Understanding ourselves - Let’s give each other a bro hug

He done it wonderful or he did it wonderfully ... does it really matter how precise the language is or how a sentence is constructed? Does it really matter that long-held but once-novel conventions of language are stretched to breaking point? Does it really matter how the bro hug is offered?

Well, the politically correct answer must be yes and no; the stickler/pedant/curmudgeon would insist, usually with throbbing neck veins, that it does and always will. A freer spirit, a person more at ease with how language evolves and happy to scatter apostrophes wildly around a sentence, might say no. However, if we are to trust language made up of an ever-changing vocabulary as a reliable, exact way of communicating then it seems impossible — and foolish — to embrace one of those views to the exclusion of the other.

Today Oxford Dictionaries updated its online dictionary and it includes words that will probably feature on the permanent if ever-shifting frontline between the inflexible keepers of the flame and those happy to embrace the new, even if they sometimes confuse fashion with substance.