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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kory Stamper
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August 12 - August 22, 2020
This is commonly called “prescriptivism,” and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work at
Humanity sets up rules to govern English, but English rolls onward, a juggernaut crushing all in its path.
Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying.
I would have to investigate, and if five years of lexicography had taught me anything, it was that going through the evidence might lead to my being unswervingly wrong about a word I still deeply felt was bogus.
Each comment, no matter how it was phrased, was intended to prove one thing: I was outside, a stranger. I was not from here, and so was exoticized or ostracized accordingly.
While everyone thinks that they speak Standard English, no one natively speaks it: Standard English is itself a dialect based on a written ideal
Here’s the other interesting thing about rivers: they flow wherever they damned well please.
All my years of training, all those hours spent carefully crafting responses to people who complained about the dialectal “ain’t” or “irregardless,” were thoroughly defenestrated.
Maternal worry surfaced in dialect shaming.
That is, as we say in my native dialect, worth reckoning.
insofar as there is any perception about lexicographers—that
Folks assume that I spend my day in a locked, smoky conference room, chomping on cigars and guzzling scotch, where other lexicographers and I bark out the latest, greatest additions to the language
If only this were so
Doesn’t dreck have a place in the world, too?
including in an article discussing the language of a Supreme Court dissent.
Because we live in a literate society with comparatively easy access to books and education, we tend to believe that the written word is more important and has more weight than the spoken word.
But this is, to use a technical term, totally bogus. Speech is actually the primary way that language gets transmitted, and linguistic research of all stripes bears this out.
English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.
it’s likely that not all of you will lose your minds at exactly the same time.
I will feel disparaged; therefore, I will assume that he meant to disparage,
(for I find, as I get older, that I can be bothered less and less with randos on the street hollering dumb shit at me and am more apt to return the insult in kind, thereby proving their initial claim that I am, in fact, a bitch),
Can I, in that two-second interlude as the car passes by, even pretend to divine the speaker’s intention?
The nursery rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” is a lie that every five-year-old knows in their deep waters. Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially accepted ways we can attack each other,
It’s a beguiling idea: that there’s a golden plumb line of logic that English follows, and we just need to snag it to unravel the mysteries of this language.
people, generally speaking, are messy and illogical.
Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language change itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn’t change is a dead language, and as much as etymological fallacists seem to love the purity of Latin,*6 you’ll notice that none of them have abandoned that whore English for it.
Every republic runs its greatest risk not so much from discontented soldiers as from discontented multi-millionaires. They are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality, and the larger the population which is said to be equal with them, the less content they are. Their natural desire is to be a class apart, and if they cannot have titles at home, they wish to be received as equals by titled people abroad. That is exactly our present position, and would be the end of the American dream. All past republics have been overthrown by rich men, or nobles, and we have plenty of Sons of
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“the recency illusion” to refer to the misbegotten assumption that anything that strikes you as new in language is a recent innovation, when, in fact, it’s not.
“OMG” goes back to 1917,
Are you telling me Dr. Seuss lied to me about English?
But because English isn’t phonetic, that’s a ridiculous proposition.
I don’t even know what that string of words means,
The language is a big place: you can’t stop in one spot for too long.
Language comes at you pretty fast
life, the universe, and everything
Most of the innovations in American dictionaries have been driven by a desire to gain market share and outcompete other publishers, and it’s been that way since Noah Webster. The difference between then and now is in how people consume and use dictionaries.
Dictionaries move online and they are no longer fixed objects, revered books kept on the family shelf, but malleable, ever-changing works that mirror the quicksilver nature of our language.
This is the new way of finding information, and it privileges the sources that play the game of search engine optimization.
Bookstores shared “a cultivative interest” with publishers: more book buyers were good for both of them. But search engines and Internet ad providers don’t share that interest, or at least not in the same way. They truck in a type of user engagement that dictionaries are historically not good at.
The craft of writing a good definition isn’t important in the click economy: what is important is being agile enough to do what it takes to get to the top of an Internet search results page.
The language is booming, but lexicography is a shrinking industry: Funk & Wagnalls, Random House, Encarta, and Century are just a few of the dictionary publishers who have ceased operations in recent history.
Most of the editors who are let go when a dictionary publisher shutters have decades of experience writing and editing dictionaries, and the craft that represents is irreplaceable.
They’ll notice errors, but you can’t notice excellence in a dictionary, for the most part, because it consists of a lack of errors.”
English deserves careful attention and care.
