Language evolves over time. I know this and have (mostly) gotten used to it. In fact, I like it. I enjoy neologisms. I’m very fond of “yeet,” for example. (Although I’ve never understood the conjugation of yeet. I think it’s probably yeet/yeeted/yeeted. If I ran the zoo, it would be yeet/yote/yoten. But I digress.) I don’t know if yeet will last. I kind of doubt it, but while it’s still around, I’m going to savor it. (Dan yeets things all the time, so I’ll have plenty of chances to use it. But I digress again.)

Every year the various dictionaries add words that they deem to have made it into the language. This year, Merriam-Webster spotlighted 1,400 new words, some of which I knew (Rickroll, looksmaxxing) and some of which I didn’t (cuffing season, parasocial). There were also new uses of old words, such as “compute” as a noun.

Some new words or usages bother me. I’m still not used to “overwhelm” when it’s used as a noun rather than a verb. It just sounds wrong, even though I don’t know of any other word that fills that particular lexical gap.

I also love changes in language that serve a purpose in society. The best example I can think of is the demise of sex-linked words for occupations. When this change first got going, the new words and phrases sounded awkward, or there didn’t seem to be solutions for firmly entrenched forms of speech.

Some were derided at first, like “Men at Work” signs (though not the band), which sensibly became “Work Zone. Some have been abbreviated, such as “chair” instead of “chairman.” (Although I did once see someone try out “chairhead,” which, as far as I can tell, disappeared after the one use. Good. But I digress some more.)

The use of “male” or “female” (or “lady”) to preface occupations has likewise faded out. “Stewardess” briefly begat “steward,” but quickly both were given up for “flight attendant.” And publications are increasingly less likely to use “woman physicist” or “lady astronaut,” unless they mean the first example, which is also becoming less noteworthy.

(The only occupation for which this is not true is “nurse.” Most people feel compelled to say “male nurse” unless there’s an obvious man’s name attached to it (Nurse Jim Denker, for example). Otherwise, a reminder is due. “I heard the nurse was just here. Did she give you a shot?” “No, he didn’t.” And many of us still expect a nurse practitioner to be a woman and a physician’s assistant to be a man. But I digress even more.)

But the new usage that most often trips me up is actor/actress. Oh, I know what it means when someone refers to “actor Gwyneth Paltrow,” but I find myself stumbling over using the word to apply to both sexes. I just can’t seem to remember to say “beloved actor Carrie Fisher” or “Meryl Streep is a fine actor” or “the film features actors Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.” I know this is a lack of linguistic subtlety and a failure in feminism on my part, but I just haven’t gotten used to saying it. I’ll keep practicing.

The New York Times Magazine published an article this week about the furor over new words entering dictionaries. It proposed that the usual dictionaries aren’t the right place for all these neologisms. Instead, they asked, “Couldn’t some new thing join them, some Oxford Social Reference or Collins Meme Almanac, for the sake of those poor future historians?” These, they suggested, would be “slang dictionaries,” a kind of L.S.P. dictionaries (“language for specific purposes”).

That might satisfy the lexicographers, but not the people who don’t know what lexicographers are. I, for one, am tired of looking up words in The Urban Dictionary and would like somewhere official to go for info. I like the idea of having a place to find new words and their definitions. Maybe we also need a dictionary listing recent words that have fallen out of use. These would have to be online editions of the dictionaries, of course, publishing and printing being the long, expensive productions that they are. (But I digress linguistically, wishing I had become a lexicographer. Chat, that would have been a flex.)