Can we please stop crowdsourcing the English language?

According to the Collins Dictionary, every word of the following paragraph qualifies as legitimate English:

"That oojamaflip zhooshing up the bang tidy K-pop on the banjolele is amazeballs! It's totally fandabidozi, but I'm just a fanboy who can't play squadoosh myself."

As good a way as any other to build a language

(Credit: Essex Library)

Nine of the words and phrases in the above two sentences come from the list of 86 new words, phrases, and senses (sort of like an additional definition for an existing word) that Collins added to its online dictionary as a result of an exhaustive crowdsourcing effort.

Now here's the mind-blowing part: those 86 new English words were chosen from a massive digital pile of more than 4,000 submissions sent in from the public.

So if oojamaflip makes the cut, imagine what sort of "verbal diarrhoea" (British spelling, also one of the 86) was passed up to make room for fandabidozi, which can be traced back to Scottish comedy duo, The Krankies.

Actually, you can see all the submissions on Collins' site. The number has now exceeded 5,000 -- and many of those thousands are still "pending in... [Read more]