Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

To them, “grammar” is a loose conglomeration of stylistic word choices that get codified into right and wrong, misspellings that every English speaker has made at some point in their life and yet are branded as “bad grammar,” half-remembered “rules” about usage shamed into them by their middle-school English teachers, and personal, sometimes irrational, dislikes.

Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.

Early dictionaries were entirely didactic: they were meant to improve the education of those who already had some education.

These books, plays, and pamphlets purported to be the true-crime pulp fiction of Elizabethan England: they were tell-all confessionals by beggars, hustlers, and thieves, and the educated class ate them up. Consequently, authors of rogue literature began to publish dictionaries of thieves’ cant so their readers could better understand their works.

When he saw a word that piqued his interest, he underlined it, put the first letter of that word in the margin of the book, and then passed those heavily marked texts to his assistants, who would copy the passage down on a piece of paper. The pieces of paper were filed alphabetically; they were what Johnson referred to in writing his dictionary.

the business of a lexicographer is to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.