Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

Adverbs look like everything else; they are the junk drawer of the English language (“like so”).

Ask any lexicographer who has been at this gig for a while what word had them hunched over their cubicle at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, hands clutched to their temples, the office copy of Quirk open on their desk while the night janitor loudly scrummed with the big recycling bin, and the answer will not be a polysyllabic hummer like “sesquipedalian.” The answer will be “but,” “like,” “as.”

So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.

The problem with this rule is a familiar one: English grammar is not Latin grammar. The languages are cousins, but not close ones, because they come from different branches of the Indo-European language tree. English has a grammatical structure similar to other Germanic languages, and Latin has a grammatical structure similar to other Italic languages. Blending grammatical systems from two languages on different branches of the Indo-European language tree is a bit like mixing orange juice and milk: you can do it, but it’s going to be nasty.

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.

David Foster Wallace, modern literary titan, described himself in a famous Harper’s essay as a “snoot,” a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He was a prolific writer and a very careful one, too; he used “nauseated” instead of “nauseous” to mean “to feel sick,” for instance, an old grammatical peccadillo to be sure, and one that even the most prescriptivist usage commentators today merely shrug over.

frankly I only use "nauseated" instead of "nauseous" to mean "to feel sick" and I will never give it up.

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.

Lowth hammers this home by noting that even translators of the Bible can’t get this right: for “Whom do men say that I am?” (Matt. 16:13, Mark 8:27, Luke 9:18), Lowth sighs, “It ought in all these places to be who.”

It’s hard to jump to the conclusion that the jury would have decided differently had the interview been transcribed differently. But the “mights” weigh very heavily: had a native speaker of AAVE been on the jury or in the courtroom, Jeantel’s testimony might not have been discredited, and the verdict might have been different. That is, as we say in my native dialect, worth reckoning.

I am these days dutifully slogging through The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology. There is no one on staff to foist that one on. Kyrie eleison.

This is a happy fiction (it was my happy fiction, in fact). Lexicographers don’t do real defining. In fact, the hallmark of bad lexicography is the attempt to do real defining. Lexicographers only get to do lexical defining, which is the attempt to describe how a word is used and what it is used to mean in a particular setting.

These are dangerous, because no one really knows where a word is going to go, and your judgment call may end up being terrible. In the early 1980s, one of our editors decided that the word “snollygoster,” meaning “an unprincipled or shrewd person,” was not really in use anymore, and to free up some space for something new and exciting, they dumped the entry from the Collegiate. About ten years after that, a notable TV personality began using “snollygoster” because it was the perfect word to describe a politician. America is now on the cusp of a “snollygoster” revival, and, boy, do we feel stupid. We also have to gamble on the tech of the future, which is impossible.

Most people assume that long words or rare words are the hardest to define because they are often the hardest to spell, say, and remember. The truth is, those are usually a snap. “Schadenfreude” may be difficult to spell, but it’s a cinch to define, because all the uses of it are very, very semantically and syntactically clear. It’s always a noun, and it’s often glossed because even though it’s now an English word, it’s one of those delectable German compounds we love to slurp into English.

Modern lexicographers are trained to be objective and leave their own linguistic baggage at the door; modern lexicography is set up to make the definer anonymous and incorporeal. But language is deeply personal, even for the lexicographer: it’s the way that we describe who we are, what the world around us is, delineate what we think is good from what we think is bad.

Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially accepted ways we can attack each other, and suddenly the retiring lexicographer is right in the middle of the melee.

Steve Kleinedler recounted listening to Eric Hamp, one of the more famous etymologists of the modern era (insofar as there are any famous etymologists of any era), explain what a Pan-Scandinavian pronunciation of “Häagen-Dazs” would be, respecting the umlauts and everything, though the ice-cream brand’s name is definitely not Scandinavian and so can’t really be pronounced in any of the Scandinavian languages.