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[QUOTE="tzznandrew, post: 3871306, member: 168"]
Dictionaries aren't objective because they aren't handed down from the sky. From the very beginning they were filled with politics. Check out Samuel Johnson's definition of [I]oats. [/I]Noah Webster coming out with a dictionary at all was a political act. Issues of slang and usage are political to today.

That doesn't mean they can't be useful, but they certainly aren't objective, and they [I]most definitely [/I]aren't comprehensive.

There doesn't need to be any "governing authority" at all. For centuries upon centuries there were not and people understood each other just fine. I never said they can mean "what any writer/speaker wishes them to mean," I said that—contra some "governing authority" language speakers have a general understanding of what a word means.

No definition of a word is really fully accurate—think of a word in this sense as an electron. The observation pins it down with some other words, but it's sphere of meaning is beyond that.
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First name of men's bb coach