As a one-time employee of the Merriam-Webster company, publishers of dictionaries and other reference works, I of course subscribe to the official credo that the job of a dictionary is not to lay down the laws of proper English but to describe how words have been and are currently being used by reputable writers of the language. That’s the modern official credo. The Bl. Noah, from whose 1828 dictionary those of Merriam-Webster descend in direct line, would have had none of it. Noah Webster was a reformer, and every reformer is a prescriptivist in his own way. In the previous century, Dr. Johnson set out to perfect and fix the vocabulary of English in his dictionary, though he was wise enough to learn from experience along the way that it can’t be done.
