It seems like every time a dictionary publishes a new update, people flock to social media to talk about it. Whether they’re responding to the addition of the word “fam” or the dad joke,

They always return to the question of what consequences these additions will have. Do they really spell disaster for the English language?

Turns out, the “updation” (new to the Oxford English Dictionary as of last year) of language isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And it’s been going on for as long as language has existed. Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, explains why the creation of new words is actually natural, and tells us how the ways we communicate have been speeding up the evolution of language.