That might be the situation for the OED (and I owned a copy of the Compact Edition, so you might believe I might be sympathetic), but dictionaries are/were also issued/prescribed to students for usage guidance, long before we heard of particular venues' style guides. We'd see term senses declared by the dictionary to be "archaic", "slang", "vulgar", etc.
Let's see those lexicographers at least exercise some editorial warnings about the most egregious evolving senses.
Also, I'd like to see some official attribution of blame to Rob Lowe, for this particular episode of the destruction of language, as part of general decline and fall of civilization.
Sprinkle emoticons throughout this thread.
They did. There are notes on the definition that are also pointed out in the article I sent you.
> but dictionaries are/were also issued/prescribed to students for usage guidance
Sure, yeah, as a reference. I don’t follow, why does using dictionaries imply that lexicographers should not document history without judgement? Notes like ‘archaic’ and ‘vulgar’ are not judgements the lexicographers invented, right? Those are historical facts that are widely agreed upon by society before the dictionary writes about it.
What exactly is the “dump” you think Merriam-Webster left on English? I’m trying to understand your point, but not seeing it.
I don’t understand what you mean or why you think they’re “taking a dump”. I’m getting the feeling that 1- you didn’t finish reading that article I linked to, and 2- you might not fully understand what lexicographers actually do. Their goal and their job is to understand how people actually use language, not to define it. Their job is not to establish any rules, nor to be enforcers or make sure people follow any such rules. They are documentarians, and as such their sole responsibility is to show how the word “literally” has been used in the past. The dictionary isn’t a set of unchangeable language axioms, it’s more like legal case law, it’s just a reference of some stuff people said.