The English Language Breaks A Million

Next month, the English language will be celebrating the induction of its  one-millionth word. With word candidates like "noob", "defriend", and "chiconomics" (a fashion style for the recession, apparently) the vast and overwhelming majority of these words up for contention and others listed were all coinages of the internet, words used in forums and online communities, social networking sites and other social outlets along those lines. Yet while recognized and popular language as a whole separate entity approaches its millionth bedpost notch, dictionaries are far, far behind still at or below the 500,000 marker. 

Lexicographers don't have an easy task. From the sounds of it, deciding which words enter a dictionary on a given year is dreadfully time consuming - tracking words and their "hits", a hit being any time a word is mentioned in a book, newspaper, or on a website. The goal is to pick the most salient words, the word that the educated layperson needs to know. There's probably no single greater contributer to the English language than Bill Shakespeare, who through his works gave life to more than 1,700 words. To use one of his words, Willy gave us a fardel of words.  

Generally, dictionaries reject words that are either too technical or too young-sounding. Name brands don't count. The misconception out there is that dictionaries somehow create words, when all they really do is provide a detailed, typed out lexicon of the speech of the people. We create the words and we give them meaning, and it's up to the dictionary to recognize them. The problem, though, is the dictionaries are falling behind as the cultural and linguistic front of our speech patterns and commonly used words surges far ahead and changes just about every way we've every thought about language. We portmanteau everything (we turn nouns into verbs), among other things, and if dictionaries won't recognize these as "words" then are they doing us any good? As of right now, it's The Global Language Monitor that's carrying the load.

Dictionaries need to change. For one, they need to pick up the pace. Language moves fast now; We're talking light speed celerity. It's nothing new, though. Dictionaries have always played catch up, as they can't coin a word before it exists within a culture, but now their powdered-wig, archaic standards of what a "word" is are slowing them down ever more. By no means do they need to become Wikipedia and include everything, but there are words floating around out there being used daily and carrying more than enough meaning to be considered "words". Maybe there's a more fair way of inducting words nowadays. Currently we have two fronts of dialogue and the more these two progress and evolve, the more they begin to intertwine. Our casual vernacular mating with our formal verbiage in new and very interesting ways. Dialogue and fixtures of languid portmanteaus and abbreviations mixed with the formal, regular words that would make our scholarly ancestors proud. 

I was browsing through a Middle English dictionary and found that the old definition of a "word" was "a spoken thought". By that understanding, if someone says a word and you understand that word, it's a word. No need to mystify the process. Further early definitions of what constituted a word are as follows:

A meaningful single word or connected series of words forming an utterance, a remark, statement, question, etc.; a thing said, what someone says or said; speech, talk, discourse; also fig. and infig. context; also, the written record of someone's words, written speech, what someone writes or has written;

(b) an exchange of words, a conversation; conversation, colloquy, parley; haven ~ of, to be able to speak with (sb.);

(c) a spoken word or an utterance in explicit contrast to something done, thought, written, indicated by physical signs, etc., talking as opposed to acting, showing, etc.; bi wordes and bi writinge, in thought ~ and dede, mid werk and mid ~, wordes other werkes, etc.;

(d) the verbal portion of a song or liturgical piece; also, the literal level of a text as opposed to its deeper meaning or interpretation;

(e) diction, manner of speaking, customary delivery; also, a habit of expression or turn of phrase [occas. difficult to distinguish from (a)];

English is a global language now. No, fuck that. That's wrong also. Language, the very process by which two human beings communicate and express themselves is global now. We've loaned out so many words and proverbs and axioms and bent our lexicons over others that it's no longer beneficial to remain so rigid in our definitions of words. After all, what is language but little more than a mess of utterances, guttural intonations and incantations, vowels and other noises that over the course of time we've attached meaning to? We don't bend at the whims of our language; Our language bends to us. We've created it. Let's continue.