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Originally Posted by ApK
Aww. That makes me  .
Ok...but then by what standard does anyone claim to know "what a word means?" What informs your disagreement?
I'm all for resisting letting blatant misuses become standard, but Oxford cites that usage back to the early 1700's. How much more time does a living language need? |
A dictionary is just a useful tool, and it becomes a lot less useful if the meanings of words have shifted to the point where the dictionary meaning isn't in sync with the way the word is commonly used. I doubt there's any hard science behind it beyond just noting the number of people that roll their eyes whenever someone points out that someone else has misused the word "ironic".
The fine scholars at Cracked.com stated it thusly:
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There is a massive percentage of the population, somewhere north of 99 percent, that struggles with telling the difference between nouns and verbs. With no use for the rules of grammar, they simply talk like their friends and neighbors talk. That this will lead to slowly drifting definitions and grammatical structures is inevitable, because these people don't know the rules in the first place, and could not fucking care less if they did.
This puts writers, who are generally concerned with verbin' etiquette, in a tricky position. By choosing not to use newly minted grammatical rules and words, they impede their ability to communicate with the rest of the population. They cut themselves off from the creative options that new words and grammar open up, and if they hew too closely to the old, unchanging rules, they can make their writing sound stuffy and formal.
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