Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

I was invited to personally rot in hell no fewer than thirteen times.

“REPENT OF YOUR HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE!” one e-mailer bellowed, and I forwarded it to my husband: “This is news to me, but okay: I repent.”

The firewall between “imply” and “infer” is a fairly recent invention; the two words have had close meanings since at least the seventeenth century, when that slacker Shakespeare used “infer” to mean “imply” and vice versa.

It isn’t just that we lose friends; it isn’t just that we lose colleagues; it’s that we lose craftspeople. Most of the editors who are let go when a dictionary publisher shutters have decades of experience writing and editing dictionaries, and the craft that represents is irreplaceable.

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.”

ed·i·tor \ˈe-də-tər\ n -s : a person who prepares something (such as books or other printed materials) for publication; especially : one who reads, alters, adapts, and corrects a written work a great number of times while simultaneously convincing the writer that the written work is good, though not yet good

called also miracle worker