Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

You must also excise all potential double entendres from the book; they say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind, and they are right. Editors are, at heart, twelve: if we can construe something as a fart or sex (or a fart and sex) joke, we will. This is a double-edged sword as you write verbal illustrations: the elevation of your adult duty is constantly pulling against the gravity of your native gutter thinking. Duty must prevail because duty ostensibly pays the bills, and so <I think we should do it> gets changed to <I don’t want to do that>; <That’s a big one!> becomes <That’s a big fish!>; <He screwed in the lightbulb> becomes nothing at all. After a while, you see double entendres everywhere: you remove every single verbal illustration at “member” and “organ” for obvious reasons, you scrutinize the verbal illustrations at “wind” extra hard just to make sure there’s no secret fart joke in there, and you wonder if you should science-up the verbal illustrations at “organism” because it’s just a few letters off from “orgasm,” and no doubt someone will read sex into <complex organisms>. (And yet here I must confess that I am aware of two good double entendres that have made it into our dictionaries and have stayed there. The first is in a paperback dictionary at the entry for “tract” and references a boob joke from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: <huge tracts of land>. The second is in our middle-school dictionary, at the entry for “cut....