Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

When the dictionary finally hits the market, there is no grand party or celebration. (Too loud, too social.) We’re already working on the next update to that dictionary, because language has moved on. There will never be a break. A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.

But logic tells us that in English, ’s attached to a noun signals possession: the dog’s dish, the cat’s toy, the lexicographer’s cry. So if English is logical, and there are simple rules to follow, why doesn’t “it’s” signal possession? We know that ’s also signals a contraction, but we don’t have any problems with differentiating between “the dog’s dish” and “the dog’s sleeping”—why should we suddenly have problems with “it’s dish” and “it’s sleeping”?

So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.

Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales?

There are times when the marginalization of a dialect, or of vocabulary from that dialect, has more dire results.

It’s hard to jump to the conclusion that the jury would have decided differently had the interview been transcribed differently. But the “mights” weigh very heavily: had a native speaker of AAVE been on the jury or in the courtroom, Jeantel’s testimony might not have been discredited, and the verdict might have been different. That is, as we say in my native dialect, worth reckoning.

(“Doth any wise man think, that wit resteth in strange words…? Do we not speak, because we would haue others to vnderstand vs?”).

I was gobsmacked: here I was, a recent graduate of a women’s college, getting schooled on gendered language by an old guy. And rightly so: I brought to the definition my own assumptions about the gender of people who have in the past run for president. But a good lexicographer weighs the untold future as well as the told past and present: Is it so inconceivable that a woman could run for president? By assuming that the gender-neutral “he” was going to be fine here, because presidents are all men, I had committed the sin of editorialization.

The other big problem with writing your own examples is that you sometimes write out of your own experiences, which are often not the experiences of the people who will be reading this dictionary.

It seems ludicrous—all that futzing for “a”? No one pays attention to little words like this. Everyone knows what they mean, and all this foofaraw has exactly zero impact on the way we live our lives. Then again, debate over the meaning of “is”—one of the simplest words in the English language—helped set in motion the impeachment of a sitting U.S. president.

But reclamation isn’t always so straightforward. First, it assumes that the community which is maligned is just that—a single community, rather than a diverse group of people who happen to share a particular ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or state of life.

But the edits made to her definition were from what she considered to be “a rich, white perspective, unfortunately.” Her editor had changed the force of the definition so that the word “microaggression” referred to comments that were merely perceived to be offensive. “But, no,” she said, “they’re just offensive—but offensive in a way that’s not always obvious to the person who is perpetrating the offense.”

Is this my own bias against men using “bitch”? Absolutely, one informed by a lifetime of having men sneer “bitch” at me for any reason, all reasons, and no reasons.

But language is deeply personal, even for the lexicographer: it’s the way that we describe who we are, what the world around us is, delineate what we think is good from what we think is bad.

Why do we say that someone’s “worth their salt”? Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commodity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a salary).

Further, the way that English grows doesn’t make sense. The history of English is full of messiness and illogic because the English language is a true democracy, built entirely by the people who use and have used it, and people, generally speaking, are messy and illogical.

Who thought that “pumpernickel” was a good name for a dark rye bread? Because when you trace the word back to its German origins, you find it means “fart goblin,”

Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language change itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn’t change is a dead language, and as much as etymological fallacists seem to love the purity of Latin,*6 you’ll notice that none of them have abandoned that whore English for it.

Every republic runs its greatest risk not so much from discontented soldiers as from discontented multi-millionaires. They are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality, and the larger the population which is said to be equal with them, the less content they are. Their natural desire is to be a class apart, and if they cannot have titles at home, they wish to be received as equals by titled people abroad. That is exactly our present position, and would be the end of the American dream. All past republics have been overthrown by rich men, or nobles, and we have plenty of Sons of the Revolution ready for the job, and plenty of successful soldiers deriding the Constitution, unrebuked by the Executive or by public opinion. This citation sounds as if it were written last year. It’s from 1900.

Jimmy Carter spent his time in the U.S. Navy working on propulsion systems for nuclear submarines, acting as an engineering officer of a nuclear power plant, and actually being lowered into a nuclear reactor core that had melted down in order to dismantle it. To my mind, he has earned the right to pronounce “nuclear” however he damned well pleases.

We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to mean something, and the difference is palpable.