Our Words column makes its bid to take over the entire English-speaking world

HERE’S an interesting question – who decides how words are spelled? Or, indeed, spelt?

Who decides the rules of grammar and punctuation? Or what constitutes a verb, an adjective or a noun?

The answer, unfortunately, is no one. Usage is formulated by consensus, or tradition – or whoever shouts loudest.

This leaves us with the ludicrous situation of words changing meaning because people use them wrongly. When enough idiots get it wrong, their version somehow becomes right.

Awful used to mean good, it was “full of awe”. But now awful things are bad.

Myriad nowadays means uncountable, but a few hundred years ago it meant you had precisely 10,000 things.

Senile used to mean old age, now it describes someone living with senile dementia.

There are thousands of examples and I dislike almost all of them. If we need a new word for something, let’s create a word. What we shouldn’t do is hijack an old word, because it weakens the language.

Decimate used to mean it “reduce by one in 10”. Now as means (to many) the same devastate. We no longer have a word for “reduce by one in 10".

Since “myriad” was changed, we have a number but not a word to mean precisely 10,000.

We have damaged English. We allowed lazy usage to erode it.

Dictionaries have to shoulder quite a bit of the blame for this. They insist on listing words as they are being used by the public not sticking to solely defining proper meanings.