Our language is constantly evolving. That’s almost a tautology for any language that hasn’t been officially pronounced dead. Whilst the rate of change often appears virtually imperceptible to us, a quick flick through a dictionary containing word etymologies, or a glance at the literature from bygone centuries soon proves the point. Words arise and mutate, they spontaneously alter their usage and change their position in a sentence, they crop up in unusual scenarios through metaphor, and before long appear to us in an entirely new guise from their original form. Whilst we occasionally borrow words from foreign languages, and typically for the moment derive new words for new technologies, the main source of new words in our language comes from the current stock. Each of us has an inbuilt sense of how words should be used and formed, and through repetition and popularity, a new word (or an old one with new stripes) can worm its way into one of those revered tomes we like to call dictionaries.
