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It may be observed that the English language is not a system of logic,
What appears to be a straightforward word ends up being a linguistic fun house of doors that open into air and staircases that lead to nowhere.
Better writers than I have used the singular “their” or “they,” and the language has not yet fallen all to hell.
If my sojourn into premed taught me anything, it was that numbers and I didn’t get along.
Old English is the great-granddaddy of Modern English, an ancestor language that was spoken in England between roughly A.D. 500 and 1100. It looks like drunk, sideways German with some extra letters thrown in for good measure:
historic ephemera sprinkled throughout a building whose aesthetic is best described as Office Bland.
Neither group realizes that their dictionary is a human document, constantly being compiled, proofread, and updated by actual, living, awkward people.
If I gave dictionaries so little thought, then I gave lexicography itself bugger all. This is the song of my people. Most lexicographers had no clue that such a career path existed until they were smack in the middle of it.
Not everyone has sprachgefühl, and you don’t know if you are possessed of it until you are knee-deep in the English language, trying your best to navigate the mucky swamp of it.
I nearly wept for joy at hearing I wouldn’t have a phone at my desk.
He cast an eye over my résumé and asked with some incredulity if I enjoyed interacting with people, because if I did, then I should understand this job promised nothing of the sort.
Circuitous and less efficient than a conversation? Absolutely. But risk walking to a colleague’s desk only to see them startle and freeze like a rabbit as the hawk swoops in? No, thank you.
English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.
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 A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.
No matter how book smart, we are all idiots at seventeen.
a small table, around which four editors can sit comfortably and six in introverted terror, warily holding their elbows to their sides and breathing shallowly so as not to make unintentional physical contact with anyone else in the room.
You don’t decide what part of speech a word is—the general speaking, writing public does.
Adverbs look like everything else; they are the junk drawer of the English language (“like so”).
the more you write, the less you know.
The Transitizer, as some of us call it, is a pink with a sentence on it and a hole cut out where the verb of the sentence is so you can lay the card over your problem verb and read the resulting sentence to see if that verb is, in fact, transitive. The Transitizer reads, “I’ma ______ ya ass.” I’ma bend ya ass (to Webster’s will). There you go: this sense of “bend” must be transitive.
The reality is that your high-school English teachers lied to you about what words can do because doing so makes English much, much simpler.
because English is so flexible, two lexicographers with the same training can look at the same sentence, refer to the same grammars, tear out the same amount of hair, and yet place the target word in two different parts of speech.
I do all manner of nerd pyrotechnics to figure this out:
now we’re dabbling with grammatical agnosticism, not sure of anything anymore.
Like many things that are claimed as Western inventions, grammar was first practiced in the East.
o 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.
As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy.
So great was my surprise that I actually said, out loud and at a normal volume, “You have got to be shitting me.” Dan Brandon, one of the science editors who sat near me, answered from the depth of his cubicle, “Probably.”
All of these complaints point in one direction: “irregardless” is evidence that English is going to hell, and you, Merriam-Webster, are skipping down the easy path, merrily swinging the handbasket.
It may be that “irregardless” isn’t the superlative form of “regardless,” as my correspondent claimed, but an intensive form of “regardless,” just like the infix “fucking” turns “absolutely” into the intensive “absofuckinglutely.”
Logic be damned: everybody knows that the more syllables you slap onto a word, the smarter you sound.
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.
A perfectly cromulent word. Sorry, world.
“They pay you to sit and read for eight hours a day?” Her eyes went glassy with delight.
English is a language that invites invention (whether you like it or not), and the glories of the Internet make it possible to spread that invention abroad (whether you like it or not).
I had the word “abecedarian.” It’s relatively rare, one of those ten-dollar words that people whip out when trying to prove that they competed in the National Spelling Bee.
A week of editorial time stuffed down a rabbit hole, and all I came out of it with was the knowledge that I am the world’s biggest epistemophilic dork.
The Internet has also posed another problem for the lexicographer: sources can be changed, edited, or disappear at will.
anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the gold standard of fluency isn’t your reading comprehension but your ability to ask a native speaker of that language which team they favor in the World Cup and to fully understand and participate in the argument that will inevitably ensue.
the Internet gives everyone with access the opportunity to be a well-read author.
in the pre-corpora days we did citational spackling ourselves
But, c’mon: ho-bag. On public radio.
And while you learn the lingo, you also know that you will have to code-switch between lexicography jargon (“sense,” “headword”) and words that normal people understand (“definition,” “word”), which is frustrating because you are learning about the precision of language, and here you have to be wicked imprecise in order to communicate with people.
the definition of “hella” (a California adverb that means “very”):
Dude, do you even English? That defining job is hella bad.
It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.
I trained with two other editors, and it was common for Gil to have us read our definitions aloud so that we could benefit from hearing how dumb we all were.
It wasn’t all needless nitpicking; it was needful nitpicking.
no one starts writing a dictionary in A. Ever.
When space isn’t an issue, how do you know when to stop?
