The process of writing a dictionary has disabused me of any
notion about dictionaries being authoritative. Language is too
living, too mobile, too flexible, for any single portrait of it
to be accurate. If you attempt to pin it to little white cards
and label it like so many specimens, it will slip out from under
your fingers and hover just out of reach, laughing at you.
I had to laugh heartily, then, when I found this exceedingly
dictionary-ish word in our English dictionary:
verbicide, n. Deliberate distortion of the sense of a word (as
in punning).
The only problem is, that's not killing words. It's only killing
dictionary definitions. Verbicide is what makes words live.
Just ask Shakespeare.
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