Help me annotate and write comments on this $"$Go Ahead, Make Up New Words! By Erin McKean

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I$\text{'}$m a lexicographer. I make dictionaries. And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary. My job is not to decide what a word is; that is your job.

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Everybody who speaks English decides together what's a word and what's not a word. Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other. Now, sometimes when people are trying to decide whether a word is good or bad, they don't really have a good reason. So they say something like, "Because grammar!" $($Laughter$)$ I don't actually really care about grammar too much $--$ don't tell anybody.

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But the word "grammar," actually, there are two kinds of grammar. There's the kind of grammar that lives inside your brain, and if you're a native speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language, it's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language. And this is what you learn when you learn a language as a child. And here's an example: This is a wug, right? It's a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of these. There are two $...$ Audience: Wugs. Erin McKean: Exactly! You know how to make the plural of wug. That rule lives in your brain. You never had to be taught this rule, you just understand it$.$ This is an experiment that was invented by a professor at $[$Boston University$]$ named Jean Berko Gleason back in $1958.$ So we've been talking about this for a long time.

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Now, these kinds of natural rules that exist in your brain, they're not like traffic laws, they're more like laws of nature. And nobody has to remind you to obey a law of nature, right? When you leave the house in the morning, your mom doesn't say, "Hey, honey, I think it's going to be cold, take a hoodie, don't forget to obey the law of gravity." Nobody says this. Now, there are other rules that are more about manners than they are about nature. So you can think of a word as like a hat. Once you know how hats work, nobody has to tell you, "Don't wear hats on your feet." What they have to tell you is$,$ "Can you wear hats inside? Who gets to wear a hat? What are the kinds of hats you get to wear?" Those are more of the second kind of grammar, which linguists often call usage, as opposed to grammar.

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Now, sometimes people use this kind of rules$-$based grammar to discourage people from making up words. And I think that is$,$ well, stupid. So$,$ for example, people are always"