Moving Away From the Traditional View of Language

What is a Language? This question seems almost daunting to answer. Does your definition include how languages are formed? Appended? Used? There is too much disagreement about the answers to these questions. However, even though we may not know what Language is, we can still find a way to represent it. Language can typically be represented as a dictionary. A fixed collection of words with definitions. Adding a word to a language is a bureaucratic process. Even words that tend to be prevalent and universally understood aren't considered "official" words until they are added  to a well respected dictionary.

However, the article shows that this is not how we think of language. When thinking about words, we often rely on using constructions that have been known to work in the past.  If you want more of  word,  you add an - er. But on a word like fun, this doesn't work. But why not? We all know what it means. The only reason we don't accept it now is because we're told not to. The same mechanism stops us from accepting new words as well.

I remember watching Akeelah and the Bee, and seeing the specific scene where her teacher doesn't accept her use of the word "diss" until it's being shown that it was in the dictionary. But language shouldn't be so slow to adapt.

My proposal is that we move away from using a collection of words to using a collection of common constructions. This is what we do as children,  so it is more intuitive, as well as being more adaptive. Words like funner could be used without derision, and new words could be introduced seamlessly, without being first added to a dictionary.