Definitions and Self-Control

First of all, way to go, Molly, for reading the posts AND the comments and taking the conversation in yet another direction! You mention tradition as what gives language its meaning. Consider some other sources... I had no idea what the term "integral" meant in math until my high school calculus teacher defined it for us. Thus, authority is one source for language meaning. Another is casual usage. The verb "text" did not exist until recently. And how did people know how to parse it? In other words, how did they know the past tense should be "texted?" There seems to be a combination of culture at work along with inherited rules of English grammar. We have made an accepted past tense of "text" through the common rule of adding the suffix "-ed." This is just the thing an toddler reared in an English-speaking environment does when he or she says, "They breaked my toy" instead of "They broke my toy." And the mere fact that "texted" seems acceptable whereas "breaked" does not suggests that even the rules are culturally derived, along with the definitions. Still another source of meaning is from literature. A long list of expressions have passed into the English language via Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible.

Finally, I want to take the censorship thing in a different direction. Consider the power an individual's vocabulary develops when he or she refrains, for whatever reasons, from using certain words or even certain syntax. For many people, their grandmother is the one who is proper and decent. How shocking it would be to hear her say certain words! When we freely restrict ourselves, we not only add power to our words, but we stretch our range of expressions. There is a great story about a woman who challenged Winston Churchill for ending sentences with prepositions and told him he should not do so. He replied, "Madam, that is an imposition up with which I will not put." By choosing not to end his response with a preposition, he was forced to find another way to say what he wanted. As it turned out, this response was ludicrous in its syntax, which was Churchill's point all along.