>>I wish I could get into those times and sense the changes happening to the language. It can't possibly be that "it was decided"... it must have been happening in a more of a tidal wave fashion. Makes one wonder where do those tides come from.
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>In our case the "Tidal Wave" was the Norman Conquest and the beginnings of the francophonic invasion and bastardisation of the language! :-)
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>By the way, we're forgetting the flexibility of English to create new words on the fly, often making a noun or noun phrase into a verb.

That was my complaint from the start - it doesn't create new words, it overloads the existing ones, thus adding to ambiguity and need for context. In this era of sound bites and short messages, the context is often absent.

>I don't know if Serbian can do that. e.g to brown-bag (eat your lunch from a brown paper bag), to CC somebody, to rear-end a car, etc.

To some extent yes - it has several mechanisms to create verbs from nouns or adjectives, usually by means of prefixes and suffixes, and it also goes the other way around, there are several ways to extract a noun from a verb, or to create a noun or adjective by changing prefixes and sufixes. "Brz" - fast (adj.); "brzati" - to do things unpatiently, in a rush; "zbrzeljati" - to do something (once) quickly but superficially.

Most of the time, however, new words, and I mean really new, not derived, come from the slang and weasel their way into the street language first, then into the media, and then into regular language. Quite often, the source is a joke - there's about a thousand jokes one must know to understand the language, because there are numerous implied references to them, even in serious newspapers. Same goes for about twenty cult films. I know this from personal experience - I was translating for a news website six years ago, and all those highly political texts had so much of it, that translation was nearly impossible - I'd have to add more footnotes than there was text to translate.

To give you an example - don't know whether you're reading the puzzles in the Chatter forum, there was the one about a brick. It is quite common to mention "brick from the previous joke", which actually means "a trick we introduced recently". Or, in an editorial in a daily paper, "and now nobody knows who is crazy and who is confused". Huh? Well, you need to know the joke: "What's the definition of chaos?" - "The crazy fuc*s the confused" - "And what's total chaos?" - "You don't know who's crazy and who's confused".

But then, it's not that easy to create a verb "rear-end"- unless you allow for "naguziti", which implies sexual assault from the rear ("to on-butt", and is also used to describe traffic accident. Yes, context.