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A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.
As we go through life (and particularly through school), we collect more blocks to stack on our foundation: don’t end sentences with prepositions; don’t use the passive voice; use “were” for “was” in conditional clauses (though not always, and the exceptions are more blocks to collect later). The blocks become smaller, able to be wedged into any noticeable gaps in our walls. “Lay” is used with a stated object (“lay the book on the table”) and “lie” is used without a stated object (“I’m going to lie down on the sofa”); “who” is only used in reference to people and “that” only in reference to
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We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.
That we have to learn Standard English proves that it is not our native dialect.
So Cawdrey has two lexicographical claims to fame: first proper monolingual English dictionary, and originator of the great lexicographical tradition of plagiarism.
People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for.
they say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind, and they are right.
It is unfortunate that the entries that take up most of the lexicographer’s time are often the entries that no one looks at.
Sometimes, in the delirium that sets in at the end of a project when you are proofreading pronunciations in six-point type for eight hours a day, a little corner of your mind wanders off to daydream about how perhaps your careful revision of “get” will somehow end with your winning the lottery, bringing about world peace, and finally becoming the best dancer in the room.
I hit my human limits about three-quarters of the way through the verb “take.” As I looked at a citation for “took first things first,” I felt myself slowly unspooling into idiocy. I knew the glyphs before me had to be words, because my job was all about words, and I knew they had to be English, because my job was all about English. But knowing something doesn’t make it true. This was all garbage, I thought, and as I felt my brain slip sideways, and the yawing ache open up in my gut, one thought flitted across my mind before I slammed headlong into the lexicographer’s
one definition meant to cover uses like “she took the sea air for her health” had been unfortunately phrased “to expose oneself to (as sun or air) for pleasure or physical benefit,” which I hurriedly changed to “to put oneself into (as sun, air, or water) for pleasure or physical benefit” so as not to encourage medicinal flashing.
Peter piped up. “I revised ‘run,’ ” he said quietly, then smiled. “It took me nine months.”
“Should we have cock at all?” asked one editor as they sailed down the cubicle aisle.
Around 1400, this sense began showing up in texts; one early citation gives us a line that sounds like it’s been pulled straight from the liner notes of a heavy metal album: “þou bycche blak as kole [thou bitch black as coal].”
How does a lexicographer, who sits within a particular cultural moment, with their own thoughts, feelings, experiences, prejudices (known and unknown), and assumptions—who is tasked with describing, to the best of their ability, the main denotative and connotative meanings of a word—adequately capture and communicate this mucky, hot mess?
Lexicography is linguistic surgery.
Surgeons and lexicographers exist within a strange lived duality: your patient—human or verbal—is at once an anonymous sum of parts that you can label, work on, know. Yet at the same time, those parts work in concert with other parts to form a person with a name, a family, a community, a dog, bills, a history, a mystery scar on the chin that you, in your expertise, cannot account for. You are an expert of the part and cannot hope to describe the whole.
The drawer was jam-packed; the evidence for “bitch” was nine linear inches of paper.
The force of the word’s full meaning is contained in something that lexicographers can’t measure: the interplay between intention and reception.
Modern lexicographers are trained to be objective and leave their own linguistic baggage at the door; modern lexicography is set up to make the definer anonymous and incorporeal. 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.
Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially accepted ways we can attack each other,
What genius, for instance, looked at the ragged edge of their sweater, laddering and unknitting itself with energy, and thought, “This is so bad that it’s not just raveling; it’s super-raveling. No: über-raveling. No, no, I got it: it’s frickin’ unraveling! Like, unreal amounts of raveling. Yeah, I’m going to call this ‘unraveling’ from now on.” 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,”*5 and now you cannot help but blench and giggle whenever you see pumpernickel.
Some people can’t deal with this wending and wandering. If English will not bend to their logic, then their logic will bend to English.
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.
We think that we have the right to go through the photo album of English’s life and throw away the pictures that don’t make sense—blurred pictures, or snaps from that unfortunate stage when it was surly and uncooperative. But those deviations from the plumb line contain surprises and delights not just about English but about the world we live in.
A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.
Is it low-class to pronounce “cadre” as \ˈka-ˌdrā\ (KA-dray), or is it preening and pretentious to pronounce it \ˈkä-dər\ (KAH-dur)? Which one will transform me from a lumpen buffoon into a lithe and elegant viscountess? Help me, O Dictionaries!
the incarcerated asking us to explain the difference between “misdemeanor” and “felony”; the parents who have lost a child and write hoping that we know of a simple word, like “widow” or “orphan,” that is a placeholder for their pain, some word that will spare them the inevitable and exhausting explication of their loss to a stranger. We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to mean something, and the difference is palpable.
It was clear that same-sex marriage cases were going to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States at some point in the future, and everyone knows that the members of the Court look at dictionaries when deciding a case.
Language always lags behind life.
“If you want to know what ‘FTW’ means, you can find that in any number of online acronym glossaries. But if you want to know what ‘disposition’ means, you really need a competently written definition.” She thinks for a moment. “I worked really, really hard on the definition of ‘build-out,’ but I’m sure no one has ever really looked at it.”
They’ll notice errors, but you can’t notice excellence in a dictionary, for the most part, because it consists of a lack of errors.”
