Can We Create The Ultimate Dictionary?

Tyler Benson
Egnl 1101
Ms. Hughes
9/17/09

Looking at both the OED and the urban dictionary, I am going to have to take a position in suggesting that they swap some attributes. The urban dictionary has its strong points in that regular people actually decide what the best definition of a certain word is. On the other hand, the OED actually has the history and facts on all the words you could think of. A merger between the two would be a very nice event, and you might actually see the birth of the standard dictionary.
The word I chose to look up was “junk”. In the urban dictionary it said that junk referred to useless garbage that was tossed out just before the day it is needed. This, of course, was the highest rated definition out of many. The OED referred to junk in two ways; one being to chop something into rough sections and also garbage. Upon viewing both the definitions of junk in these two dictionaries, the idea of merging the two together popped into my mind. I think that these Prescriptive and Descriptive dictionaries should merge into one where the history of the word is located and all definitions from the past to present are posted. Then regular people can go in and vote on the definition they see being most accurate for this time and age. If we do this, even as time and age progresses people will be able to vote on definitions of words and it will stay current. If we merge both the ideas of Prescriptive and Descriptive we can actually have legitimate definitions of words that people can vote on to actually set a standard meaning. Of course it may change as time progresses, but it will still be current and valid because people will still be voting on definitions. If a new meaning comes out, scholars will debate and add it if they see fit, of course the scholars have to be diverse.
The only problem I see in the merger would be getting a diverse group of officials that would actually make some progress unlike the Advisors’ in France. This taken into account, if a group of officials can be assembled we could in fact make a Prescriptive and Descriptive dictionary combined.