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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kory Stamper
Read between
January 16 - January 18, 2021
Further, be aware that writing a verbal illustration like <tomorrow is supposed to be sunny> may be problematic, because there are supposedly people out there who will assume that if they look up “suppose” in the dictionary and read <tomorrow is supposed to be sunny>, that means tomorrow will, in fact, be sunny, and they will write in and complain when tomorrow is not sunny.
Just as the verbal illustrations are not the place to try to hone your skills as a novelist, they are also not the place to work out your feelings about your latest breakup or other assorted existential crises. If I am copyediting your batch and see a string of verbal illustrations like <I wonder why I do this job>, <thinking dark thoughts>, and <all hope is lost>, I will stop to wonder if you are okay, and then I will have to leave my desk and speak to you in person, which will terrify us both. —
People don’t learn language in individual words but in chunks of language. Think about any foreign language you’ve learned (or attempted to). What’s the first thing you learn? Usually how to say “Hello, my name is [Kory]. How are you?” You don’t learn the word for “name,” and then learn the conjugation of “be” (and good thing, too, because it is stubbornly irregular in most languages). You don’t learn the interrogative “how” and the various declensions of the second-person pronoun. All that comes later when you have a little something to hang that information on. You learn two complete, if
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The point of example sentences in dictionaries isn’t just to fill out space and drive lexicographers to a nervous breakdown but to help orient the user in terms of a word’s broader context, its connotative meanings, its range, its tones.
miserere
Sadly, lexicographers are not suited to survive extended periods of giddiness. In the face of such woozy delight, the chances are good that you will do something rash and brainless.
I sat back and berated myself a bit. I have redefined “Monophysite” and “Nestorianism”; I can swear in a dozen languages; I am not a moron. This should be easy. My next citation read, “…arrived 20 minutes late, give or take.”
Phrasal verbs tend to be completely invisible to a native speaker of English, which is why I was so very proud of spotting one at first glance. I created a new pile for the phrasal verb “take about,” and then my sprachgefühl found its voice: “That’s not a phrasal verb.”
You are at the Wall, where you are nothing but a loose collection of human limits.
But I had a date stamp, and by the power vested in me by Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, I was going to put this goddamned verb to bed.
one early citation gives us a line that sounds like it’s been pulled straight from the liner notes of a heavy metal album: “þou bycche blak as kole [thou bitch black as coal].”
“Cant” refers to a type of slang used by various groups on the seedy outskirts of society: thieves, Gypsies, criminals, scoundrels, loose women, and loud drunkards.
The sordid wordbooks weren’t all created for love of money; there was actual scholarly interest in “low” language.
Grose and his assistant, the aptly and delightfully named Tom Cocking, didn’t just sit over a good dinner and concoct vocabulary: they went on midnight strolls through London, collecting slang words from the docks, the streets, the taverns of ill repute, and the slums, then publishing them in Grose’s work. It would be fair to say that Grose and Cocking therefore probably had a very good grasp of how vulgar terms were being used in that moment by ordinary people.
The eighteenth century thus saw “bitch” bifurcated into two main meaning trunks: one trunk that referred to all things female and feminine, and a new trunk that instead tapped into the difficulty of controlling a bitch in heat. From this, we get the sense of “bitch” applied to difficult or uncontrollable things; from the mid-eighteenth century onward, “bitch” is applied to fortune, poverty, necessity, a boat that stubbornly resists repair, the star that ruled over Lord Byron’s love life, and so on.
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. It’s done to remove power from the oppressor, the linguistic version of catching an arrow shot at you in flight.
opprobriously,
riposte:
“virago”?
Small words have big consequences.
The problem that lexicographers face with a reclaimed word like “bitch” is the same problem that Jane’s struggle with the definition of “microaggression” is, just writ large. The force of the word’s full meaning is contained in something that lexicographers can’t measure: the interplay between intention and reception. What’s more important: the intention of the speaker or the reception by the hearer?
abstruse
and “asshat,” which drily mentions the movies Raising Arizona and City Slickers before offering a final etymological analysis: “The current meaning of asshat may be a reanalysis, perhaps in part based on the expression ‘have one’s head up one’s ass’ (meaning ‘to be obtuse, be insufficiently conscious of one’s surroundings’), perhaps in part due to simple phonetic similarity to asshole. A more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.”
Further, the way that English grows doesn’t make sense. The history of English is full of messiness and illogic because the English language is a true democracy, built entirely by the people who use and have used it, and people, generally speaking, are messy and illogical.
Who thought that “pumpernickel” was a good name for a dark rye bread? Because when you trace the word back to its German origins, you find it means “fart goblin,”*5 and now you cannot help but blench and giggle whenever you see pumpernickel.
This is truly logical: as Ammon Shea put it in his book Bad English, “How often does one really have the need to say, in a single word or so, that something has had exactly one-tenth taken from it?”
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.
No one complains that “redact” is now used to excise writing from text when its Latin root means “to put in writing.”
“These things can have a complex history,” says Jim Rader, but few of us want to live with that complexity. We think that we have the right to go through the photo album of English’s life and throw away the pictures that don’t make sense—blurred pictures, or snaps from that unfortunate stage when it was surly and uncooperative.
“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.
English has survived through conquest and adaptation, and many of those adaptations are blunt mistakes and misreadings. A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.
Most words come into being first in speech, then in private writing, and then in public, published writing, which means that if the date given at the entry marks the birth of a word, the moment when it went from nothing to something, then Merriam-Webster must have an underground vault full of clandestine recordings of each word’s first uttering, like something out of the Harry Potter books, only less magical. But the fact remains: because of how words are born, we will probably never know who coined a particular word and when they first used it, because language begins as something private and
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jeremiads
Or that “OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill. What now? Shall we blame the decline of English on typewriters?
People rarely think of English as a cumulative thing: they might be aware of new coinages that they don’t like, but they view those as recent incursions into the fixed territory they think of as “English,” which was, is, and shall be evermore.
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.” It was one of our old pronunciation editors, trying to get the intonation right for the audio file. He left a few years later to become a priest.
This general confusion about “lingerie” means that we collected so many pronunciation variants of it that we listed thirty-six of them in the Third and sixteen in the Collegiate.*7
A newish portmanteau of “anecdote” and “data,” “anecdata” refers to personal experiences or anecdotes that are treated like objectively collected and analyzed data.
This is a question sent to the dictionary, after all: this is serious shit.
It becomes startlingly clear when you begin answering letters from people that the way people use language is personal. The indignant looking for justice or justification in “misogyny” or “misandry”; the incarcerated asking us to explain the difference between “misdemeanor” and “felony”; the parents who have lost a child and write hoping that we know of a simple word, like “widow” or “orphan,” that is a placeholder for their pain, some word that will spare them the inevitable and exhausting explication of their loss to a stranger. We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to
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ret·ro·nym \ˈre-trō-ˌnim\ n : a term consisting of a noun and a modifier which specifies the original meaning of the noun <“film camera” is a retronym> (MWC11)
Of course one of our dictionaries from 1913*5 didn’t mention same-sex marriage: it wasn’t a common use of the word “marriage” back then! And of course it offered example sentences from the Bible. If you were literate in the United States during that time period, you were likely familiar with the Bible, because it was one of the few books that even the poorest families had on their shelves, and so was used didactically in educational settings.
ontological
encomiums
The creation of The American Heritage Dictionary in the 1960s wasn’t just a linguistic response to the Third but a calculated cultural response to it. One ad for the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary showed a long-haired young hippie; the ad copy read, “He doesn’t like your politics. Why should he like your dictionary?”
Noah Porter, the editor in chief for Webster’s 1864 American Dictionary of the English Language, sent notes to the staff warning against using quotations from antislavery sermons in the dictionary, because a reference book was not the place for them. Nonetheless, people still assumed that the dictionary was a cultural and political tool: an 1872 article in the McArthur, Ohio, Democratic Enquirer that compares the 1864 with previous editions actually asks, “Why does Dr. Porter ignore the Constitution of the United States?” Dr. Porter, it must be said, was merely writing a dictionary.
People weren’t just angry; they were frothing mad. “You have crossed the line where you are irresponsible and attempting to pollute the minds of MY CHILDREN…BACK OFF!” one woman warned. I was invited to personally rot in hell no fewer than thirteen times. I was told to get a life, get a fucking life, to fuck off and die, and also to swallow shards of glass mixed in acid. The e-mails were, almost to the letter, uninterested in actually knowing why we entered this new subsense of “marriage.” They didn’t care about the mechanics of language change; they cared about the mechanics of culture
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Arthur and I had endured a number of write-in campaigns together—he called us Brother Perpetual Spin and Sister Accidental Scapegoat—but this one was particularly difficult.
heuristic
bor·bo·ryg·mus \ˌbȯr-bə-ˈrig-məs\ n, pl bor·bo·ryg·mi \-ˌmī\ : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas (MWC11)
