Writing in today's Chicago Sun-Times, columnist Neil Steinberg offers the following aside, which includes a wonderful neology-related story about Noah Webster:

The British had extra incentives to dislike us — we were breakaway ingrates, of course. But we also had kidnapped their language and were degrading it, creating new words and giving new meanings to solid old words, words that had served England well for centuries. (A British traveler, Capt. Basil Hall, actually confronted Noah Webster, who had the audacity to compile these American offenses into a book, a dictionary, as if it were an actual language and not a shameful Creole. The elderly Webster stood his ground, demanding: Why shouldn't Americans coin new words? "Because there are words enough already," the Brit replied, characteristically).