ordinary circumstances, we learn to speak before we learn to read, and anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the gold standard of fluency isn’t your reading comprehension but your ability to ask a native speaker of that language which team they favor in the World Cup and to fully understand and participate in the argument that will inevitably ensue. That means that new words and phrases are almost always coined and spoken for some time before they get written down, and that is a whole area of language creation that the lexicographer doesn’t have access to.
