More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
S is, to put it in the modern vernacular, the worst. It is the longest letter in the book and an absolute heartbreaker, because you can see the end of the alphabet from it, and you know that once you clear S, you are moving on to T–Z, and half of those are barely even letters. But S—S goes on for-fucking-ever. Exactly 11 percent of your dictionary is made of words that begin with S. One-tenth of your dictionary is made up of one twenty-sixth of the alphabet.
🐂 wow!
ostensive defining: it’s the act of physically showing a person what the word means.
Analytical definitions are the most common ones you’ll find in dictionaries, the ones that read like they were written by a team of neurodiverse robots—
Differentiae” is plural; there’s usually more than one in a definition.)
you are defining for the mythic Everyperson,
Ahh...the mythic everyperson..so politically correct..and odd
This board is also—and this strikes you as an important detail—buoyant, because it has to carry the weight of a person and not drag them immediately to the bottom of the sea.
This is one (now infamous) definition of “hotel” found in Webster’s Third: a building of many rooms chiefly for overnight accommodation of transients and several floors served
by elevators, usually with a large open street-level lobby containing easy chairs, with a variety of compartments for eating, drinking, dancing, exhibitions, and group meetings (as of salesmen or convention attendants), with shops having both inside and street-side entrances and offering for sale items (as clothes, gifts, candy, theater tickets, travel tickets) of particular interest to a traveler, or providing personal services (as hairdressing, shoe shining), and with telephone booths, writing tables and washrooms freely available
Hotel definition that is rather detailed ((now) infamously
Lumpers are definers who tend to write broad definitions that can cover several more minor variations on that meaning; splitters are people who tend to write discrete definitions for each of those minor variations.
Back in the 1950s, when this definition for “hotel” was written, places that called themselves hotels did have some (or all) of these amenities. The lexicographer who wrote this definition evidently wanted to distinguish a hotel from other accommodations (like motels or inns) and thought—reasonably—that mentioning what sorts of services were available at a hotel compared with, say, a motel would help orient the reader.
1950 hotels were fancy.
The meaning is something that resides in the word, and the definition is a description of that. But a definition is an artificial thing.”
three main criteria: they need to illustrate the most common usage of the word; they need to use only words that are entered in that particular dictionary; and they need to be as boring as humanly possible. Writers generally want to catch and hold your attention, and so they write things that are full of narrative interest, clever constructions, and tons of proper names.
People don’t learn language in individual words but in chunks of language.
You don’t learn the word for “name,” and then learn the conjugation of “be” (and good thing, too, because it is stubbornly irregular in most languages).
Agreed!
You learn two complete, if rudimentary, sentences, and that gives you the confidence to keep moving forward—until you reach the subjunctive, anyway.
Yes...until you meet the subjunctive.
I began sorting the cards into piles by part of speech. This is the first job you must do as a lexicographer dealing with paper, because those citations aren’t sorted for you.
Some of the all-time top lookups at Merriam-Webster are “paradigm,” “disposition,” “ubiquitous,” and “esoteric,” words that are used fairly regularly but also in contexts that don’t tell the reader much about what they mean.
They are used all the time?
collocative
The new sense: “—used as a function word before a proper noun to distinguish the condition of the referent from a usual, former, or hypothetical condition,” as in “With the Angels dispatched in short order, a rested Schilling, a career 6-1
pitcher in the postseason, could start three times if seven games were necessary against the Yankees.”
“There’s no room up front, so you have to take a back seat” has a different meaning from “reason takes a back seat to sentiment.” This second use is an idiom, which means it gets defined as a phrase at the end of the entry. I started a new pile.
My next citation read, “…arrived 20 minutes late, give or take.”
I took the well-trod path of least resistance and decided that maybe it’s adverbial (“eh, close enough”). Yes, I’ll just put this citation…in the nonexistent spot for adverbial uses of “take,” because there are no
adverbial uses of “take.” My teeth began to hurt.
logophiles
A lover of words
OED, which is a historical dictionary with over 600,000 senses, and defining for the Collegiate Dictionary, a relative lightweight at about 230,000 senses.
That is a lot of words.
In the OED, “run” has over six hundred separate senses, making the Collegiate’s “take” look like kid stuff.
This is not an error. For whatever reason, people tend to use the open compound “back seat” in the phrase “take a back seat” but the closed “backseat” when referring to the seats behind the driver. English!
By the time Shakespeare used the dog sense of “bitch” in Merry Wives of Windsor, the “lewd woman” sense had seeped into the language.
“Cant” refers to a
type of slang used by various groups on the seedy outskirts of society: thieves, Gypsies, criminals, scoundrels, loose women, and loud drunkards. Whatever base, whatever low, whatever dangerous: these dictionaries attempted to catalog it.
The thrust of each of these uses was clear: men who were called “bitches” were feminized, or less than men.
Never knew this.
Take the case most often held up as a reclamation success story: “queer,” which was reclaimed by the AIDS activist group Queer Nation in the 1990s. Through the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, “queer” came to be used as a tongue-in-cheek synonym for “gay,” even appearing in the titles of TV shows like Queer as Folk and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It was adopted as a label within the gay community first to describe gayness in all its manifestations, then to describe those who didn’t want to identify within the traditional binaries: gay/straight, man/woman,
...more
The word clearly has an interesting history
The point of linguistic reclamation is to kill the potency of a slur.
who sits within a particular cultural moment, with their own thoughts, feelings, experiences, prejudices (known and unknown), and assumptions—
Small words have big consequences.
The force of the word’s full meaning is contained in something that lexicographers can’t measure: the interplay between intention and reception. What’s more important: the intention of the speaker or the reception by the hearer?
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,
True. An acceptable social way to hurt another person. Extend to gossip.
etymology is because it tells a story about English and a word’s place in it, and sometimes that story tells you something about the culture or time period in which that word blossomed.
we call them “sideburns”? It’s a play on the name of the Civil War officer who made them popular, General Burnside.
That initial sp followed by that ct—those are the morphological marks of an Italic language, not a Germanic language (of which English is one). It’s very well-known that the Italic language that English speakers have historically had the most contact with is French; the etymologist doesn’t have to poke too far to find the sixteenth-century French spectre, which means “specter,” and the Latin spectrum, which means “appearance” or “specter.”
In the days of steamer travel between England and India, wealthy patrons traveling with the Peninsular and Oriental Company reserved the choicest cabins on the ship, which were the ones that got the morning sun but were shaded in the afternoon—no air-conditioning in the nineteenth century. These cabins were on the left side of the ship on the way out, and the right side on the way home, and so were stamped “P.O.S.H.” to indicate that the ticket holder had a cabin that was port side out, starboard side home. The “posh” ticket, then, was for the moneyed, elegant folk, and it was this association
...more
It’s beautiful—and total bullshit.
Acronyms also weren’t terribly common until World War II, where they were deployed with aplomb.
And the US navy is full of them!
“GI” (originally “galvanized iron,” if you can believe it, but misconstrued by soldiers and others as “government issue”), “snafu” and “fubar” (“situation normal: all fucked up” and “fucked up beyond all recognition,” brought to you by government bureaucracy).
The history of English is full of messiness and illogic because the English language is a true democracy, built entirely by the people who use and have used it, and people, generally speaking, are messy and illogical.
Yup.
German origins, you find it means “fart goblin,”*5 and now you cannot help but blench and giggle whenever you see pumpernickel.
a language that doesn’t change is a dead language,
(no doubt because the idea of junking the Third, a dictionary that took more than a hundred editors twenty-seven years to complete, sent the then president of the company into
apoplexy). The Third was one of its flagship products, and the G. & C. Merriam Company would abandon it when hell froze over. One James Parton, the publisher of American Heritage magazine, decided to do all he could to make it snow. In 1962, a few months after the release of the Third, he began buying up shares of Merriam stock with the view of buying out the company. His reason: the company “badly needs new guidance,” and the Third was “an affront.” His plans were to “take the Third out of
