That's not a word!

It always intrigues me whenever I witness a debate over a word's status as a word - virii, or boxen, for example, for the /. crowd among you. For whatever reason, there seems to be a near-universal tendency to assume that there's an authoritative answer to the question.

But how could it ever be so clear-cut? Languages are by their nature highly evolutionary. Words are constantly created or destroyed to match the times. "Normalcy", for example, was a word unheard-of a hundred years ago - "normality" was used instead. But Warren G. Harding, in a slip of the tongue or deliberate act of coining, used the word in a presidential campaign, and it stuck. Practically no one would dispute the word's legitimacy today. But at what point did it "become" part of the language? The moment Harding first uttered it? Hardly, or else we would have to assign "strategery" the same legitimacy. The moment dictionaries started including it? Which dictionary? And surely it must have been in at least semi-common usage before dictionaries would consider it worth inclusion.

"Ain't" ain't a word, 'cuz it 'ain't in the dictionary, runs an old quip. But "ain't" is in most dictionaries now, but is still not considered acceptable in any formal context. And in scientific or technological fields, words must be coined practically daily to describe newly observed or created phenomena or technologies, and may even make it into common usage before they'll be universally incorporated into dictionaries. But no one's likely to question those.

Dictionaries describe a language, they don't define it, I once heard said, and I think it's a better summing-up than I could coin. Languages don't have a single well-defined structure and vocabulary, no matter what people might think. Words will create themselves; Sometimes you have to just stop fighting it.