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In a similar vein to the idea of grammatical rules for English being invented to match the rules of Latin...
I heard recently on one of the ABC radio stations, so my source is not definitive, that Samuel Johnson, the creator of the dictionary, only included words in his dictionary if they had been written somewhere, even if the words were in common use by the illiterate masses. This meant that a large portion of our English language, spoken by the illiterate masses, was not included in the dictionary and lost to antiquity.
a shame, really...
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