“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” - George Orwell, 1984

I recently listened to a TED Talk given by language historian Anne Curzan on “What Makes a Word Real.” Not only does she have great stage presence and sense of humor, she raises interesting questions that most of us have probably never considered. What makes a word, a word? How does a word get into the dictionary?  Are slang words like “YOLO” and “hangry” real?

As a writer, communicator and lover of words, I often refer to a dictionary or thesaurus to spice up my prose, and not once have I questioned the credibility or authenticity of the words or definitions I find there. I take them at face value because, well, I never thought not to – the dictionary is the unaltered law book of linguistics…right? Wrong. As Anne says, “dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless.”

OK, so who are these authoritative humans that are controlling the English language by selectively adding new words to the dictionary every year? Turns out, it’s us. Dictionary editors have the awesomely challenging job of listening to and keeping up with the public’s ever-growing vocabulary and deciding what’s going to stick. They need to be tuned in to pop culture to catch words like “selfie” and “twerk,” and decide which words they think will stand the test of time, and which are just fads. “Selfie,” by the way, was Oxford Dictionary’s 2013 Word of the Year.

It excites me when new words, albeit sometimes ridiculous, are introduced to our language. However, I have caught myself a time or two sarcastically saying to my younger sisters, “so that’s what the kids are calling it these days?” Apparently, these types of criticisms about language evolution go way back – even when new pronunciations were introduced. In 1855, English poet Samuel Rogers said, “the now fashionable pronunciation is, to me at least, very offensive: ‘c?ntemplate’ is bad enough, but balcony’ makes me sick.”

It’s pretty likely that there will be changes to the English language that will make us all cringe at one point or another, but for a second, go back to your childhood and think about words like they were crayons. You didn’t have to like every color in the box, but it was always exciting when Crayola introduced a new color, and you could never have too many crayons. The same is true with words. New words give us more options to play with, more expressions to communicate, more lyrical colors to paint with. 

We will continue to create new lingo, introduce new meanings, and slowly but surely, evolve the English language, and that is a beautiful thing. To the naysayers, Anne says, “we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant, and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it.”