Basically schools marking down your work for mistakes can't refer to anything as the source of truth other than "this private entity, sometimes in a foreign country, published a book that says so" or just "it's common knowledge".
Second, Americans, I think, would be really uncomfortable with the idea of a government entity controlling how people are supposed to speak and write. That lives too close to controlling what we say and think. Not that such an entity necessarily leads to 1984-style propaganda and thought-control, but we take First Amendment concerns very seriously here.
Lastly, if you attend a specific school, you are subscribing to the instruction of that curriculum and those teachers. To have all students everywhere subscribe to the same authority of what they should know and how they should think... that can be pretty scary for an American.
If this were true, there would have been no Scopes Monkey Trial. Neither is a school free to teach you that 2+2=5 or that pi is 3.2, even in Indiana. How's that for 1st amendment?
If you'd like to get as good as you're giving, how about you tell us what country you're from, so we can provide an opinion about choice episodes in its history in return? Fair is fair, no?
Sure, I know some countries where these "regulators" perceive themselves as having an important political function: keeping (mostly dying) language "pure". But this really is pretty laughable, teenagers will still speak some kind of pidgin, borrowing half of vocabulary from some other language with larger (and more importantly, perceived as "cool") community. I've seen this happen a lot. Maybe this does slow down language transformation to some extent, but I really doubt it is significant on the historic scale. In fact, I strongly suspect that English is changing much slower today, just because of how much content there is in it. Other languages borrow more from English, than English does from other languages today.
Sure we do. It's the people, culture, elites, etc. It's survival of the fittest.
> Basically schools marking down your work for mistakes can't refer to anything as the source of truth other than "this private entity, sometimes in a foreign country, published a book that says so" or just "it's common knowledge".
You can't be serious. Don't want to get philosophical, but what is the source of 'truth'?
What should really be mindboggling to you is that more than 80% of the top 100 universities in the world are in the US alone. The majority of the rest are in UK, canada, etc. Almost all science, business, diplomacy, etc is done in the english language. Now that is mindboggling.
There's also quite some benefit for a org with official capacity to declare, against the wishes of some individuals, that say "santorum", "bromance" or "trumpgret" are not in fact English words.
Do other languages remain static? What happens when actually new things happen? Does "CD-ROM" just get integrated in whole? Translated? Rejected?
While I find many "new" english words unacceptable for my use, I wouldn't personally declare them "not English words". Moreover, if there were an authority over authentic english (especially American english) word existence and usage, I get the feeling that most would laugh said authority out of the room.
Until then, use them in an essay at school and you'll lose marks.
Where in Dutch we use computer, computernetwerk or lift, in Afrikaans it is rekenaar, rekenaarstelsel and hijsbakkie.
And in many languages, most famous in Dutch and German, one can make up words by putting other words together. Those aren't official untill some officials put it in some list. But that way, we can have koekiewet or Wutbürgerin or Nachtshoppen.