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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hardhead" data-source="post: 979331" data-attributes="member: 2844">That's a terrible definition, I'm surprised a teacher would give it.  Get up and melt for me.  Or get up and implode for me.  Or any other number of verbs that are rarely, if ever, applied to human beings.Words can be used incorrectly, it's possible, but as for who determins what's "right" and "wrong," well, there's not Word Comitte that sits in judgement.  How a language is used, and what is an acceptable use of a word and what isn't, is determined by the people speaking the language.  If I say to you, "When it get's hot, water transitions from a solid to a liquid state," and you understand the sentance, it's probably correct usage.  There are many differnent rules depending on location, as well.  If I typed this post the way I talked in real life, you'd find a post full of swear words, double negatives, and vast amounts of grammer that would be considered improper in all but the rural South.  I don't type the way I talk, because many people have the opinion that someone not using the standard written dialect is uneducated.  Especially towards people that use the rural southern dialect (it is, oddly enough, one of the last enduring negative stereotypes that those of us in South are uneducated cousin-marrying hicks, but that's another topic). But this isn't a new stereotype.  The idea that you're supposed to write in an "educated" fashion, as opposed to how you acutally talk, is old and enduring.  But you must remember that the written dialect is just that - a dialect like any other.  It is *not* more correct than a New York or a Southern Californian or a Deep Southern dialect.  It's just the one we use when we write things down.  It is not, in any way, more "correct" than the way you or I talk to our friends.And no one sets these rules, really, except the people that use them.  And those rules *do* change over time.  They've never stoped.  That's why we have different languages in the first place!  They all evolved seperately from the same primordial language, and branched out many, many times, sometimes twisting and combining back again.  That constant changing is the *beauty* of languages.  It's what makes them interesting in the first place, and it's what has made them so robust and full-featured.  We can talk about anything, because language changes with time to suite the needs of the population speaking it.  People that rail against the evolution of language, such as nouns becoming verbs are almost invaraiably people *without* a degree in English (or at least and English teacher who is trying to teach their students to write in the standard written dialect, so they don't come across as uneducated in the written form.  It's like what Terry Pratchett said: you lie to your students until they're ready for the next lesson, which is just a smaller lie). Anyway, the point is, language changes.  That's just what it does.</blockquote>

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