Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

Emily Brewster, who has been an editor at Merriam-Webster for over fifteen years, sums up the secret longing of every lexicographer: “Yes, this is what I want to do. I want to sit alone in a cubicle all day and think about words and not really talk to anybody else. That sounds great!”

that sounds nice

Humanity sets up rules to govern English, but English rolls onward, a juggernaut crushing all in its path.

Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.

Do you eschew what is generally held to be popular dreck for something more literary? Doesn’t dreck have a place in the world, too?

indeed

It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.

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.

But those deviations from the plumb line contain surprises and delights not just about English but about the world we live in. “OK,” which might just be one of the most widely understood English words in the world, came into being as an initialism from “oll korrect,” which was a facetious misspelling of “all correct” that came about because of a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings and the abbreviation thereof. And now you, too, know that there was a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings.

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