As someone who works in marketing, I often hear, “That is not a word,” spoken with the glee of ending an argument once and for all, a sort of mic drop, when it comes to really dumb marketing jargon.

Yes a lot of weird words are made up in marketing, mostly to dance around the fact that people are often sitting in a room, coming up with ways to sell more product. We say things like “learnings,” “action items,” “synergy.” (We try not to say “synergy” at my work, but the other two sneak their way in.) And yes these words may make us sound “newfangled,” annoying, euphemistic, douchey even. But they aren’t going anywhere.

“That is not a word” is a fairly innocuous argument in a marketing setting, where we all need to check ourselves now and again. But in other settings, this argument is dangerous, because it has the power to marginalize cultures.

For example, many people turn to hip-hop and pick it apart by criticizing the slang, the “made-up” words, the “bad grammar,” lumping all that together with profanity and writing it all off. But when we do so, we are doing nothing but gleefully reaffirming ourselves as the norm and another part of culture as a corruption, devoid of logic, to be written off. (Read this Zadie Smith article for some good perspective on that.)

We have to allow for variations of English because all kinds of cultures have a right to make it their own. By saying they don’t, we’re just reinforcing hegemony.

But aside from warning about the danger of calling things “not a word,” it’s just not a correct argument most of the time. Here is why:

1. Most words were once not words. Sometimes people act as if words somehow have some tie to what they actually mean, like “wind” is an inherently windy word. (Although some words did form because of their onomatopoeic qualities.)From a semiotics point of view, words are just arbitrary symbols that people have agreed will signify a specific thing. They are often dressed up in grammatical rules, but the whole system of signs and signifiers changes from generation to generation, in minute ways or gigantic ways. Language is always in flux.

2. Some kids actually speak an entirely different (and new) language than their parents’ generation did, for example, the first generation of kids raised between two cultures that have recently mingled. When two new cultures are completely mashed together (which does happen on this planet), they create a pidgin language, like Spanglish, which is a mixture of two languages that people haphazardly use to communicate. Usually, the next generation will form a creole language, which applies consistent grammatical rules to the pidgin, creating a new language. Most languages started this way, including English, which is a mixture of Germanic and Latin languages.

3. Now of course this is also a good argument for why languages need rules. The rules are a complex extension of that semiotic agreement that something means something – “this string of things, said in this order, means this.” Because these rules are equally arbitrary, they are equally breakable. It’s not inherently more correct for a noun to come before a verb, or for a noun and a verb to be exclusive from one another. For example, people who hate made-up words often hate when nouns are used as verbs, “i.e. Let’s table that motion.” But a word sharing both parts of speech does not somehow diminish that word. We still understand what one another means due to a ton of other factors, like word order, conjugation and context.

4. Language veers toward logic. The force that constantly applies rules to language is that tacit agreement people make that something means something, or a string of things means something. People are amazing at doing this, and we have far better devices to do so than people consciously enforcing certain rules. For example, people in groups tend to naturally bend language to create in-group signifiers, which you might think of as slang or “bad grammar.” Stuff like, “I be that guy” instead of “I am that guy.” But what’s funny about a group’s “bad grammar” is that it actually has consistent rules and logic behind it. That’s because if people agreed to say things inconsistently all the time these conventions of speaking would not spread.

What I’m trying to say is that people won’t fuck up language no matter how much we stop correcting on them. Language is totally arbitrary, but also exists out of necessity. And because of that necessity, only the logical uses of the arbitrary survive. Confused? You should be because it’s really complicated and weird. And maybe we should all be a little humbled because of that.

–Becky Lang

This was originally posted on my linguistics blog, Linguisticated, which you can follow if you want to read more stuff like this.