Word by Word Quotes

“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. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. 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. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them a supply of water and enough nonperishable food to last several days. “Unless…” almost always marks the beginning of a wild lexical goose chase.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Removing racial slurs from the dictionary will not eliminate racism; removing “injustice” from the dictionary will not bring about justice. If it were really as easy as that, don’t you think we would have removed words like “murder” and “genocide” from the dictionary already? Jerkery, like stupidity and death, is an ontological constant in our universe.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“In short order, I became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist. I recorded a short video for Merriam-Webster’s website refuting the notion that “irregardless” wasn’t a word; I took to Twitter and Facebook and booed naysayers who set “irregardless” up as the straw man for the demise of English. I continued to find evidence of the emphatic “irregardless” in all sorts of places—even in the oral arguments of a Supreme Court case. One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales? I began telling correspondents that “irregardless” was much more complex than people thought, and it deserved a little respectful respite, even if it still was not part of Standard English. My mother was duly horrified. “Oh, Kory,” she tutted. “So much for that college education.” —”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Yes, this is what I want to do. I want to sit alone in a cubicle all day and think about words and not really talk to anybody else. That sounds great!”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Words are stubborn little fuckers.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for. They”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. 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. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Ah, but those horrid initialisms, naysayers cry—“LOL” and “OMG”—surely a mark of modern laziness, moral decline, and the end of Good English as we know it! Never mind that these naysayers use plenty of initialisms themselves—please RSVP ASAP and BYOB. Or that “OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill. What now? Shall we blame the decline of English on typewriters?”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Properly, an acronym is a word that is created from the initial letters or major parts of a compound term whose pronunciation is a word (“NAY-toe,” “SNAF-oo”), and an initialism is an abbreviation created from the initial letters of a compound term, like “FBI,” whose pronunciation is a collection of letters (“EFF BEE EYE”). “Acronym” gets used of both of these, however, and such use burns the biscuits of some.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Good” has been used for almost a thousand years as an adverb, even though usage commentators and peevers have condemned this use. Dictionaries, he explained, were records of the language as it is used, and so we must set aside our disdain for the adverb “good” (and here he looked over his glasses at me) and record its long use in our dictionaries in spite of the rather pointless foofaraw around its existence.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Just as the verbal illustrations are not the place to try to hone your skills as a novelist, they are also not the place to work out your feelings about your latest breakup or other assorted existential crises. If I am copyediting your batch and see a string of verbal illustrations like < I wonder why I do this job >, < thinking dark thoughts >, and < all hope is lost >, I will stop to wonder if you are okay, and then I will have to leave my desk and speak to you in person, which will terrify us both.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Dude, do you even English? That defining job is hella bad.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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 the Revolution ready for the job, and plenty of successful soldiers deriding the Constitution, unrebuked by the Executive or by public opinion.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“This is a question sent to the dictionary, after all: this is serious shit.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It’s not all “molly” and “asshat.” The etymologies of some words are, for the lexicographer and average joe alike, boring.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Real defining answers questions like “What is truth?” “What is love?” “Do sounds exist if no one is around to hear them?” and “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Every entry, whether revised or reviewed, goes through multiple editing passes. The definer starts the job, then it’s passed to a copy editor who cleans up the definer’s work, then to a bunch of specialty editors: cross-reference editors, who make sure the definer hasn’t used any word in the entry that isn’t entered in that dictionary; etymologists, to review or write the word history; dating editors, who research and add the dates of first written use; pronunciation editors, who handle all the pronunciations in the book. Then eventually it’s back to a copy editor (usually a different one from the first round, just to be safe), who will make any additional changes to the entry that cross-reference turned up, then to the final reader, who is, as the name suggests, the last person who can make editorial changes to the entry, and then off to the proofreader (who ends up, again, being a different editor from the definer and the two previous copy editors). After the proofreaders are done slogging through two thousand pages of four-point type, the production editors send it off to the printer or the data preparation folks, and then we get another set of dictionary pages (called page proofs) to proofread. This process happens continuously as we work through a dictionary, so a definer may be working on batches in C, cross-reference might be in W, etymology in T, dating and pronunciation in the second half of S, copy editors in P (first pass) and Q and R (second pass), while the final reader is closing out batches in N and O, proofreaders are working on M, and production has given the second set of page proofs to another set of proofreaders for the letter L. We all stagger our way through the alphabet until the last batch, which is inevitably somewhere near G, is closed. By the time a word is put in print either on the page or online, it’s generally been seen by a minimum of ten editors. Now consider that when it came to writing the Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, we had a staff of about twenty editors working on it: twenty editors to review about 220,000 existing definitions, write about 10,000 new definitions, and make over 100,000 editorial changes (typos, new dates, revisions) for the new edition. Now remember that the 110,000-odd changes made were each reviewed about a dozen times and by a minimum of ten editors. The time given to us to complete the revision of the Tenth Edition into the Eleventh Edition so production could begin on the new book? Eighteen months.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“In June 2014, a sixteen-year-old teen named Peaches Monroee made a six-second video in which she called her eyebrows “on fleek,” meaning “good” or “on point.” In November, just five months after Monroee posted her video, nearly 10 percent of all Google searches worldwide were for “on fleek.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“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.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Take the oft-repeated injunction to get “its” and “it’s” straight. Everyone claims it’s remarkably easy to remember that “its” is possessive and “it’s” is a contraction. But logic tells us that in English, ’s attached to a noun signals possession: the dog’s dish, the cat’s toy, the lexicographer’s cry. So if English is logical, and there are simple rules to follow, why doesn’t “it’s” signal possession? We know that ’s also signals a contraction, but we don’t have any problems with differentiating between “the dog’s dish” and “the dog’s sleeping”—why should we suddenly have problems with “it’s dish” and “it’s sleeping”? This type of grammar often completely ignores hundreds (and, in some cases, well over a thousand) years of established use in English. For “it’s,” the rule is certainly easy to memorize, but it also ignores the history of “its” and “it’s.” At one point in time, “it” was its own possessive pronoun: the 1611 King James Bible reads, “That which groweth of it owne accord…thou shalt not reape”; Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, “It had it head bit off by it young.” They weren’t the first: the possessive “it” goes back to the fifteenth century. But around the time that Shakespeare was shuffling off this mortal coil, the possessive “it” began appearing as “it’s.” We’re not sure why the change happened, but some commentators guess that it was because “it” didn’t appear to be its own possessive pronoun, like “his” and “her,” but rather a bare pronoun in need of that possessive marker given to nouns: ’s. Sometimes this possessive appeared without punctuation as “its.” But the possessive “it’s” grew in popularity through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until it was the dominant form of the word. It even survived into the nineteenth century: you’ll find it in the letters of Thomas Jefferson and Jane Austen and the speechwriting notes of Abraham Lincoln. This would be relatively simple were it not for the fact that “it’s” was also occasionally used as a contraction for “it is” or “it has” (“and it’s come to pass,” Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII, 1.2.63). Some grammarians noticed and complained—not that the possessive “it’s” and the contractive “it’s” were confusing, but that the contractive “it’s” was a misuse and mistake for the contraction “ ’tis,” which was the more standard contraction of “it is.” This was a war that the pedants lost: “ ’tis” waned while “it’s” waxed.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It is best, in fact, to assume that every verbal illustration you write will offend someone, somewhere, at some point.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“bor·bo·ryg·mus \ˌbȯr-bə-ˈrig-məs\ n, pl bor·bo·ryg·mi \-ˌmī\ : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas (MWC11)”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries