.

The biggest issue I have with the additions mentioned in the article, and again where I agree with Fiske, is the addition of words that are just plain wrong.

Reading the article, I learned two new terms, "descriptivist" and "prescriptivist", of which I am certainly the latter. While I can accept that language needs to change, I think it should be from necessity and not fallacy. I used to be worse, nitpicking about every misuse -- sometimes incorrectly -- until I realized that even fellow prescriptivists relax their standards at times. Now I just silently take pride in my correct usage while rolling my eyes at others' speech and writing.

Still, this doesn't excuse misuse and misspellings. The examples cited in the article are poignant: "accidently" is an absurd addition. I can't say I've ever heard this word pronounced this way, though I can see people misspelling "accidentally" in such a way. It does not make it right. "Conversate". I suppose we should give a little credit to those who attempt to apply grammatical rules to further their vocabulary, but not all back-formation should be considered valid, just because it's become popular.

My own peccadillo, not mentioned in the article, is "supposably" versus "supposedly". I think what irks me the most is that most people don't know the real meaning of "supposably"; I think it's fairly obvious that they're taking affixes that they hear every day and, having not seen the word in print, assume that "supposedly" is spelled similarly.

And this, I think, is the crux of the issue. What I can't decide, though, is whether people are reading less -- to be blamed on television and videogames I'm sure -- or if people are reading more, now that they have access to email and the Internet, but that this increased influx of text is unedited and teaching incorrect uses to those who could otherwise benefit from all this extra reading.

But the question being asked, regarding these additions to the dictionaries, is whether the dictionaries' roles are exactly that -- to note the way language is used, and not necessarily the way it should be used. I'm of the opinion that separate dictionaries should exist to differentiate between the two, or at the very least it should be well-noted in an all-in-one dictionary that words are incorrect or fleeting as they are slang, dialectal or archaic now. Or, are we just going to allow a handful of companies to declare what is and is not considered «correct»?

Supposably.