What to do with words that may or may not be words . . . yet

Bromance. Hashtag. Mashup. Bromance. Sexting. It wasn’t long ago that these words were not words at all. No one had ever heard them or said them. But the lexicon is evolving quickly these days, aided by social media where people can creatively push the language in new directions. But how do you handle this as an editor? How do you decide when a slang expression has become an actual word? How do you decide if you need to put it in quotes or just use it as is? 

You could wait until Webster’s lists a word in the dictionary, but in my experience Webster’s tends to follow the culture, not lead it. 

I’ll admit that for me, these are judgment calls based in large part on intuition. No one puts quote marks around e-mail anymore (or email, if you prefer) because while it was a totally new concept 25 years ago, everyone knows what it means today. The same is true for texting. Only recently did “to text” become a verb, but everyone recognizes it today. What are some new words that you've heard recently? And have they graduated into real wordness yet? And did I just make up the word “wordness”? I think I did.