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Nothing is more illustrative of this than the method of adding words to the language. By tradition, big dictionaries used to wait for proof of a word’s general acceptance in formal literature or speech before confirming a word or phrase for enshrinement.

But that process has been turned on its head. Now a word can gain instant popularity via the Internet or a social network. An example is Palin’s word refudiate, which bounced from a tweet of hers to a television program and then to common use even if often used jokingly.

In the new scheme of things, serious dictionaries are not so serious. Their main purpose is no longer to certify a new entry by public acceptance but to be the first to use it in order to build traffic to the dictionary’s website. In many cases, the word may be dead on arrival or have only a few hours to live.

Take the five new entries listed by Merriam-Webster Online between display ads on a random day, January 18, 2011: huggle, Usian, gambleholic, recombobulate, and monumentation. Who uses such words? Is it possible that M-W is trying a little too hard to titillate?

To these five not-ready-for-prime-time words was added a nearly extinct one as “the word of the day.” It was gloaming, meaning “to glow,” a term that may have peaked in Ireland in 1909 with the famous folk song, In the Gloaming, which M-W knew would not be on the iPod of its online visitors.

In other words, lexicography has become a big game. Traditional dictionaries have been turned into promoters of new words as lures for online ads. They desperately want to play the neologism game, which they once were supposed to police, not lead.

To be sure, not all verbal inventions are useful or lasting. But they can spice up the swirling stew, thus making language fun to use in contrast to the days when people were reluctant to speak or write freely for fear of making an embarrassing mistake.

THE COOL STATE

The pattern outside the United States is similar, with a growing feeling in non-English-speaking countries that people must use at least some modish English words, preferably American ones, in order to display just the right degree of cool among their peers.

It’s all in keeping with the views of the late physician and poet Lewis Thomas that language is a living organism: “Words are the cells of language, moving the great body on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. . . . Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny.”5

Amglish started as American slang, which formed the earliest waves of informal words and phrases to captivate international tongues. The great-great-great-granddaddy of all exportable Americanisms is a four-letter word sometimes abbreviated in two letters and loaded with many uses and meanings. Okay, so you guessed it.

There is no agreement on the exact origin of the word, but there is evidence that it goes all the way back to a 1790 handwritten court record clearly showing the letters OK. Another theory is that the two letters go back to an 1839 editorial in the Boston Morning Post. Still another version suggests that it comes from the Chocktaw Indian word okeh.

Whatever its origin, OK or okay is still considered the most common American word in the world. It has withstood the test of time and is still used frequently in conversations by native speakers as well as by those who were not born with English on their tongue.

Thousands of other American words have also gone international. And many have become integral parts of daily conversations in nearly every country. Linguist Leslie Dunton-Downer lists thirty common English/American words used often in other countries. Of the thirty, I counted twenty-eight that were in global circulation well before the computer age.6 They include bank, business, bye, check, cocktail, cookie, credit card, deluxe, disco, film, free, fun, hello, jazz, job, made (as in “made in China”), parking, penthouse, relax, robot, safari, SAT, shampoo, star, stop, stress, taxi, and