Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head.

The more I learned, the more I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language.

The door is open: beyond are more cubicles, lots of books, and the feel of people, though not the sound of people. Welcome to the editorial floor.

You must set aside your own linguistic and lexical prejudices about what makes a word worthy, beautiful, or right, to tell the truth about language.

Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially accepted ways we can attack each other,

Humans are inveterate storytellers. If history is lacking, we are happy to embellish it.

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.

the way people use language is personal.

The language is a big place: you can’t stop in one spot for too long.

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.