inb4 OMG THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS GOING TO SHIT I love that the OED does this. Michel et al. (2011) showed using the Google ngrams corpus that dictionaries in general are terrible at keeping up with current new lexical items, and often retain words that haven't been in use for centuries.
I kinda have to agree with you on that, I think it's good to have branching lexicons, some which can more rapidly incorporate fast changing language, even at the expense of including words that might only be fads without staying power, and others, with more strict guidelines that can be steered by a language's long term path, as well as maintain the historical context of non-contemporary terminology. Saying language is going to shit is like saying art is going shit; it all depends on who you ask. My opinion is that better or worse is irrelevant, anything cultural is alive and the best thing about it is that it never stands still. Edit: @rd95 Yep, it should be pretty obvious that an unchanging language would be useless in a world that never stops changing.
Yeah, exactly. As a linguist it is so frustrating when people go on about the new generation "ruining" language. It's not like language has never changed for thousands of years up until this single generation. Language is constantly changing, and what is key is that people are using it for the same purpose -- to communicate. Since language is driven by communication needs, it remains approximately as efficient as it always has since communication needs don't change. My opinion is that better or worse is irrelevant, anything cultural is alive and the best thing about it is that it never stands still.