Usage is an important signifier of social status. There are plenty of dialects that signal high or low status depending on who one is talking to that one is fre

Usage is an important signifier of social status. There are plenty of dialects that signal high or low status depending on who one is talking to that one is free to speak, but being competent in one’s culture’s prestige dialect is a valuable skill. In their rush to bless every passing linguistic fad, M-W comes off rather preachy, even prescriptive, in their supposed descriptivism. Worse they’re not even good at it. If one wants the bleeding edge of living language then urban dictionary is a far superior resource. M-W is a bad dictionary.