Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

It’s another name for a hooded merganser. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a hooded merganser is, because that doesn’t detract from the wonder of “hootamaganzy.” Shout it out an open window; it’s as good as Prozac and cheaper.

Johnson fetishism runs deep in lexicography.

(particularly Morton’s Story of “Webster’s Third” and Skinner’s Story of Ain’t) in addition to this one. Alas, I have but one book to write, and that book ain’t it.

Not quite: The Third doesn’t say that “imply” and “infer” mean the same thing, though it does use the word “implication” in one definition of “infer” and “inference” at one definition of “imply.” 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.

insouciance,”

But “craft” implies care, repetitive work, apprenticeship, and practice. It is something that is within most people’s reach, but few people devote themselves to it long enough and with enough intensity to do it well.

Our modern conception of art happens in a flash; we speak of the lightning striking, the lightbulb going on, the inspiration hitting. Craft takes time, both internal and external. You need patience to hone your skill; you need a society willing to wait (and pay) for that skill.

The craft of writing a good definition isn’t important in the click economy: what is important is being agile enough to do what it takes to get to the top of an Internet search results page. It’s a very sudden shift for the staid lexicographer who likes to keep low to the ground.

And while defining gets easier with experience, and the easier it is to do something, the faster you can do it, there is a terminal velocity in lexicography. After a certain point, you simply can’t go any faster; to do so compromises the quality of what you’re doing.

Everything behind it—it’s kind of invisible. I feel like people take the dictionary for granted to a large extent. They don’t think of it as having been written by anybody, and they don’t appreciate all the decisions that had to be made for everything in it. 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.”

Business considerations aside, it is the damnedest thing to spend your career in the company of this gorgeous, lascivious language. We don’t do the work for the money or prestige; we do it because English deserves careful attention and care.

English bounds onward, and we drudges will continue our chase after it, a little ragged for the rough terrain, perhaps, but ever tracking, eyes wide with quiet and reverence.