On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:40:39 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Disclaimer: I'm a moderate descriptivist, whereas it seems you might be at least a moderate prescriptivist (see [[en:prescription and description]]).
His arguments are very descriptivist in nature. The question is about what to describe.
I think we ought to document neologisms if they have been used by any high-profile source (any major author, for example), or if they are used by any verifiable subculture.
I disagree with the first at least. Some authors create neologisms almost as a hobby. A few of their words will catch on and get wider usage, most will not be used a second time even by themselves. We want the first group, not the second.
I do agree that if I coin a word and my friends use it, that doesn't count, so there has to be a judgment call somewhere. A widespread neologism with specific connotations, like the phrase "teh sukc", ought to be documented, though. Wikipedia's always has as one of its strengths that it gets articles on new concepts before almost anyone else, so it'd be a shame if Wiktionary didn't have similar advantages.
I don't think there's any disagreement about that. The disagreement comes on the question on what is and what is not "widespread", on what base this is decided and how the burden of proof is set.
They can of course be discussed neutrally--mention if they're in other major dictionaries or not, who uses them and to what extent, etc. But we're not the language police...
What makes you think we're pretending to be? I can easily put forward that same argument from the other side: Deciding whether words exist should be done by the users of the language, not by us. We should include words because they are in widespread use, not because our contributors like them.
Andre Engels