Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

without dialects there is no language.

It is that the general public—particularly in America—has been trained to think of the dictionary as an authority, and so what “the dictionary” says matters.

Generally speaking, and as mentioned earlier, the smaller and more commonly used the word is, the more difficult it is to define.

The problem was that she was answering them in AAVE, a dialect whose speakers are often painted as ignorant and uneducated.

Why do we say that someone’s “worth their salt”? Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commodity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a salary).

Of course, we say, we have a great grasp of grammar;

Ah, but those horrid initialisms, naysayers cry—“LOL” and “OMG”—surely a mark of modern laziness, moral decline, and the end of Good English as we know it! Never mind that these naysayers use plenty of initialisms themselves—please RSVP ASAP and BYOB. Or that “OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill. What now

Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.

no fallacist suggests that we need to reorder the months of the year because the names for a bunch of them—September through December—don’t match up etymologically with their placement in the calendar. September (seven) is the ninth month of the year; October (eight), the tenth; November (nine), the eleventh; and December (ten), the twelfth.