Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

He cast an eye over my résumé and asked with some incredulity if I enjoyed interacting with people,

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.

The first soldiers in the fight to preserve English radically changed English, not according to the best practices of the great writers of the language, but according to their own views of elegance and correctness. What they wanted to preserve and promote didn’t, for the most part, actually exist: it was a convenient fiction that was painted in moral terms, thereby ensuring its own propagation.

While everyone thinks that they speak Standard English, no one natively speaks it: Standard English is itself a dialect based on a written ideal that we learn as we gain education. If we all spoke Standard English as a native dialect, then books on “good grammar” or “proper English” would be useless; we’d already know it because it’d be our very first dialect.

He offered a better paraphrase one day when I was complaining about an entry: “Words are stubborn little fuckers.”

“Decimate” in the “one-tenth” meaning came into English in the late sixteenth century, and by the mid-seventeenth century its use had been expanded to refer to causing great harm. For about two hundred years, these two senses lived side by side without any peevery touching them.

French and Continental Spanish both have academies, founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively, and it is true that they issue edicts on which constructions and words are “allowed,” and they have lexicographical arms that issue dictionaries with the “correct” words in them. Be that as it may, that doesn’t stop the French and Spanish from using whatever words they damned well want.

That means, in short, that the pronunciation editor gets to spend all day watching TV. (Josh hesitates. “I spend more time on YouTube,” he says.)

The linguistic process by which “nuclear” became \ˈnü-kyə-lər\ is called “metathesis,” where two phonemes within a word switch positions.*10 This is the process that gave us the standard pronunciations of “iron” (“EYE-urn” instead of “EYE-run”) and “comfortable” (“KUMF-ter-bul” instead of “KUM-fert-uh-bul”) and other nonstandard pronunciations like “PURR-tee” for “pretty.”

The Friday lunch crew had chosen (via pink) the Indian place downtown, and I tagged along in an effort to get to know my co-workers. Because none of us talked to each other during the workday, this was our only opportunity to mingle. Conversation came in bursts, punctuated with sudden silences and lots of staring down at our pappadum. Though it didn’t look like it, we were all enjoying the opportunity to attempt small talk with other people who got us.

We often have to tell these correspondents that lexicography doesn’t function like reality TV: people don’t get to vote words in or out of the language by contacting us.