I have thought about the problem of which words should be in a dictionary for a looooooong time, and I have come up with the solution. The solution is based on freedom (like, of speech) first, but tempered by good old fashioned hard-nosed economics; here’s how it goes:
1) Coin. Them. All. Freedom of Speech Rules:
First thing to solve is whether a word should be entered in the dictionary in the first place-- before we discuss which ones should be pruned over time. My answer to this: any and all of them. Dictionaries are the LAST place a word goes, after the people, or society, has already coined a term, and then used it frequently enough (how do dictionaries measure that? I’ll provide that answer too) to warrant an egghead in charge of terms to grandiosely enter it into the lexicon (all official-like with robes and wizard hats in Oxford or Cambridge). The old method’s TRUE determination was economic tho-- only so many pages. But sites like Urban and Etymonline changed all that, as online storage is cheap(-er than print)-- but not free. But the ULTIMATE dictionary would not only have words everyone or a large group can appreciate, but even colloquialisms (see the podcast: A Way With Words, for examples of all the local words there are, which never make dictionaries), localisms, and even words you and your friends have invented in 1979 for the purpose of just a single sports team or classroom group or sorority. The ideal dictionary would list ALL the words, even if used once, by a single person, in his bedroom. Who knows? Maybe like fashizzle or Homer’s “Doh!” it will become “a thing”? I think of it this way: only Mr. Higgs thought his theory was correct, and he might have been it’s only espouser for decades until the supercollider proved his particle exists, and what a particle it was, completing the Standard Model of Physics like Oliver completed the Bradies, or Kieth Moon completed The Who.
Credit Urban for allowing almost ANY word to be coined (they do edit, as I found out years ago when defining “Boot’n L’Lee Farnsworth” in it for the sole benefit of a single friend across the country in California who would appreciate it. It took a couple years, but Urban disappointingly deleted my definition, and I’d argue it did have some relevance beyond just my friend, but only if you are a Doctor Dre or possibly NWA, or hip-hop semi-fan.
The point is, Higgs thought “Higgs Boson” was a word, or at least was going to one day BECOME a word, so why shouldn’t he SPONSOR or PAY for the word to remain in dictionaries, and if he runs out of money or belief in his own coined term, fashizzle, then HE AND ONLY HE could prune it from the dictionary using the school of hard economic knocks…
2) PAY TO PLAY (with your coined words) & PAY TO STAY:
So if we allow ANYTHING into the dictionary, which is a bit crazy, but there are ways to do it such that your tiny group-of-three friends who are the only ones in the world who appreciate that term don’t have to infringe on the mind-space of the other 8 billion people on Earth. (I call this “auto-complete”, which means that only the BEST words get auto-complete, and everything else in the dictionary which are nonsensical words-- such as some of the quadrillion combinations you propose-- don’t get shown to Joe Sixpack, the average Joe.
But beyond just hiding what I would call “My Words” or “Local words” or “Extreme Colloquialisms” or “Personlized Dictionary Terms” from regular joes, how can a digital dictionary prevent over-expansion to the point of nonsense and lost capital? (the latter of which is the truly damning for an online dictionary like Etymonline or any other). The answer is use economics: make the coin-your-terms bastard pay for his entries in some way. How can you do that fairly? It’s simple, but also complicated. But the first step, to avoid spam, is just to make a TermCoiner pay his “2 cents” for the privilege of coining his crazy-ass term. That alone will prevent a lot of spam and send malignants to Urban or some other place to attempt their dirty work, requiring very expensive editors.
But there’s more to this solution beyond just paying for placement, what about long term storage costs?
That can be solved by what I call “the substrate”. Think of every coined word as having an expiration date determined by:
a) The coiner,
so Higgs can keep paying to keep his term alive long enough to gain popularity, and Gretchen Wieners can siege the world into “making FETCH happen”, can keep paying to keep the world alive. Like a plate-spinner at the circus, he can go as long as people will watch (or his own back collapses-- in our case his wallet). And that brings up…
b)…The public:
If the word is looked up enough, then it MUST be lexicon. no? Yes. Words are nothing more than repetition amongst people. We see this every year when a dictionary grandiosely TELLS. US. what words are now “English”. How pompous! How dictatorial! What a bunch of ASSES the Oxford and Cambridge professors are. Those who actually WRITE the definitions we seek, have probably never themselves coined a single term, but SNOOP Double-Oh Pee has! How crazy is that? All kinds of terms are coined by absolute nobodies, but there’s a way they can actually get credit, as if the world had an immutable ledger to determine who coined what term first-- as if words are now artwork, or doctoral theses, complete with peer review.
After all, it is USAGE which always determined what words make it, going back all the way to Mr. Webster and Sir James Murray. Murray needed citations, and it was some crazy-asses (literally) he recruited, or literally EVERYONE, to get him his citations. But a citation is just usage, and books and printed materials were the only way back then. But the REAL citations are spoken first, mostly, and maybe later get written. Why would a term coiner not be able to go from verbal usage in his city (for something like Philly’s “jawn”) to DIRECT ENTRY into the dictionary, closer to the time of invention, or even, gasp, the very second of inspiration someone coined the term first?
The answer is, in an ideal world, a person should be able to coin his own term the first second he concieves it, and then let either himself OR the world at large, decide whether his term should survive.
Long term, the definition’s “substrate” is an amount of money. That money goes up with usage, as seekers of the term can pay a miniscule amount (maybe 1/100th of a penny per seek) to seek and learn the term, and all those seeks will add-up to pay to keep the word in the slick dictionary. OR, you let the coiner pay a largeer substrate, to keep his word alive, if that’s what pleases him. Again, there’s ways to make sure his word is more hidden if not useful, but also ways to make it rise up if people should seek his term one day (like ole Higgsie).
In short, the answer is freedom to create, but tempered by the cold hard steel of public review and financing. Maximum freedom and the minimum economics (of survival of a word).
I personally think the internet is entering it’s third phase, and this third phase will provide the exact solutions to your question, that i’m outlining here. The first phase was advertising (banner ads) and “eCommerce” (seek book, buy book, Amazon-style). The second phase we are in now, see NYTimes, WSJ, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and even the good ole OED: subscriptions (in all their annoying uncancelable glory). The third phase will be micro-payments-- payments which are too low for Visa and Mastercard to process (they charge about 10-30 cents per transaction, and almost no one is going to pay 10 cents to look up a definition). It’s coming, some day. The perfect dictionary, which moves with the people, in real time, and allows a language to breathe and pulse and beat with the hearts of all who use it. The next great dictionary will be almost as fast as word ideation itself, and it will even document the long hundreds-of-years-long change in the language itself. When you allow freedom and economics, the best old words survive, just like the best old businesses or fiefdoms can, or just like your family tree has survived. Not only that, but each word will have timestamps on them, so you can literally graph the use and even ecomomic value of each word, each definition of each word. A word’s definition can change with time, and that change can be documented and timelined as if words became science.
What do you think of my solution, kind sir(s)?
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