I've started to ease off my purist beginnings since I read this:

Men ever had and ever will have leave
To coin new words well suited to the age.
They are like leaves - each year they die
And every year a younger race succeeds.

Horace, from Ars Poetica.

Disclaimer: I typed this from memory, so apologies from any small errors, and don't have the details of which translation it's from on me, but can find them if needed.

Kim :)

Dictionaries are for when you are trying to understand others, others who are using words you do not know. Perhaps there should be mention of that in the article. I know that, for certain authors, I should keep a dictionary close at hand to fully understand the story being told to me.
I agree that implicit consensus is all that is important in colloquial language, but what about professional discourse? Formal writing is typically slower to change, and I do not think that formal writers commonly use words not present in the dictionary (with the exception scientific/specialist/technical/industry terms, which are often absent from the dictionary, even when generally accepted or formally documented elsewhere).

I always love a good conversation about language. Forgive me if I'm overly opinionated about the subject. I think that we shouldn't spend time agonizing over fun words. Let them be fun. Instead we should unite our communities and analyze words in the hopes of defeating those who would try to overrun us. In grad school we're analyzing certain words like "native" and "ecosystem" to know how we really should use those words.

And (pardon the "eco-centrism" of this comment) one word I especially like is "greenwashing" this word should be spread from coast to coast for when Exxon tries to tell us they've gone green.

David Abram scolds us for considering words to be a set of arbitrary rules, symbols and codes - he (quoting Merleau-Ponty much of the time) suggests that when language was forming in early human societies, the words had much more of a link to perception and less of a belief that humans were more "special" than other beings in their communication.

;)