Thursday, September 21, 2006

Verbing



Yesterday I found myself commoditizing stuff. Unsure as to whether I was spelling it right, I went online and discovered that 2 out of 3 online dictionaries said it didn't exist. I also got pulled up for using the Americanized spellings of several words.

I admit I react badly to people criticizing my work at the best of times. And there have been times in the past when I would have reacted to other peoples' Americanizations in just the same way (didn't we invent the damn language in the first place? Harrumph). But my rather snippy reaction was as follows: a language is a living thing. A dictionary does not provide a definitive version of what the language should be, it's simply a record of how the language is being spoken. New words are added all the time (incidentally, is 'blog' not the ugliest word ever?). Phrases and words gain new meanings: my own particular bete noire at the moment is 'not fit for purpose' - it seems to have been pounced on by politicians, who are using it with gay abandon. And just as nobody uses the UK definition of 'billion' any more, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that z's scrabble score probably needs to be devalued a bit as more and more words get '-ized'.















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