Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

As we got older, the way we talked became political. I watched parents push their kids to talk “like a white person,” to linguistically pass, because they had spent a lifetime calling businesses like the cable company and hearing the secretary’s lips smack over their Chicano lilt or the cadence of their blackness, while she demurred that they weren’t going to be able to set up an appointment for, oh, dear, quite a while, you understand.

Under ordinary circumstances, we learn to speak before we learn to read, and anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the gold standard of fluency isn’t your reading comprehension but your ability to ask a native speaker of that language which team they favor in the World Cup and to fully understand and participate in the argument that will inevitably ensue.

I rather like this definition of "fluency."

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

As all writers know. (WARNING - F-BOMB IN QUOTE)

“Ei,” he said, shaking his head. “En puhu suomea.” No, he said in Finnish. I don’t speak Finnish.

This is someone I want to meet.

Most words come into being first in speech, then in private writing, and then in public, published writing, which means that if the date given at the entry marks the birth of a word, the moment when it went from nothing to something, then Merriam-Webster must have an underground vault full of clandestine recordings of each word’s first uttering, like something out of the Harry Potter books, only less magical.

Hello, plot bunny! Fancy meeting you here.

Mismatch between English’s pronunciation and its orthography is something that everyone, native speaker and learner alike, harps on. It feels like a bait and switch: after all, we learned as children that if words have the same cluster of letters at the end, they rhyme: hop on pop, cat in the hat. And then we encounter “through,” “though,” “rough,” “cough,” and “bough”—five words that all end with “-ough” and not only don’t rhyme but don’t even have similar pronunciations. But “won” and “done” and “shun” rhyme? Are you telling me Dr. Seuss lied to me about English?

The very idea that Dr. Seuss may have lied!