Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

I was a capital-n Nerd

Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid. When you finish defining, you must copyedit; when you finish copyediting, you must proofread; when you finish proofreading, you must proofread again, because there were changes and we need to double-check. When the dictionary finally hits the market, there is no grand party or celebration. (Too loud, too social.) 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 A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.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.

Now you know why we like to shorten “part of speech” to “POS.” The abbreviation also stands for “piece of shit,” and we find it a fitting, oddly comforting double entendre.

If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best,” you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

“In summary of the proof: grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible. Therefore, happiness depends at least partly on good grammar.”

just like the infix “fucking” turns “absolutely” into the intensive “absofuckinglutely.”

We tend to think of dialects (insofar as we think of them at all) as regional—Southern English, Boston English, Texan—but different social classes, ethnicities, and age-groups can have their own dialects. That means that dialects can be polarizing; they and their speakers are often subject to stereotype and scrutiny.

The letters in a phonetic system represent one sound per letter; the letters in a phonemic system represent a group of sounds per letter, because an individual phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in an utterance, and the thing that our pronunciation alphabets represent) can vary depending on your accent and dialect.

Unfortunately, when foreign words are snatched into English, they are often given pronunciations based on English, not the origin language.

“metathesis,” where two phonemes within a word switch positions.