Running to the
dictionary to
prove your point is a
slavish adherence to some
pseudoacademic notion of how a
word should be used. The more people who use a word in a
new way (like the word '
bad' to mean '
damn good') the more that word comes to have the
new meaning.
Take words like "
jew", "
woman" or “
black” for example, the
top down dictionary definitions of these
words c. 1950 were intended to
perpetuate the social norms of that that day. Since then many people have decided that those
norms are
incorrect, and we have
new norms. We may yet
discover that the
definitions we use, even now, are
wrong. I see the use of the
dictionary as a source of
truth ie. “this word
always means this” as a potential
road block to
social change.
Dictionaries are about the
top down control of
language, which
makes no sense since
language is
developed from the
bottom up (in most cases). Dictionaries should just be used to
look up words that you don’t
know-- not to try to ‘prove’ that a word means
one thing or
another.