Sure to Offend English Purists
Of course this news is bound to perturb those who laughed at the last post about jedimasterwendy, language warrior for the preservation of English, but the cats at Merriam-Webster have decided to update the latest edition of the Collegiate Dictionary with some creative, recent additions to the our lexicon. Among the new entries we can look forward to are “crunk”, “smackdown”, and “ginormous”. Beautiful. Excellent.
As Merriam-Webster president John Morse points out in the article, language snobs are not going to be happy. Therein lies the irony of the attitudes of those who’ll snicker at the audacity of jedimasterwnedy, not just for her mechanics errors, but for her ignorance of the evolution of a language in contact, and the snickerers’ own exasperation of “the decay” of the English language with the inclusion of the several neologisms in the latest Collegiate Dictionary. English, as much as any other language, changes. Without going into deep history (that’s something we can cover in class), English has experienced a number of periods of growth and change, with shifts in lexicon and syntax. Yet, even in its so-called modern, deteriorated state, English remains the lingua franca, and, as is evidenced in the dictionary’s expansion, is in no danger of settling into a static existence (there really never was any danger).
What’s unfortunate is how eager some are to pass-on this lingusitic pretentiousness to the next generation. I don’t necessarily expect to see words like those to be included in the new Collegiate Dictionary in a student’s academic paper, unless they were used for some stylistic or rhetorical purpose, but (any) language is too dynamic to straitjacket into a monolithic (and mythic) Standard.
If you want to investigate English language history, you can go to HEL.
Word.