Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Word by Word
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://korystamper.wordpress.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kory_Stamper * https://korystamper.wordpress.com/about/ * http://mentalfloss.com/article/64753/12-things-know-about-merriam-webster-lexicographer-kory-stamper
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended Smith College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and lexicographer. Merriam-Webster, Inc., editorial assistant and editor, 1998–. Contributor to “Ask the Editor” video series, Merriam-Webster.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Chicago Tribune.
SIDELIGHTS
Merriam-Webster editor and lexicographer Kory Stamper is the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. She has said that her “job is to define new words and update old ones. Part of that means constantly collecting evidence of how words are used in print and online and adding that to a big database,” explained Jen Doll on the Mental Floss website. “From there, I can analyze whether each meaning we’ve collected for a word … is already covered by an existing definition, if that existing definition needs to be broadened or narrowed, or if we need to write a new definition.” Stamper “has been doing this sort of thing since 1998,” wrote the contributor of a biographical blurb to the author’s blog, Harmless Drudgery, “long enough to remember blue galleys, grease pencils, rubber stamps, and inter-office mail.” She exhibits “contagious enthusiasm for words,” said Charles Shafaieh in the New Yorker, “and a considerable talent for putting them together.”
Word by Word is partly an introduction to the process of making dictionaries and partly a memoir of Stamper’s introduction into the practices of chronicling the meaning of words. “When Stamper first interviewed for a job at Merriam-Webster, she was excited,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “It was her dream job, and she got it. She was now a practicing lexicographer.” “Anyone who spends time dealing with or thinking about words,” declared Caitlin Penzey-Moog in A.V. Club, “will appreciate both the creativity and the drudgery of Stamper’s calling. The difference between measly and teeny is something that’s obsessively deconstructed; the definition of bitch is agonized over. If there’s any drawback in Word By Word, it’s Stamper’s occasional tendency to drop tantalizing asides without going into more detail, as when she mentions another lexicographer who spent twelve months working on the top-10 most looked-up words on Merriam-Webster’s website.” “The first characteristic [of a good lexicographer] is that you have to be comfortable working alone. It’s entirely solitary,” Stamper explained in an interview found on Omnivoracious. “The second is that you really have to bring a dispassionate and critical eye to the language while devoting yourself wholly to the language. A lot of people liken it to living a monastic life, but more than that, you have to set aside your own prejudices about how language works in favor of this dispassionate but intense study of how language actually works. That’s the hard part.” “`Word by Word,’” said Jennifer Schuessler in a New York Times article, “describes her own initiation into the art of lexicography, which involves wrestling with the continuous evolution of language. She walks the reader, chapter by chapter, through different aspects of a definition, including grammar, pronunciation, etymology and more.”
Critics found Word by Word a joyous romp through the English language, in all its profane glory. “Word by Word is a gloriously (occasionally even uproariously) well written book, and unsurprisingly erudite,” wrote Stevie Godson in the New York Journal of Books. “Too late, I discover, I’ve found my spirit home—a pokey cubicle in an almost silent, slightly creepy, old building filled with idiosyncratic people, piles of reference books, pens, stubby pencils … and stacks of variously hued index cards.” The book is “a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds,” stated Megan Garber in the Atlantic. “It’s a spirited defense of the messiness and experimentation that allows a language to thrive as a tool for human communication. Contemporary English is what it is, Stamper suggests, not just because the islands of Britain happened, across the distance of history, to have been conquered by speakers of Latin and German and French; English is also English because Shakespeare appreciated a good fart joke, and because Lewis Carroll found the words invented by the time his century came along to be lacking.” “Stamper claims to approach her subject irreverently, and she certainly does make fun of both language and those who peddle it,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “Hungry word lovers,” opined Library Journal reviewer Paul A. D’Alessandro, “will find this book a delicious, multicourse meal of word lore.”
One of Stemper’s points is that in lexicography, language is primarily described rather than proscribed. “This is the paradox of the English dictionary, and it is one that quietly infuses Stamper’s delightful history of that product: A dictionary is a determinedly apolitical document that will always be, to some extent, determinedly politicized,” Garber declared. “Its pages, whether tangible or digital, will always offer an awkward interplay between the normal and the normative.” “It’s hard to read Stamper’s eloquent love letter to letters themselves and not come away convinced that dictionaries, stodgy and nimble and proud and humble and old and new, are something else, too: metaphors,” said Garber. “Grammar is more fun when it allows for liberties to be taken with it. Language is more effective when it is quirky, and experimental, and above all welcoming—whatever, and irregardless of what, the scolds might have to say about it.” “Word by Word,” declared Bridget Thoreson in Booklist, “offers marvelous insight into the messy world behind the tidy definitions on the page.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, March 16, 2017, Megan Garber, “The Case against the Grammar Scolds.”
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Bridget Thoreson, review of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Word by Word.
Library Journal, March 1, 2017, Paul A. D’Alessandro, review of Word by Word, p. 83.
New Yorker, April 10, 2017, Charles Shafaieh, “Briefly Noted,” p. 68.
New York Times, March 22, 2017, Jennifer Schuessler, “Word by Word: A Journey into the Merriam-Webster Word Factory.”
Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2016, review of Word by Word, p. 60.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (March 17, 2017), Caitlin Penzey-Moog, review of Word by Word.
Harmless Drudgery, https://korystamper.wordpress.com (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Mental Floss, http://mentalfloss.com/ (June 9, 2015), Jen Doll, “A Day in the Life of a Dictionary Editor.”
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (August 30, 2017), Stevie Godson, review of Word by Word.
Omnivoracious, http://www.omnivoracious.com/ (March 30, 2017), Sarah Harrison Smith, “Word by Word: Kory Stamper Reveals the Secret Life of Dictionaries.”*
A Day in the Life of a Dictionary Editor
BY JEN DOLL ,
BY THE MAG
JUNE 9, 2015
Original image
GENE SMIRNOV
As told to Jen Doll
As a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, Kory Stamper defines new words (a personal favorite? mosh) and updates old ones. She explains what it takes to become a word, why angry letters are also inspiring, and how a day in the life of a dictionary editor includes both death threats and marriage proposals.
1. Becoming a lexicographer was completely an accident.
It’s not a job your high school guidance counselor has a folder on. I stumbled across a want ad for an editorial assistant. I got called for the interview and found out it was for Merriam-Webster. I thought, Oh, I was a nerdy kid, sure, I could do that. Within a couple of months, I realized this was exactly what I needed to do.
2. My job is to define new words and update old ones.
Part of that means constantly collecting evidence of how words are used in print and online and adding that to a big database, which we call the citations file. From there, I can analyze whether each meaning we’ve collected for a word—say, green—is already covered by an existing definition, if that existing definition needs to be broadened or narrowed, or if we need to write a new definition. It’s a giant matching game.
3. People think there’s a celebration for every new word ...
... but some days I might draft seven new entries.
4. When I first started, I thought I’d keep a list of words I wrote new entries for.
I gave up after a year and a 50-page-long list. At this point, when people ask how many words I’ve entered, I can’t tell them. I have probably looked at every single entry in all of our dictionaries.
5. I do have a handful of words I give people when they ask “What words have you defined that you’re proud of?”
I totally revised the entry for God in the Unabridged. It had been written in the mid-’50s. There was no sense that covered Greek or Roman gods of mythology, or any of the incidental uses of God, like OMG, or God help you.
6. To be a new entry, a word must meet three criteria.
First, widespread use. If it only appears in Wine Spectator, it’s not a great candidate. Second, it has to have sustained usage over a certain period of time (usually years). People think of the dictionary as being either the gatekeeper or the bleeding edge, but it’s neither. By the time a word is in a dictionary, most people have at least seen it. Third, it has to have a meaning. There are words without a formal meaning that get used a lot, like antidisestablishmentarianism. It’s used as an example of a long word, but it doesn’t have a lexical definition.
7. The gatekeepers are the editors.
Maybe I’m going to let an ugh come through, but not an ew, for example.
8. Most words don’t enter the language in a smooth, upward motion.
You’ll get spikes—words will drop out, then spike again. There’s a jagged upward trend for most words. AIDS, I think, we entered within a year of its first use. It was clear it was not going away anytime soon.
9. Some words take forever to fully enter the language.
The first written use of the word korma, for the Indian dish, was in the 1830s or so. It didn’t enter the language until the late 1990s. Now it shows up on Indian menus. It’s sort of at the halfway point.
10. I’ve been at this job for almost 17 years.
That’s kind of crazy in this day and age, but it doesn’t get boring. You must have a threshold for the same work over and over again, but you can find things that are new and fresh and interesting.
11. I’ve gotten marriage proposals, and also death threats.
Because language is universal, people feel very strongly about it. They have no problem going from “I don’t like this word or what it represents” to “I don’t like the dictionary” to “I don’t like the editor.” One year, Stephen Colbert noticed we had entered a sense of marriage that covered same-sex marriage. The hate mail came in fast and furious.
12. Even when people get angry, it’s inspiring.
They’re engaging with language, and I can help them do that.
Who?
harm·less drudg·ery is owned and operated by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster who spends all day reading citations and trying to define words like “Monophysite” and “bodice ripper.” She has been doing this sort of thing since 1998, long enough to remember blue galleys, grease pencils, rubber stamps, and inter-office mail. Most recently, she’s gained some notoriety for being one of three editors who write, edit, and appear in the “Ask the Editor” video series. (Pursuant to the video series: yes, her hair changes colors, and no, she will not marry you). In addition to working on definitions and (patiently, steadfastly) answering the editorial email, she sometimes travels around the country giving talks and lectures on things that only other word nerds would be interested in.
When she is not doing the word-nerd thing, she does other nerdy things, including knitting, baking, and live sound engineering. But she will probably not bore you to death with those things here.
If you enjoy the sort of pabulum (sense 3) that appears here, you can read more of Kory’s blabbing on the Merriam-Webster blog and in the Guardian, where British commentors endlessly complain on every column she has written there. She also occasionally contributes to Strong Language, a blog about foul language.
Her debut nonfiction book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, will be available in your local bookstore (virtual or brick-and-mortar) on March 14, 2017! Publishers Weekly called it “occasionally profane,” which is delightful. She’s working on another nonfiction book for Pantheon/Knopf, and that will also likely be occasionally profane.
Her opinions, typos, and blog are her own and not representative of Merriam-Webster &c. You know the spiel.
Kory Stamper
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kory Stamper
Alma mater Smith College
Occupation Lexicographer, editor for Merriam-Webster
Notable work Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (2017)
Website Harmlessdrudgery.com
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and editor for the Merriam-Webster family of dictionaries. She is the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Pantheon, 2017).
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 Word by Word
3 Personal life
4 References
5 External links
Early life[edit]
Stamper grew up in Colorado.[1] She attended Smith College, where she undertook an interdisciplinary major that involved studying Latin, Greek, Norse, Old English, and Middle English after enrolling in a course on Icelandic family sagas of the 13th and 14th centuries. She says "I loved the style, the rhythm. They're very bleak, but they have this black humor."[1]
Career[edit]
Stamper worked in a college development office before applying for an editorial assistant position with Merriam-Webster in 1998.[1]
In addition to her editorial duties, she presents many of Merriam-Webster's "Ask the Editor" videos,[2] a series on the publisher's website and YouTube that discusses the English language, especially unusual or controversial words and usages. She undertakes speaking engagements on behalf of Merriam-Webster[3][4] and provides expert advice and response to general enquiries on language and lexicography from the public.[5] Stamper drew attention as the Associate Editor responsible for explaining the addition of the term "F-Bomb" into the dictionary.[1]
Stamper also provides lexicographical and language-related commentary for various media outlets including the Chicago Tribune[6][7][8][9][10][11] and has written on other, non-language-related topics.[12]
Word by Word[edit]
Stamper's first book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, was released by Pantheon in March 2017.[13][14][15]
Personal life[edit]
Stamper is married with two children. She lives in New Jersey.[1]
Briefly Noted
Charles Shafaieh
The New Yorker. 93.8 (Apr. 10, 2017): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
[...]
Word by Word, by Kory Stamper (Pantheon). The compiling of dictionaries may seem a quiet topic, but this memoiristic account of the lexicographer's art, by an editor at Merriam-Webster, is an unlikely page-turner. Offering a nuts-and-bolts exploration of the English language, Stamper displays a contagious enthusiasm for words and a considerable talent for putting them together, as when describing "the fusty glut of old papers bunged hastily into metal bookshelves" that fills the basement of Merriam-Webster. Her discussion of the role of language in culture is illuminating, and she is a reliable guide to such issues as the tension between a dictionary's descriptive and prescriptive roles, explaining, for instance, why "irregardless," though widely loathed as a solecism, is no more illogical than "inflammable," and merits inclusion.
Stamper, Kory. Word by Word: The Secret Life of
Dictionaries
Paul A. D'Alessandro
Library Journal.
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p83.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Stamper, Kory. Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries Pantheon. Mar. 2017.320p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN
9781101870945. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9781101870952. LANG
Merriam-Webster (MW) lexicographer Stamper helps write and edit the estimable products of one of America's premier
dictionary publishers. Hungry word lovers will find this book a delicious, multicourse meal of word lore, the personal
story of the author's life and career, and detailed back-story of the harrowing process by which dictionaries are
produced. Her well-designed volume consists of 15 chapters, each about a word ("it's," "irregardless," "take," "bitch,"
"posh," "marriage," etc.) and its history in the dictionary. Discussion of each word illustrates a topic in language or in
lexicography such as grammar, defining words, etymology, dating of words, pronunciation, authority, etc. The real
appeal is in the charming stories of the words and the personally guided tour of the MW editorial process, told in
Stamper's fresh and funny voice. Another noteworthy, recent insider look at the making of a major dictionary is John
Simpson's The Word Detective, about his tenure as editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. VERDICT A satisfying dip
in the ocean of words and a thoughtful consideration of current American English and dictionaries.--Paul A.
D'Alessandro, Brunswick, ME
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
D'Alessandro, Paul A. "Stamper, Kory. Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries." Library Journal, 1 Mar.
2017, p. 83+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702121&it=r&asid=ddc9810c06b81c216465340b6a6df9d3.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702121
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Stamper, Kory: WORD BY WORD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stamper, Kory WORD BY WORD Pantheon (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-101-87094-5
Strange words and how to find them.When Stamper first interviewed for a job at Merriam-Webster, she was excited. It
was her dream job, and she got it. She was now a practicing lexicographer working at the oldest dictionary publisher in
America. These "drudges at their desks" practiced a noble art, part creative process, part science. Her book is a "nittygritty,
down-and-dirty, worm's-eye view of lexicography." Along with other "word nerds," Stamper writes and edits
dictionary definitions, thinks "deeply about adverbs, and slowly, inexorably" goes blind. To be successful, you must,
first and foremost, possess something called sprachgefuhl, or "a feeling for language." If you don't have it, you won't
last six months. Stamper goes into great detail describing the inner workings of how dictionaries come into being, with
each chapter focusing on a specific task or topic. She provides a short history of grammar and then spends an entire
chapter on how much lexicographers hate the word "irregardless." The author also covers the history of dictionaries
with a special shoutout to "His Cantankerousness," Samuel Johnson, whose 1755 dictionary set the standard for all
future dictionaries. "Bitch" discusses how crude, vulgar, and embarrassing words get included, and other chapters deal
with defining, small words, etymology, and pronunciation. And then there's the reading. After lexicographers answer all
kinds of correspondence, they read everything, from magazines to TV dinner boxes to beer bottles and takeout menus.
Stamper notes that the internet, which has put many dictionary publishers out of business, must be trolled for new
words, too. She loves her work, and her enthusiasm adds a real zest to her tales of usage and the chase for words--e.g.,
"onymous," "cromulent," "vecturist," and "dope slap." Look them up. Those aficionados who love words and the
language or who are big-time Scrabble fans will love this book, while others will feel like they're in over their heads.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Stamper, Kory: WORD BY WORD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357321&it=r&asid=34d94466c50e1814ce523ac59da0c191.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357321
8/13/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Kory Stamper. Pantheon, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-1-101-87094-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For those who love language, this debut from Stamper, a lexicographer at MerriamWebster, will be a delectable feast.
Stamper, who also produces the dictionary's "Ask the Editor" video series, has drawn up a witty, sly, occasionally
profane behindthe-scenes tour aimed at deposing the notion of "real and proper English" and replacing it with a genuine
appreciation for the glories and frustrations of finding just the right word. Stamper claims to approach her subject
irreverently, and she certainly does make fun of both language and those who peddle it for a living. But her teasing is
belied by a real devotion to its spirit, if not to the letter of all the stuffy so-called laws. Liberally employing a host of
wonderful words--foofaraw, potamologist--she declaims elegantly on the beauty and necessity of dialect, how to
evaluate emerging words, and many other topics. Stamper is at her best when entertaining the reader with amusing
etymologies, celebrating the contentiousness of grammar, and quoting annoying emails from an opinionated public. If
she bogs down occasionally in the swamps of industry jargon, it's easy to forgive her. As one of her colleagues notes,
"Words are stubborn little fuckers." However, Stamper corrals them to her purpose with such aplomb that readers might
just feel like applauding. Agent: Heather Schroder. Compass Talent. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224891&it=r&asid=faf548d59084a4b16a5b644a75a1470f.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224891
8/13/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502649984169 4/4
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p6.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. By Kory Stamper. Mar. 2017.320p. Pantheon, 526 (9781101870945).
413.028.
Lexicography is not sexy, but in this spirited book about the science and art of making dictionaries, it is by turns
amusing, frustrating, surprising, and above all, engrossing. Stamper is one of the lexicographers at Merriam-Webster,
tasked with updating and creating dictionaries on an unforgiving editorial schedule. With wit and candor, she introduces
us to the people behind the definitions, drinking terrible coffee made from orange foil packets as they labor away in
near-total silence. It is perhaps unsurprising, given her line of work, that Stamper employs words with delightful
precision in her writing. What is surprising is how enjoyable she makes reading about the drudgery of dictionary
making. She illuminates the meaning and purpose of each portion of a dictionary entry and describes the pitfalls
awaiting those who attempt to define an ever-changing language. Seen through Stamper's eyes, a dictionary is not only a
reference source, but also a living linguistic record and a window into history. Word by Word offers marvelous insight
into the messy world behind the tidy definitions on the page.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 6+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474715926&it=r&asid=a25b26bb1b79596b234c8db26268665e.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474715926
The Case Against the Grammar Scolds
The lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is an eloquent defense of a “live and let live” approach to English.
Louis du Mont / Getty
MEGAN GARBER MAR 16, 2017 CULTURE
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Listen and subscribe to The Atlantic’s podcast, Radio Atlantic. This week: Kurt Andersen on How America Lost Its Mind. Click here for more.
These are boom times for linguistic pedantry. Never before have there been more outlets for opinionated humans to commiserate about the absurdities of “irregardless” or the impropriety of “impact”-as-a-verb or the aggressive affront to civil society that is the existence of the word “moist.” This is an age that found Bryan Henderson, Wikipedia editor and empowered peeve-haver, taking all the instances he could find of the phrase “is comprised of,” within the vast online encyclopedia, and replacing them with “is composed of” or “consists of”—more than 40,000 word-swaps, in all. It’s an age, too, that found Lynne Truss, author of the usage polemic Eats, Shoots & Leaves, garnering plaudits and book sales by offering readers rallying cries like this one: “If you still persist in writing, ‘Good food at it’s best,’ you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”
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The vitriol is ironic—and, yes, I do mean ironic, Alanis-wise and otherwise—and not merely because it puts the pendants in a precarious place, karmically. (The subtitle of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, one might point out, itself contains a usage error: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation might more properly be written as “The Zero-Tolerance Approach.”) The irony is broader: To engage in such peevery, playful or otherwise, is also to ignore the long, chaotic, and deeply creative history of the English language. It is to assume that someone’s adherence to the moment’s current rules of usage is a signifier of that person’s education and worth. It is to assume, on the flip side, that to violate those rules is also to commit a very particular kind of violence against English and, by extension, its many speakers.
Well, you know what they say about assumptions. Jane Austen, it turns out, employed the possessive “it’s” in her writing, and still managed to die a relatively dignified death. Thomas Jefferson used such an “it’s,” too. So did Abraham Lincoln, those four score and many more years ago. Even David Foster Wallace, master of contemporary English and self-proclaimed linguistic “snoot,” committed the ultimate usage sin of the committed usage snob: He used “literally,” yep, figuratively.
Was Wallace wrong, or merely prescient? Was he disrupting the English language, or, you know, disrupting it? As Kory Stamper, a longtime lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, suggests: both. And, more to the point, the senses of disruption here can’t be meaningfully distinguished from each other, when it comes to the underlying Darwinism that guides English diction. Stamper’s excellent new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is, like a dictionary itself, a composite affair: It’s a memoir that is also an explanation of the work that writing a dictionary entails—and, in both of those things, an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the English language.
Jane Austen used the possessive “it’s.” So did Thomas Jefferson. So did Abraham Lincoln, those four score and many more years ago.
Between the lines, though, Word by Word is something broader still: It’s a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds. It’s a spirited defense of the messiness and experimentation that allows a language to thrive as a tool for human communication. Contemporary English is what it is, Stamper suggests, not just because the islands of Britain happened, across the distance of history, to have been conquered by speakers of Latin and German and French; English is also English because Shakespeare appreciated a good fart joke, and because Lewis Carroll found the words invented by the time his century came along to be lacking, and because, in 2015, a 16-year-old named Peaches Monroee looked at her image in a car mirror and decided that the best way to describe her perfectly styled eyebrows was “on fleek.” English, like any other language, is a geopolitical phenomenon that evolves by way of individual genius. The scolds are offering top-down rebukes about a language that changes from the bottom up.
And, so, dictionaries. There’s a common assumption, Stamper notes, that such reference volumes—whether they exist in print or online, whether they’re branded Merriam-Webster or American Heritage or Oxford English—operate with grand, hushed Authority, their bulky contents the final words on our current words. Under this view of things, Stamper writes, the dictionary operates as “some great guardian of the English language,” a book that ensures, in its very bookishness, that “the language is thus protected, kept right, pure, good.”
It’s a view that is both rosy and wrong. Dictionaries are human-written documents, with all the subjectivity and fallibility that such production-side origins will entail. (Merriam-Webster’s version happens to be produced not, as one might assume, within a Gothic library, dank with stuffy history, but rather in a beige-toned office, its cubicles outfitted in typical corporate chic, that is located in the post-industrial city of Springfield, Massachusetts.)
English, like any other language, is a geopolitical phenomenon that evolves by way of individual genius.
Dictionaries, Stamper argues, are the result of art and craft and, above all, dull and dutiful labor. Lexicographers are researchers who pay intense and obsessive attention not just to the rise of new words, but also to the new shadings of old ones. This requires that they be at once passionate about, and objective toward, the vagaries of English usage. They must put aside their individual feelings about “less”-versus-“fewer” and “whether”-versus-“if” and “literally”-as-“figuratively” and simply record the living language as it is being used by their fellow language-users. This requires a type of realism when it comes to both usage and diction. The lexicographer might certainly prefer a world in which “genocide” and “cunt” and “hate crime” need not be enshrined in the dictionary; when the task is to provide a description of a language, though—and, by extension, a description of a world that becomes communal in large part through language—there those words are. And, of course, there they must be.
And that is because—here Stamper, a wry and charming correspondent, is at her most insistent—dictionaries exist, she argues, “merely to record the language as people use it.” They are, in lexicographical terms, descriptive rather than prescriptive: They describe the language as it is deployed, rather than prescribe how it should be. Dictionaries, in this vision, allow for a kind of linguistic libertarianism: One can follow their conventions, or not. One can disrupt, or not. English is a notoriously irrational language, bound occasionally by sensible rules of grammar but more often by arbitrary norms that have sprung up, proven useful, and then become—a word that has been a popular lookup in Merriam-Webster of late—normalized.
Which is to say that, as Stamper puts it, “your high-school English teachers lied to you.” The rules of English—the words it has created, the grammar it has codified—are “rules” only insofar as speakers and writers find it useful to abide by them. The rise of “y’all” and the decline of “whom” and the reclamation of “queer” and the many, many terms that arose from digital discourse to find relevance in IRL communication—they are innovations that emerged in spite of the norms of American English, and, then, that stuck around precisely because of them. And they are terms that, once they proved their momentary staying power, were dutifully added to the record by the logo-loggers at Merriam-Webster and its fellow dictionaries.
“Good grammar,” however, remains a powerful, and persistent, and troublingly political, idea. It is to some extent a necessary one, sure, lest we have linguistic anarchy. But it can also be weaponized. It can be used not just to connect people, but also to sort them and categorize them and otherwise divide them. Stamper notes that African-American Vernacular English, AAVE, is sometimes interpreted as less than, rather than merely slightly distinct from, other dialects of English. And she suggests the many ways that pointing out other people’s usage errors can function not merely as a nerdy sport, but also as an exercise in elitism.
She also suggests how intimately snobbery itself—grammar, seen as a sign of education and social worth—has been bound up in the overall history of the English dictionary. While “grammar” as we tend to think of it today—eight parts of speech, tidily (and sometimes frustratingly) modular in nature—was first codified in the 2nd century B.C. (and based on, as so many other linguistic edicts would be, ancient Latin and Greek), English, that messy mishmash of a language, wasn’t standardized until the 15th century. It didn’t become the bureaucratic language of England itself until 1417, when Henry V ordered the first bureaucratic record to be made in Britain’s newish vernacular.
The earliest English usage guides—the precursors to dictionaries as we know them today—sprang up as English wealth was expanding from the aristocracy to the merchant class, and doubled as guides to etiquette. They were part of the same prescriptivist impulse that motivates many of the grammar scolds of the 21st century: Daniel Defoe wanted to establish an English “academy” that would inject “purity and propriety of style” into the newly literarily-legitimized English language; Jonathan Swift and John Dryden entertained similar aspirations to create early forms of the governmental language protections that France and Spain enacted in attempts to keep their languages “pure.”
The men’s desires for English, which arose from their love for English, were a response to their historical moment: In an age of newfound social and economic mobility, good grammar—good, patriotic English grammar—became seen as a sign not just of one’s education, but of one’s social standing and worth. In 1762, Robert Lowth, the bishop of London, published A Short Introduction to British Grammar: With Critical Notes. Lowth’s preface declared that “it is with reason expected of every person of a liberal education, and it is indispensably required of everyone who undertakes to inform or entertain the public, that he should be able to express himself with propriety and accuracy.” His manual was one of many guides that were sold, Stamper notes, under the general assumption that “good manners, good morality, and good grammar all go hand in hand.”
It’s an idea that remains with us, embedded in Lynne Truss’s attack on the use of “it’s” as a possessive pronoun, and in the tagline of the popular Facebook group The Official Grammar Police (“I am judging you’re your grammar”). It’s an idea that lingers, as well, in the businessman-turned-self-appointed-grammarian N.M. Gwynne’s argument, made in his 2013 book The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English, that good grammar is a means not just to social respectability, but to happiness itself. (“In summary of the proof: Grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible. Therefore, happiness depends at least partly on good grammar.”)
Words are not merely words, and not merely tools. They are intimate. They are extensions of ourselves.
These notions of the normality—and, indeed, the morality—of “good English” complicate Stamper’s own professional humility. Language may be a tool of human communication, and dictionaries may simply record the shape of those tools as they exist within a particular moment in time; but the reality, as Stamper well knows, is much more complex than her simple observe-record-define formula might suggest. The history of the dictionary is not merely a history of English being defended, but also a history of dictionaries being debated: What should dictionaries do, actually? Should they prescribe English usage? Should they proscribe it?
This is the paradox of the English dictionary, and it is one that quietly infuses Stamper’s delightful history of that product: A dictionary is a determinedly apolitical document that will always be, to some extent, determinedly politicized. Its pages, whether tangible or digital, will always offer an awkward interplay between the normal and the normative. Samuel Johnson, the ur-lexicographer (and a laborer who argued that dictionary-writing required “neither the light of learning, nor the activity of genius,” but merely “the proper toil of artless industry”), nonetheless resisted including Americanisms in A Dictionary of the English Language; Noah Webster, for reasons both opposite and identical, resisted including British conventions in his American dictionary.
In 2003, Merriam-Webster, using the typical lexicographical method—observe words in the wild; exhaustively document evidence of new usages; update words’ entries accordingly—updated its definition for “marriage” to acknowledge that same-sex couples were entering that institution. The new definition provoked a write-in campaign to Merriam-Webster, accusing the dictionary of politics-via-lexicon. The anger was extremely predictable. Because—and this is the other thing a history of dictionaries will make abundantly clear—words are not merely words, and not merely tools. They are intimate. They are extensions of ourselves. They are one of the few immediate ways we have to take that small piece of reality that is ours—the mind, the self, the soul, choose whichever word in the dictionary seems most apt to you—and offer it to other people.
Word by Word, as it happens, enters the scene during a time of anxiety about those words—in American English, in particular. “Fake news” and “alternative facts” and the moment’s general epistemic panics come with some other panicky questions: Do words, in the end, matter? Can they be used, still, to share information and change minds? Language has long been a weapon, and a front, in the American culture wars (see: marriage, n., the state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law). Now, in a very real sense, it is also the thing being fought for. Facts, meaning, a culture enabled by shared truths—these are all, currently, at stake. Dictionaries (and Merriam-Webster, in particular) are doing their own part in all this. They are, in bids for continued relevance, operating more and more as quasi-journalistic outlets. They are functioning not merely as reference works or as histories, but also as soft suggestions that the ground beneath us can still be “common.”
It’s hard to read Stamper’s eloquent love letter to letters themselves and not come away convinced that dictionaries, stodgy and nimble and proud and humble and old and new, are something else, too: metaphors. For linguistic utilitarianism, for the productive interplay between the amateur and the professional, for the creative communal energies that will tend to drive the most thriving cultures. And for the notion that progress has a way of ignoring whatever rules might be enacted to prevent it. “It’s” becomes “its,” and “you’re” becomes “your” becomes “ur,” and lightning fires have not, as yet, burned it all down. And taco, sari, woke, multicultural, love—there they all are, in the dictionary, not just because they are useful vessels of human connection, but also because, in the dictionary, inclusion is the default setting. Diction is more useful when it is varied. Grammar is more fun when it allows for liberties to be taken with it. Language is more effective when it is quirky, and experimental, and above all welcoming—whatever, and irregardless of what, the scolds might have to say about it.
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Image of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Author(s):
Kory Stamper
Release Date:
March 13, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Pantheon
Pages:
320
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Stevie Godson
It’s difficult to describe quite how delightful this book is for a word nerd. For one thing, it’s hard to remember to breathe while reading it, especially at the start, what with all the words and excitements flying around in a jumble of thoughts, ideas, and light-bulb moments.
Anyone even wanting to read a book about dictionaries must surely first possess an almost irrational love of words. If you do, then this is the book for you. Author Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and editor at Merriam-Webster, offers an informed, irreverent and witty take on it all.
If you’re reading this review it’s probably safe to say you’re something of a word nerd yourself: the owner of a pet grammar peeve or two at best; an immoveable, prescriptive pedant at worst.
In the battle for supremacy between prescriptivists and descriptivists, the scary so-called Grammar Nazis often seem to rule. Confrontational websites and social media pages abound. Venturing an opinion on any of them can be as (emotionally) bloody as any episode of Game of Thrones—only without the sweeping scenery. Or the dragons. Or the costumes. Or the damsels constantly dropping their frocks.
Forget all that. This is far more serious.
Anyone wanting to research and define the words that fill dictionaries must be pretty tough-skinned, too, if not downright brave. Believe it or not, the author and some of her colleagues have been known to receive death threats—taken very seriously by management—from fanatics angered by the inclusion of certain words or definitions (like same-sex marriage, a relatively recent trigger).
The thing about dictionaries, though, is that despite what your mother, teacher, or any other bossy boots may have told you, these learned logbooks are not there to tell you what to do with words, or how they may or may not be used. Their job is simply to record words in common usage—where they come from, how they’re spelled, what they mean, and how they’re used—including those considered by some to be rude, crude, or unattractive.
“Each word must be given equal treatment, even when you think the word that has come under your consideration is a foul turd that should be flushed from English,” says Stamper, and she should know.
In Word by Word, she not only lifts the curtain to let us peek behind the semantic scenes, she also lets us in on all sorts of lesser known linguistic history.
Much of the inside info she spills is unforgettable—and not just the comically rude bits, although there’s no denying they do help stuff to stick in the psyche.
For example: “Who thought that ‘pumpernickel’ was a good name for dark rye bread,” she asks. “Because when you trace the word back to its German origins, you find it means ‘fart goblin’ and now you cannot help but blench and giggle whenever you see pumpernickel.”
I guarantee you won’t forget its meaning (and not just to ensure you’re the life of your next party, as her footnote on the subject suggests).
Word by Word is a gloriously (occasionally even uproariously) well written book, and unsurprisingly erudite. Too late, I discover, I’ve found my spirit home—a pokey cubicle in an almost silent, slightly creepy, old building filled with idiosyncratic people, piles of reference books, pens, stubby pencils (“. . . now hoarded against the coming Pencil Apocalypse”) and stacks of variously hued index cards.
If your interest is piqued, do read this book. If you love it, spread the word and it may well find the wider audience it surely deserves.
Stevie Godson is a columnist for South African newspaper the Daily Dispatch, a copy editor and a former books page editor.
A Journey Into the
Merriam-Webster Word
Factory
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER MARCH 22, 2017
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in
America, has turned itself into a social media powerhouse over the past few years. Its
editors star in online videos on hot-button topics like the serial comma, gender
pronouns and the dreaded “irregardless.” Its Twitter feed has become a viral
sensation, offering witty — and sometimes pointedly political — commentary on the
news of the day.
Kory Stamper, a lexicographer here, is very much part of the vanguard of wordnerd
celebrities. Her witty “Ask the Editor” video contributions, like a classic on the
plural of octopus, and personal blog, Harmless Drudgery, have inspired a Kory
Stamper Fan Club on Facebook. One online admirer has carefully tracked minute
changes in her hair (which, for one thing, is purple).
But the company remains very much a bricks-and-mortar operation, still based
in this small New England city where the Merriam brothers bought the rights to
Noah Webster’s dictionary in the 1840s and carried on his idea of a distinctly
American language. And this month, Ms. Stamper, the author of the new book
“Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” was more than happy to offer a
tour of some of the distinctly analog oddities in the basement.
[Read more: Three Words We Love to Argue About]
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She walked me through a hallway that seemed to double as a museum of
superannuated filing cabinet technology. She offered a glimpse of the dungeonlike
storage room used as a podcast studio and cheerfully pointed out some of the
creepier company heirlooms, like mangy historical dioramas donated by local
schoolchildren and an inflatable dictionary with arms and legs, created for a longago
promotional campaign.
But the real jaw-dropper was the Backward Index, which includes some 315,000
cards listing words spelled … backward.
“It was conceived of as another way of shuffling information,” Ms. Stamper said
of the index, which seems to have been produced intermittently from the 1930s to
the ’70s. “Basically, someone sat here and typed up all the entries backwards. And
then went crazy.”
Craziness is a bit of a leitmotif in “Word by Word.” The book, published last
week by Pantheon, mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along
with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries. The
Atlantic called it “an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the
English language” that’s also “a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the
grammar scolds.”
Ms. Stamper calls it “a love letter to dictionaries in English,” if one that allows
for some mixed feelings.
“People have so many fears about what their use of language says about them,”
she said. “When you talk to people about dictionaries, they often start talking about
other things, like which words they love, and which words they hate. And it’s
perfectly fine to hate parts of the language.”
Ms. Stamper, 42, grew up in Colorado and majored in medieval studies at Smith
College. When she interviewed at Merriam-Webster in 1998, she was puzzled to
learn the job involved writing definitions.
“I just thought, ‘Why would you need to do that?’” she recalled. “Hasn’t the
dictionary already been written?”
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“Word by Word” describes her own initiation into the art of lexicography, which
involves wrestling with the continuous evolution of language. She walks the reader,
chapter by chapter, through different aspects of a definition, including grammar,
pronunciation, etymology and more.
Her first definition, by her recollection, was “blue plate.” Since then, she
estimates, she has had a hand in hundreds of thousands of others.
“Take,” which she wrestled with for a month, was the longest in column inches.
(It’s also one, she notes wryly, that very few people will ever read.)
“God,” which she revised for the company’s unabridged dictionary (now being
updated online only), took the longest — four months — and involved not just
extensive reading but consultation with clergy members, theologians and academics,
who often responded to her email queries with long philosophical disquisitions.
Which leads to an important point. Dictionaries are often seen as argumentsettling
arbiters of truth. But their job, Ms. Stamper notes, isn’t to say what
something is, but to objectively and comprehensively catalog the many different
ways words are used by real people.
Ms. Stamper has no patience for self-styled purists who quail at “irregardless” —
an actual word, she notes. (She is O.K. with ending sentences with prepositions as
well as — brace yourself — split infinitives.) But she also describes being caught up in
some higher-stakes fights.
One chapter takes an uncomfortable look at the racial assumptions baked into a
Merriam-Webster definition of the color term “nude.” Another recounts the furor
that erupted in 2009 when it added a subdefinition to its entry on “marriage,” noting
uses to refer to same-sex unions that weren’t necessarily legally sanctioned.
That brought reams of hate mail, but most interactions with readers are
friendlier. When Merriam-Webster began its videos, the heavy-breathing fan mail
prompted her to create an “Ask the Editor Video Hotness Chart.”
“People would write in saying, ‘The editor with the glasses is so hot,’” she said.
“Which is hysterical, since we all wear glasses.”
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Stalkers who show up at the offices in Springfield, alas, may have trouble
finding actual people. Ms. Stamper telecommutes from her home outside
Philadelphia. During the visit, the halls were eerily deserted. No heads popped above
cubicles. Only a few faintly murmuring voices were heard.
But at the center of the main upstairs work area stands a howling mass of
irreplaceable historical chatter: the Consolidated Files.
The files, kept in red cabinets that snake around the middle of the room, contain
millions of citations: small slips of paper documenting individual word uses, drawn
from newspapers, books, radio, packaging and other sources, stretching from the
1980s back well into the 19th century.
These days, lexicographers work from an updated digitized database. But Ms.
Stamper opened a drawer and pulled out a favorite “pink,” as editorial notes are
called, from the 1950s sternly declaring that the word “cracker” “could not be
defined as a ‘biscuit’ nor as a ‘wafer.’”
“This just sums up the job so well,” she said in a sub-sotto-voce whisper.
If dictionaries are a form of information technology, the building is in some
ways a catalog of obsolescence. A downstairs gallery includes a 1934 poster
advertising the second edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary, billed
as “one of the thickest books ever printed.” (The technology needed to bind it, Ms.
Stamper said, no longer exists.)
There are also oddities like an asymmetrically bound Seventh New Collegiate
from 1969, designed so it could hold itself up — an innovation that failed to catch on,
probably because if you open it too far from the center, it falls over.
The dictionary industry itself has been listing of late, as printed dictionaries
have given way to online dictionaries, many of them free. Merriam-Webster, a
subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica, itself announced layoffs just as she was
finishing her manuscript. (It currently has 70 employees.)
There are only about 50 lexicographers working at dictionary companies in the
United States today, Ms. Stamper estimated. But their work, she believes, remains as
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vital as it was in Noah Webster’s day.
“There’s something to having a bunch of nerds sitting in an office
dispassionately reading lots and lots of material and distilling the meaning of a word
as it’s been used in lots of places,” she said. “It really is this weird democratic
process.”
Correction: March 25, 2017
An article on Thursday about Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in
America, described the current edition of the company’s unabridged dictionary
incorrectly. It remains in print; it is not an online-only publication. (Future updates to
the dictionary, however, will be made only online.)
Follow Jennifer Schuessler on Twitter @jennyschuessler
A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the
headline: A Tour of the Word Factory.
Word By Word makes the surprisingly convincing case for “irregardless”
By Caitlin PenzeyMoog @penzeymoog
Mar 17, 2017 2:46 PM
Image: Libby McGuire
Image: Libby McGuire
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“The dictionary” is one of those background items that’s always just there, little thought about and quickly forgotten after looking up a word. Those of us who deal with the English language for a living might appreciate a particularly illuminating definition, but the focus is always on the word itself, not on the person who took the time to define it. But behind every dictionary definition is a lexicographer, and it’s their curious, somewhat strange world that’s lovingly uncovered in Kory Stamper’s Word By Word. Stamper is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary. The book’s subtitle—“the secret life of dictionaries”—aptly sums up what you’re getting yourself into when you crack open the book, and while that may sound dry, this world is a compelling, peculiar one, well worth getting lost in for a while.
And thanks to Stamper’s assured prose, Word By Word is educational but also entertaining and surprisingly funny, never more so than when she describes the office culture at Merriam-Webster. “The sepulchrally quiet” floor where the lexicographers work is kept in hushed silence, as speaking out loud poses too great a threat to the concentration needed to define words. This is where the lexicographers “spend the better parts of their lives writing and editing dictionary definitions, thinking deeply about adverbs, and slowly, inexorably going blind.” No phones crowd the lexicographers’ desks, where piles of papers bearing word usage are measured in inches and their rearrangement by a cleaning crew can send a lexicographer into (silent) hysterics. When Stamper concludes her long work on the definition take, she celebrates: “I was so pleased with myself that I pushed back from my desk, looked left and right to make sure that no one was within glancing range, and then emphatically punched the air and mouthed ‘YES.’”
But it’s the drama of defining words and the passionate case Stamper makes for dictionaries and the messy, chaotic English language that gives the book its weight. English constantly evolves, but you wouldn’t know it from the way some pedants insist on following arbitrary grammatical rules or enforcing their own pet peeves as “proper” English, which often comes from a place of racism or classism. We’re also—very recently—in a political climate where the very definitions of words are politicized, as Trump’s administration bastardizes language to shroud and confuse. Even without this fraught 2017 context, though, Word By Word presents a worthy defense of English’s true nature, which is messy and weird and surprising and not at all the orderly thing English teachers make it out to be. No where is this lesson better made than in the chapter on irregardless. Early on in Word By Word, where Stamper lays out the basics, she helpfully explains descriptivism and prescriptivism, the battling philosophies of the English language:
The whole notion that the dictionary merely records the language as people use it grates against what we generally think dictionaries do. Many people—and many people who think they’d be good at this lexicography gig—believe that the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that its job is to set boundaries of decorum around this profligate language like a great linguistic housemother setting curfew. The language is protected, kept right, pure, good. This is called “prescriptivism,” and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work at all.
Yes, the dictionary is “descriptivist,” meaning words are entered based not on some elitist judgement but simply by “widespread and sustained use in written English prose.” Even descriptivist-minded folks will be challenged to rethink their assumptions about “proper” English words, and why we think of some words as improper at all. Stamper’s chapter about irregardless—that most scorned of words—is this book in miniature: a fascinating, even enthralling, examination of the way words actually work in our language, warts and all. Stamper’s personal epiphany with “irregardless” is the epitome of descriptivist lexicography, as her research leads her to see the word in a new light:
I realized, that in spite of all the violent hatred leveled at “irregardless,” it was not only still in use but had maybe developed a second, emphatic meaning sometime back in the 19th century that had just barely clung to life but spread though various speaking communities like wildfire. “Irregardless” wasn’t just a static irritation: it was an active force of language growth.
Stamper might as well conclude this chapter with “that’s right, motherfuckers,” so neatly and authoritatively does she take down any assumptions that we can control language: English doesn’t care what you want it to be; it is its own uncontrollable monster. Word By Word is an eloquent primer on this baffling, lovely language we use, and Stamper is our wryly funny tour guide.
Anyone who spends time dealing with or thinking about words will appreciate both the creativity and the drudgery of Stamper’s calling. The difference between measly and teeny is something that’s obsessively deconstructed; the definition of bitch is agonized over. If there’s any drawback in Word By Word, it’s Stamper’s occasional tendency to drop tantalizing asides without going into more detail, as when she mentions another lexicographer who spent 12 months working on the top-10 most looked-up words on Merriam-Webster’s website. But what are they? Of course, Merriam-Webster’s website is a treasure trove of information on this front, and well worth a visit (for fun!). If anything, Stamper’s dangling of information just makes you want to crack open your dictionary—not exactly a bad result for a lexicographer.
Word by Word: Kory Stamper Reveals the Secret Life of Dictionaries
Sarah Harrison Smith on March 30, 2017
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Word-by-Word225A “lexicographer,” Samuel Johnson wrote in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, is “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Presumably this was tongue in cheek; who would describe themselves that way? Certainly it doesn’t apply to Kory Stamper, the longtime editor at Merriam-Webster whose new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is one of the critical successes of the season.
For one thing, Stamper doesn’t look the part. Seen discussing why, say, the plural of “moose” is “moose” in “Ask the Editor” videos on YouTube, Ms. Stamper seems to be fighting back a smile and suppressing a slightly sassy shoulder wiggle; her hair color veers from fuchsia in one episode to petrol blue in the next—hardly the mouse brown you’d expect of someone whose work, by her own admission, is solitary and silent. Though there’s no tattoo in sight, viewers may suspect there’s one lurking somewhere—something clever, possibly in Latin.
Stamper’s tone in Word by Word may also come as a surprise. While indisputably erudite, her writing voice is breezy, irreverent, and frequently ribald. You might not think you are interested in the history of dictionaries or how Ms. Stamper came to work as a lexicographer, but spend a few sentences in her company, and you will realize that you are, in fact, fascinated. Her “sprachgefühl”—or sensitivity to language—will spark your curiosity about how we came to speak the way we do and what our words really mean, whether it’s “pumpernickel” (translation: fartgoblin) or “nude,” or “marriage,” or “muggle.”
Stamper spoke to the Amazon Book Review by phone. For further entertainment, you can watch her discuss odd plurals, the difference between "which" and "that," and other interesting lexical conundrums in the Merriam-Webster “Ask the Editor” videos on YouTube or at Merriam-Webster.com. Stamper also has her own blog, which she’s named, with a hat tip to Samuel Johnson, “harm·less drudg·ery.”
Amazon Book Review: At Merriam-Webster, your job is, essentially, to define words based on how people use them. What makes someone good at that?
Kory Stamper: Well, I think the first characteristic is that you have to be comfortable working alone. It’s entirely solitary. The second is that you really have to bring a dispassionate and critical eye to the language while devoting yourself wholly to the language. A lot of people liken it to living a monastic life, but more than that, you have to set aside your own prejudices about how language works in favor of this dispassionate but intense study of how language actually works. That’s the hard part. If you love language and you’re at all good at it, the reason you are is because of all these rules. Then you discover those rules are not rules, they’re just some dude’s opinions most of the time. That can be a hard thing. If you devote yourself to being good at grammar, it’s hard to find out that that isn’t grammar. You are quickly disabused of the notion that that language is either right or wrong. Instead language is about context.
Were there signs you’d be good at this when you were a child?
I was a voracious reader and an early reader, and I read everything—I just read everything. I would read the encyclopedias in our house—and we had two, a medical encyclopedia and the World Book Encyclopedia that my parents scrimped and saved for. I liked reading about things for the joy of reading about things, not necessarily to learn about things, or for school, but just because I liked reading. It was reading that was important to me. That was pretty much the only sign that I could do this job.
How did your family feel about your reading habits?
They thought I was weird. My family is very loud. They like football; they like arguing politics at the dinner table. If there’s free time there’s an assumption that you are going to be playing a game. I was not like that. I was very quiet. I spent most of my adolescence locked in my room, which my parents thought was unfathomable. Looking back, I’m sure they were grateful that that’s all I did as a teenager, but at the time they thought, “This is a little much.”
My parents are quite literate but not at all literary. My dad reads all the Clive Cussler books and Hot Rodder magazine on the john. So obviously, they knew I was writing a book, and when I sent them a copy, my dad called and said, “This is nice! This is a nice book! I’m going to read it.” My dear, sweet parents...you know, they read, but they’re not reading Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. I said, “It’s OK if you don’t read it.” They’re both very proud of me. They way my mom put it was, “I guess all that reading finally paid off.”
Did you initiate the video series for Merriam-Webster? Video and dictionaries seem like an interesting, but not obvious, combination.
No, we had a director of marketing and she was like, “Well, we need to increase engagement on the website,” and she said, “We have all these editors who define but also write ‘Word of the Day.’ We have this resource no one knows we have. We should let them know we have this resource!” She approached a bunch of editors and said, “Would you be willing to write and be in videos?” and a bunch of editors said, “No way.”
She came to me and said, “I think you’d be good at this; do you want to give it a shot?” I said, “Sure.” We had assumed they’d be a one-off.
We did four of them, from memory, in one take. They were super homespun and plain. In one I was wearing a blouse that was short sleeved and cut in such a way that from my shoulders up it looked like I was wearing scrubs. We thought we’d do 12 videos, but they took off, which I don’t think any of us were expecting. One video went viral—that was on the plural of "octopus." It must have 2 million views. It was a weird thing. Suddenly all three of us who do the videos were internet sensations. Not what you bargain for when you take this job.
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“Nude” and “marriage” are hot-topic words in your book—they’re words that have changed meaning over time, and there are political implications to those changes. Any you’re working on now?
I am not. This is the funny thing about lexicography. There are a handful of words that will always be controversial and difficult. They’re obscene words or they’re slurs. You just assume those will be hard to handle, no matter what you do. The definition of “nude” was a great example. It had been 7 to 10 years since we had really gone through the evidence, and that was when the meaning of the word really changed.
The words that take the most brainpower are not words that anyone would think would do. They’re also not words that most people look up. I spent a month defining the word “take.” People would say, “Why would you waste your time on ‘take’?” It’s evidence of a very objective and democratic approach to all language. “Take” should get just as much attention as the f-word or “marriage.” Lexicography really views all words on pretty level playing fields in terms of how you approach defining. Every word gets equal lexicographical attention because every word that comes under your review is there for a reason. It’s not my job to judge whether people use the word worthily or whether they should use that word at all.
How has the digital age changed the nature of what you do?
Social media gives you a direct link now to people who use dictionaries and can comment on entries directly. It’s sometimes great and sometimes overwhelming. On the positive side, the internet gives lexicographers more people to draw on. If I have a regional word in my batch, like “Yins,” and I define it as only being used in Pittsburgh, as soon as that’s published online, we might hear from people from Ohio, who might also use “Yins.” That’s an interesting way that lexicographers can collect more information about words.
The internet means that people don’t engage with the dictionary as a dead book now. They see it as something that’s active, that people are working on. It helps raise people’s awareness that it’s always developing.
I learn new words on Twitter anytime I go and take a look at something. I think technology opens up more language to people so there are more words and phrases they want to know about. Technology in general opens a wider world of language to anyone who uses it.
What do you think about the future of dictionaries?
In terms of the future of dictionaries, there’s no way you can guess at the technology that’s coming. There are lots of people who are like, “Yech, why do we need dictionaries?” We still need some objective definition of language. We are starting to become suspect of everything we see online. To know that this is how dictionaries are made, this is how they approach words, I think is really invaluable and more important than ever as we move forward. I think we like to know that there’s an objective meaning to something. Right? That a word’s definition is actually what it means and not what some guy in an office may think it should mean.
What do you read for pleasure?
It’s very hard for me when I’m reading for pleasure to not also read for work. I read everything. I read a lot a lot of fiction and I’m a very avid rereader of fiction. It drives my husband bonkers because I’ll read a book over and over again. I binge-read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. I’ve been on a big Shirley Jackson kick; I binge-read We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
I’ve been reading more nonfiction, though I read it in a very different way. I don’t read a ton of magazines or newspapers because I do that a lot at work.
Recently I’ve been on a graphic novel and comic book kick. I found a couple of really fascinating graphic novels/comics. I’ve [enjoyed] the new Ms. Marvel series—not something I’d normally be drawn to, but I love the way the main character is written.
There’s the comic books series Saga, which a friend turned me on to, and John Lewis’s March, which I’m working through with my teenage daughter.
One place lexicographers could probably do a little better is in researching language use in graphic novels, comics, sci-fi, and fantasy. There are types of language you’ll find that will originate in sci-fi and fantasy. “Kryptonite” is a great example. It was a Superman thing for decades and then seeped out into broader language. They’re important historical resources.
If you hadn’t become a lexicographer, what do you think you’d have done?
I love science. In fact, before I found this field I was planning on doing lab work in biology. I thought being a pathologist seemed super sexy.
Or honestly, I worked as a baker and I loved working in the bakery. I love tactile work. I could see myself sticking it out and being a baker. I love the physicality. You go home at night and you are sore and covered with flour and dough conditioner and you’ve gotten something done.
Thank you so much, Kory. It’s been fun talking to you.
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