People also tend to forget that dictionaries were compiled for the sake of selling them for profit.
Dictionaries aren’t the be all end all of a language.
If something accurately communicates an idea, then it has done its job. You can argue for accuracy, but at the end of the day, fuck off.
I think it’s funny when people use the dictionary like it’s some perfectly unbiased and authoritative source, rather than a compilation of how people use words
Sometimes if you’re going to have a conversation you need to agree on what a word means. If there’s any ambiguity, I’m going to refer to the dictionary so we can continue our conversation, not whatever you or I decide a word means. The dictionary should be the common ground on which we speak when we disagree, because anything else is madness.
It’s useful, but more often than not, people tend to use the dictionary to shut down disagreement
Holy shit we’ve really started going after big dictionary now as well? What’s next, big water?
a lot of them were made for national pride (not English ones necessarily)
But even the differences between British and American English are in part out of the national need to separate from each other. English was standardized around the time of the American independence and the first American dictionary was oriented at the British one, later the same guy made a different one to set American spelling apart. Words for Granted made a podcast episode about it.
Have you ever met someone who’s actually paid for a dictionary in the last several decades? I don’t think there’s a global conspiracy trying to sell them to people lol, you can access most for free fairly easily.