How do lexicographers get the definitions? Do they look at published usage of a word to get it from context? After all, we get the dictionary definition by looking it up in a dictionary, but the guys that write the dictionary can’t just look it up, otherwise one definition would just propagate.
The Usage Panel works hard at adding new words to the dictionary. They seem to base their decisions on contemporary writing styles by popular authors and temper that with a bit of common sense.
Don’t ask me where their heads were when they decided that irregardless is now officially a word.
Popular spoken usage has no concrete “right” or “wrong”. What IS commonly said & understood is fine & dandy English, regardless of what connotations given usages may have. Caveat loquitor.
“Irregardless” is commonly UNDERSTOOD in contect to mean the same as “regardless.” Since it is so understood and does not lead to miscommunication, the word survives and gets used more & more – eventually even in written material.
Now then - apparently, some usage panel or another will accept “new” words that are popularly used & understood IN SPOKEN CONTEXTS as well as written. If you ask me, the written “standard” can only hope to be an faint approximation of the living, growing spoken language, anyway – so I side with the approval of “irregardless”.
Accordingly, I have no problem with the editors ading in a note that “irregardless” is considered “substandard” English–so long as they ackowledge the word’s existence and wide understanding by giving it an entry. This helps readers take note and evaluate how and when they’ll use the word.
Ah, a descriptivist. Although there is much merit in this position, I truly lament the cases where a word is corrupted, and becomes fine & dandy English not by its merits but just because it has become popular. Such corruptions weaken the language. One example is “literally”, which is really supposed to mean “in a true sense, not in a figurative sense,” particularly for a phrase that is usually used figuratively. For example, “I sat down next to a mirror and found that I was literally beside myself.” The word becomes watered down, in fact turned on its head, with usage like, “There were literally thousands of people in the street,” or “People were literally pouring throgh the doorway,” both of which I’ve heard on the radio news. Pronunciation is the same way. A single newscaster once mispronounced “negotiation” as “ne-go-see-AY-shun” instead of the correct “ne-go-shee-AY-shun” and it just sort of spread like a fungus. Of course, I have mushrooms in my back yard that are literally spreading like a fungus.
Nah. They just irritate us purists to no end. There are darned few words that you say on a daily basis that have not acquired their current meaning or pronunciation through some corruption.
Yeah, I mourn the confusion between disinterested and uninterested because I think there is a genuine useful distinction, but on the other hand, I do not have to go around “gaining access to a file” when I want to read a document on my computer.
Stuff happens. Words change.
Read The Professor and the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. It’s a fascinating account of how dictionaries (the dictionary, in fact) are made and revised, as well as a story (as the title indicates) of murder and insanity.
It’ll literally blow you away!
[ducks & runs]
I think this statement telephones the banana, albeit 20% more obliquely.
Seriously, here’s a link to the OED’s appeal for readers, which gives some details of how the dictionary is compiled. Essentially, lots of people send them examples of particular words.
I posted this link in the Pit a few months ago because of the inclusion of an appeal for uses of the words felch and felching before 1972. Despite the popularity of those words in the Pit at the time, I didn’t get a very good response.
TomH, that sentence of yours is perfectly good English – but it is poor COMMUNICATION. You & I do not have an agreement about what “telephone”, “banana”, and “obliquely” mean in a given context.
It’s a well-formed English sentence, in that it obeys the rules of grammar and syntax, but it’s not perfectly good English.
If words are to have any meaning at all, there must be rules governing what is right and wrong. You and I can disagree on what any word means in a given context, but it is not you or I who determines the rules of English usage. When a word is used in a way that differs substantially from the understanding of the relevant linguistic community, it is being used wrongly. If, referring to a telephone box, I describe it as “a train”, I have simply used the word “train” wrongly.