The thing about language is it’s basically the world’s most pure democracy. Communities, cultures, ect… each decide for themselves how they’re going to use it.

The thing about language is it’s basically the world’s most pure democracy. Communities, cultures, ect… each decide for themselves how they’re going to use it. Individuals or organisations can attempt to establish themselves as an authority on how it should be used, by forming committees or writing dictionaries, but the only people who care what they have to say are their own respective community of aligned interests. Everybody else ignores them. I would say if you want your dictionary to be actually useful, then it should attempt describe the way words are actually used, rather than attempt to dictate their permissible use. I think English is a language that lends itself to this rigid approach a bit more than some other languages, because of how common it is for English as a first language speakers to only speak English. Where I live there are a lot more languages, basically everybody is multilingual, and the level of slang, language mixing and other general bastardisation would probably make a lot of English speakers cringe…