Do you speak English as your second, third or fourth language?
I beg to differ- one cannot change the meanings of words nor their entymology in a dictionary by whim- one cannot change the definition of male and female, up or down, black or white- It appears one lives in a bizarro world-
-Sorry but America was never divided into Uppper class, Upper Middle class, Middle class, lower middle , lower class- it`s a bumch of economic strata borrowed from England after the 1960`s and placed in sociology books and called American classes- ridiculous... When I was going to school we were just all Americans created equal. If you were born into a rich family, you were a rich kid. If you lived on the other side of the tracks you were a poor kid etc., but I never ever heard the terms middle class , lower class etc. These are terms made up after the 1960`s when I was in school.
Whose dictionary did one use, Oxford Dictionary of the English Language? LaRousse?? Bhasa ??
Usage of words change upon slang or the gutteral, not the dictionary definitions. That`s the job of a thesaurus, not a dictionary.
These [mostly] words in Webster`s dictionary originate from Latin and Greek, and one cannot change the meaning and the etymology of these Latin and Greek roots on any whim.
Twisting English etymology and the usurping of words to ascribe to non-existent imaginary conditions which are borrowed from another language/culture is called cross- glossification, similar to Mexican slang words appearing in US culture in latter half of the 20th Century and gutteral Chicano beinmg spoken in California which does not have the exactness of the spoken crisp Mexico City spanish...
Class distinctions belong in Europe from whence they came, not in the USA.
Poeple can create words but they cannot change the original meanings of words and their etymology. That is called revisionism.
Your statement/question [Do you speak English as your second, third or fourth language?]-
viz- I will not stoop to conquer nor dignify the latter as evidently one has to stray from facts on a whim to leave the argument hanging like an apple on a non-objective tree.
I beg your pardon, Webster`s dictionary DOES have the authority in schools as to the learning and looking up of words and their meanings. I had to buy a Webster`s dictionary in high school as THE reference book for English classes, as with my french class, “dictionnaire francais larousse”.