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one of the biggest problems in writing definitions: things change, and you are a lexicographer, not a clairvoyant.
“Words are stubborn little fuckers.”
English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.
People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for.
The example sentence should be less interesting than the definition. The problem, of course, is that the definitions are generally pretty boring; that is after all the lexicographer’s wheelhouse.
When called upon, you not only can’t think of any use that suits the definition, but you completely forget English altogether.
I have sent many an e-mail to Emily and Neil that began, “Help, I can’t English [sic].”
Do not write <she’s just a harmless drudge> at “drudge,” because there are only about fifty people in the English-speaking world who will get that reference, and they are all sitting within a twenty-five-foot radius of you, worrying about their own entries.
they say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind, and they are right. Editors are, at heart, twelve: if we can construe something as a fart or sex (or a fart and sex) joke, we will.
Once you have removed all vestiges of fun from your verbal illustration,
It’s not just semantic fiddliness that causes lexicographical pain.
A search for “the” in our in-house citation database returns over one million hits, which sends the lexicographer into fits of audible swearing, then weeping.
For a normal-sized word like “blemish,” it’s a matter of minutes. Five hours in, I had finished sorting the first box of citations for “take.”
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,
I am going to whip through this, and then I am going to take a two-week vacation, visit my local library, and go outside.
When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them a supply of water and enough nonperishable food to last several days.
My working definition of “desk” expanded as I ran out of flat spaces to stack citations.
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.
That night over dinner, my husband asked if I was okay. I looked up at him, utterly lost. “I don’t think I speak English anymore.”
The next morning, I came into work and discovered that the overnight cleaning crew had decided to move all the piles I had left on the floor, dumping them into a cascade of paper on my chair.
You spend all day elbows-deep in the language, so it’s inevitable that you can’t scrub it all off when you leave the building.
One part of many identity movements is linguistic reclamation. This is a process by which a maligned group—women, gay men, people of color, the disabled, and so on—take an inflammatory slur that’s been directed at them as a group and begin using it themselves as an identity marker of pride.
Take the case most often held up as a reclamation success story: “queer,” which was reclaimed by the AIDS activist group Queer Nation in the 1990s.
The “stupid person” sense of “ass” isn’t in the Bible, but it is in Shakespeare, which is a close second.
The rest of us gawp, as if Jim were an alchemist or magician, a Level-Ten Word Mage. He is, in a sense: he’s an etymologist.
No, he said in Finnish. I don’t speak Finnish.
He also left equally scholarly notes at entries like “twerking”
To the etymologist, “origin unknown” means that while there may be theories regarding a word’s origin, there’s no direct evidence that those theories are true. But to most people, “origin unknown” seems to mean “Please send us your best guess as to where this word came from, because we are idiots.”
Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles.
fallacists know, in their hearts, that the language is going to keep changing, and no amount of tantrums or threats on their part will stop that.
Isaac Asimov pleaded, “My opinions are strong, but not necessarily authoritative. Please realize that.”
A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.
This is one of the joys of dating: everything is older than you think it is.
hunting down dates for words can sometimes feel like gearing up for a lexicographical pissing contest—can we beat the OED?—there
Even though we explain what those dates represent in the front matter of the dictionary, which we evidently write and proofread entirely for our own amusement.
They collect pronunciations from instances of speech. That means, in short, that the pronunciation editor gets to spend all day watching TV. (Josh hesitates. “I spend more time on YouTube,” he says.)
Peter Sokolowski remembers being in the hallway outside the pronunciation editor’s office one day and hearing from within the office a very measured voice say, as blandly as possible, “Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.”
The second complaint is that the pronunciation of a foreign borrowed term is too Englishy.
Three things conspired against keeping \lan-zhrē\: the way we think French should sound, the way that English works, and our desire to be fancy.
And you are not alone, though here I ask you, again and graciously, to read the goddamned front matter.
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.
the lesser duties that can be set aside when the deadlines are not just looming but have begun climbing the building and pawing around inside for hostages.
the answer to “what’s the word for when you have to explain what kind of a thing you’re using when you didn’t have to do that in the past, like now we have to say ‘film camera’?”
We often have to tell these correspondents that lexicography doesn’t function like reality TV: people don’t get to vote words in or out of the language by contacting us.
I don’t mind when people have complaints about definitions; hell, there are definitions that I could complain about, and I’ve written some of them.
I was walking the aisles of a large department store with my fifteen-year-old daughter, trying to be a Good Mom who takes her child shopping, even though I would rather pull my own fingernails out with pliers than spend an afternoon wandering around the mall.
“I’ve made the big leagues. I’ve been parodied by Colbert.”
The language is a big place: you can’t stop in one spot for too long. We moved ahead into the second half of the alphabet. The world, meanwhile, was spinning circles in court.
The culture war seemed to have passed us by. The operative word in that sentence is “seemed.”
pressure to be politically correct instead of just plain correct,
