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Guardians of Language or Notaries of Usage: The Dilemma of Dictionaries in the Viral AgeBy Jazmin Agudelo for Ruta Pantera on 9/20/2025 3:51:04 PM |
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| The recent update of the Cambridge Dictionary, which included terms like "skibidi" and "tradwife," revived a debate as old as the printing press: should a dictionary be a guardian of the purity of language or a notary of its actual usage? In an age where viral language is created and consumed at the speed of a click, this question takes on unprecedented relevance, pitting prescriptive tradition against descriptive reality. Those who defend the inclusion of these terms argue that a living language is one that evolves. The role of a lexicographer, in this view, is not that of a judge who rules on what is right or wrong, but that of a chronicler who records how the language is actually used. Words like "skibidi," as absurd as they may seem, are a form of expression for a generation, a key to its identity. Excluding these words from a dictionary would be equivalent to ignoring a massive cultural phenomenon, an act of elitism that would cause the reference work to lose its connection with social reality. In this sense, the legitimacy of a word lies not in its origin, but in its effective and widespread use, a principle that the Cambridge English Corpus seeks to validate with hard data. | ||||
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On the other hand, proponents of linguistic purism express caution. They maintain that a dictionary should be a guide, a standard for clarity and correctness. Including ephemeral and contextually volatile jargon, they argue, dilutes the dictionary***s authority and turns it into a mere catalog of fads. How can a word like "skibidi," whose meaning is intentionally ambiguous, serve as a reference tool? The fear is that, by opening the floodgates to everything viral, dictionaries will become filled with noise, confusing the user and losing their primary function of providing stability and coherence to the language. The urgency of the internet should not dictate the solemnity of a linguistic record. The Cambridge Dictionary***s pragmatic approach seems to be a response to this dilemma. Its "potential for staying power" criterion acts as a filter, a middle ground between rigid prescriptivism and blind descriptivism. It recognizes that language emerges from the grassroots, not from academia, but demands that a word demonstrate its value and durability through sustained use in a vast corpus of data. It is an acceptance of digital reality, but without abandoning the responsibility of curation. | |||
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