This notion of compiling a “democratic” dictionary is batty. The meaning of words is not a game of Big Brother Scrabble for Beginners on Multimedia Online.

To allow celebrities, sports stars, comedians and entertainers - every Tom, Dick and Mary - to define the language is to invite the idiots into the library carrels.

Of course we all have our personal definitions of a word. But many of them are personal bollox. This project is going to put online thousands of ignorant mistakes, producing anarchy, not democracy. It is as daft as suggesting that creationism is a branch of science rather than comparative religion. It arises from the noble modern idea that Everyman (and Everywoman) is as good as everybody else.

Language is a true democracy. Everybody who speaks it has input to it. If enough of us go on using a word such as “wicked” or “nice” in a new way, that word acquires an onion skin of new meaning.

But dictionaries consist of recording the ways that words are being used now, and pinning them down precisely. This is a laborious job for specialist wordsmiths.

Wordia.com will be a valuable source for lexicographers to mine for the new words, meanings and solecisms used today by comedians, entertainers, everybodies and even celebrities. Good English is that used today by the best speakers and writers of it. The trick is to find them. One of the places to search is in a good dictionary, compiled by professional lexicographers.

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