"We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance. Rarely, however, do we..."

“We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance. Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronunciations get deemed “substandard” or “incorrect.” Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what’s OK and what isn’t? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to precedent or tradition won’t work, because what’s considered correct changes over time. In the 1600s, for instance, the second-singular pronoun took a singular conjugation — “You is.” Earlier still, the standard 2-S pronoun wasn’t “you” but “thou”. Huge numbers of now acceptable words like clever, fun, banter, and prestigious entered English as what usage authorities considered errors or egregious slang. And not just usage conventions but English itself changes over time; if it didn’t, we’d all still be talking like Chaucer. Who’s to say which changes are natural and which are corruptions?”

- David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (via mesogeios)