by Kory Stamper
Copyright © 2017 by Kory Stamper
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Owing to space limitations, permissions acknowledgments may be found following the index.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Stamper, Kory, author.
Title: Word by word : the secret life of dictionaries / Kory Stamper.
Description: New York : Pantheon Books, [2017]. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024253 (print). LCCN 2016037824 (ebook). ISBN 9781101870945 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101870952 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Lexicography—History. Encyclopedias and dictionaries—History and criticism. Lexicographers—Biography. BISAC: REFERENCE / Dictionaries. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.
Classification: LCC P327.S695 2017 (print). LCC P327 (ebook). DDC 413.028—dc23. LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016024253
Ebook ISBN 9781101870952
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Oliver Munday
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
HRAFNKELL: On Falling in Love
BUT: On Grammar
IT’S: On “Grammar”
IRREGARDLESS: On Wrong Words
CORPUS: On Collecting the Bones
SURFBOARD: On Defining
PRAGMATIC: On Examples
TAKE: On Small Words
BITCH: On Bad Words
POSH: On Etymology and Linguistic Originalism
AMERICAN DREAM: On Dates
NUCLEAR: On Pronunciation
NUDE: On Correspondence
MARRIAGE: On Authority and the Dictionary
EPILOGUE: The Damnedest Thing
Acknowledgments (in alphabetical order)
Notes
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
FOR MY PARENTS, ALLEN AND DIANE, WHO BOUGHT ME BOOKS AND LOVED ME WELL.
It may be observed that the English language is not a system of logic, that its vocabulary has not developed in correlation with generations of straight thinkers, that we cannot impose upon it something preconceived as an ideal of scientific method and expect to come out with anything more systematic and more clarifying than what we start with: what we start with is an inchoate heterogeneous conglomerate that retains the indestructible bones of innumerable tries at orderly communication, and our definitions as a body are bound to reflect this situation.
—PHILIP BABCOCK GOVE, Merriam-Webster in-house “Defining Techniques” memo, May 22, 1958
Preface
Language is one of the few common experiences humanity has. Not all of us can walk; not all of us can sing; not all of us like pickles. But we all have an inborn desire to communicate why we can’t walk or sing or stomach pickles. To do that, we use our language, a vast index of words and their meanings we’ve acquired, like linguistic hoarders, throughout our lives. We eventually come to a place where we can look another person in the eye and say, or write, or sign, “I don’t do pickles.”
The problem comes when the other person responds, “What do you mean by ‘do,’ exactly?”
What do you mean? It’s probable that humanity has been defining in one way or another since we first showed up on the scene. We see it in children today as they acquire their native language: it begins with someone’s explaining the universe around them to a rubbery blob of drooling baby, then progresses to that blob understanding the connection between the sound coming out of Mama’s or Papa’s mouth—“cup”—and the thing Mama or Papa is pointing to. Watching the connection happen is like watching nuclear fission in miniature: there is a flash behind the eyes, a bunch of synapses all firing at once, and then a lot of frantic pointing and data collection. The baby points; an obliging adult responds with the word that represents that object. And so we begin to define.
As we grow, we grind words into finer grist. We learn to pair the word “cat” with “meow”; we learn that lions and leopards are also called “cats,” though they have as much in common with your long-haired Persian house cat as a teddy bear has with a grizzly bear. We set up a little mental index card that lists all the things that come to mind when someone says the word “cat,” and then when we learn that in parts of Ireland bad weather is called “cat,” our eyes widen and we start stapling little slips of addenda to that card.
At heart, we are always looking for that one statement that captures the ineffable, universal catness represented by the word “cat,” the thing that encompasses the lion “cat” and the domestic-lazybones “cat” and the bad weather in Ireland, too. And so we turn to the one place where that statement is most likely to be found: the dictionary.
We read the definitions given there with little thought about how they actually make it onto the page. Yet every part of a dictionary definition is crafted by a person sitting in an office, their*1 eyes squeezed shut as they consider how best to describe, concisely and accurately, that weather meaning of the word “cat.” These people expend enormous amounts of mental energy, day in and day out, to find just the right words to describe “ineffable,” wringing every word out of their sodden brains in the hopes that the perfect words will drip to the desk. They must ignore the puddle of useless words accumulating around their feet and seeping into their shoes.
In the process of learning how to write a dictionary, lexicographers must face the Escher-esque logic of English and its speakers. What appears to be a straightforward word ends up being a linguistic fun house of doors that open into air and staircases that lead to nowhere. People’s deeply held convictions about language catch at your ankles; your own prejudices are the millstone around your neck. You toil onward with steady plodding, losing yourself to everything but the goal of capturing and documenting this language. Up is down,*2 bad is good,*3 and the smallest words will be your downfall. You’d rather do nothing else.
We approach this raucous language the same way we approach our dictionary: word by word.
* * *
*1 Throughout this book, I will be using the singular “their” in place of the gender-neutral “his” or the awkward “his or her” when the gender of the referent isn’t known. I know some people think this is controversial, but this usage goes back to the fourteenth century. Better writers than I have used the singular “their” or “they,” and the language has not yet fallen all to hell.
*2 up adv…7 b (1) : to a state of completeness or finality (MWU; see the bibliography for more details)
down adv…3 d : to completion (MWU)
*3 bad adj…10 slang a : GOOD, GREAT (MWC11)
Hrafnkell
On Falling in Love
We are in an uncomfortably small conference room. It is a cool June day, and though I am sitting stock-still on a corporate chair in heavy air-conditioning, I am sweating heavily through my dress. This is what I do in job interviews.
A month earlier, I had applied for a position at Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary company. The posting was for an editorial assistant, a bottom-of-the-barrel position, but I lit up like a penny arcade when I saw that the primary duty would be to write and edit English dictionaries. I cobbled together a résumé; I was invited to interview. I found the best interview outfit I could and applied extra antiperspira
nt (to no avail).
Steve Perrault, the man who sat opposite me, was (and still is) the director of defining at Merriam-Webster and the person I hoped would be my boss. He was very tall and very quiet, a sloucher like me, and seemed almost as shyly awkward as I was, even while he gave me a tour of the modest, nearly silent editorial floor. Apparently, neither of us enjoyed job interviews. I, however, was the only one perspiring lavishly.
“So tell me,” he ventured, “why you are interested in lexicography.”
I took a deep breath and clamped my jaw shut so I did not start blabbing. This was a complicated answer.
—
I grew up the eldest, book-loving child of a blue-collar family that was not particularly literary. According to the hagiography, I started reading at three, rattling off the names of road signs on car trips and pulling salad-dressing bottles out of the fridge to roll their tangy names around on my tongue: Blue Chee-see, Eye-tal-eye-un, Thouse-and Eyes-land. My parents cooed over my precociousness but thought little of it.
I chawed my way through board books, hoarded catalogs, decimated the two monthly magazines we subscribed to (National Geographic and Reader’s Digest) by reading them over and over until they fell into tatters. One day my father came home from his job at the local power plant, exhausted, and dropped down onto the couch next to me. He stretched, groaning, and plopped his hard hat on my head. “Whatcha reading, kiddo?” I held the book up for him to see: Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, a book from my mother’s nursing days of yore. “I’m reading about scleroderma,” I told him. “It’s a disease that affects skin.” I was about nine years old.
When I turned sixteen, I discovered more adult delights: Austen, Dickens, Malory, Stoker, a handful of Brontës. I’d sneak them into my room and read until I couldn’t see straight.
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. As I grew older, words became choice weapons: What else does a dopey, short, socially awkward teenage girl have? I was a capital-n Nerd and treated accordingly. “Never give them the dignity of a response” was the advice of my grandmother, echoed by my mother’s terser “Just ignore them.” But why play dumb when I could outsmart them, if only for my own satisfaction? I snuck our old bargain-bin Roget’s Thesaurus from the bookshelf and tucked it under my shirt, next to my heart, before scurrying off to my room with it. “Troglodyte,” I’d mutter when one of the obnoxious guys in the hall would make a rude comment about another girl’s body. “Cacafuego,” I seethed when a classmate would brag about the raging kegger the previous weekend. Other teens settled for “brownnoser”; I put my heart into it with “pathetic, lickspittling ass.”
But lexophile that I was, I never considered spending a career on words. I was a practical blue-collar girl. Words were a hobby: they were not going to make me a comfortable living. Or rather, I wasn’t going to squander a college education—something no one else in my family had—just to lock myself in a different room a few thousand miles away and read for fourteen hours a day (though I felt wobbly with infatuation at the very idea). I went off to college with every intention of becoming a doctor. Medicine was a safe profession, and I would certainly have plenty of time to read when I had made it as a neurosurgeon.*1
Fortunately for my future patients, I didn’t survive organic chemistry—a course that exists solely to weed slobs like me out of the doctoring pool. I wandered into my sophomore year of college rudderless, a handful of humanities classes on my schedule. One of the women in my dorm quizzed me about my classes over Raisin Bran. “Latin,” I droned, “philosophy of religion, a colloq on medieval Icelandic family sagas—”
“Hold up,” she said. “Medieval Icelandic family sagas. Medieval Icelandic family sagas.” She put her spoon down. “I’m going to repeat this to you one more time so you can hear how insane that sounds: medieval Icelandic family sagas.”
It did sound insane, but it sounded far more interesting than organic chemistry. If my sojourn into premed taught me anything, it was that numbers and I didn’t get along. “Okay, fine,” she said, resuming breakfast, “it’s your college debt.”
—
The medieval Icelandic family sagas are a collection of stories about the earliest Norse settlers of Iceland, and while a good number of them are based in historically verifiable events, they nonetheless sound like daytime soaps as written by Ingmar Bergman. Families hold grudges for centuries, men murder for political advantage, women connive to use their husbands or fathers to bring glory to the family name, people marry and divorce and remarry, and their spouses all die under mysterious circumstances. There are also zombies and characters named “Thorgrim Cod-Biter” and “Ketil Flat-Nose.” If there was any cure for my failed premed year, this course was it.
But the thing that hooked me was the class during which my professor (who, with his neatly trimmed red beard and Oxbridge manner, would no doubt have been called Craig the Tweedy in one of the sagas) took us through the pronunciation of the Old Norse names.
We had just begun reading a saga whose main character is named Hrafnkell. I, like the rest of my classmates, assumed this unfortunate jumble of letters was pronounced huh-RAW-funk-ul or RAW-funk-ell. No, no, the professor said. Old Norse has a different pronunciation convention. “Hrafnkell” should be pronounced—and the sounds that came out of his mouth are not able to be rendered in the twenty-six letters available to me here. The “Hraf” is a guttural, rolled HRAHP, as if you stopped a sprinter who was out of breath and clearing their throat and asked them to say “crap.” The -n- is a swallowed hum, a little break so your vocal cords are ready for the glorious flourish that is “-kell.” Imagine saying “blech”—the sound kids in commercials make when presented with a plate of steamed broccoli instead of Strawberry Choco-Bomb Crunch cereal. Now replace the /bl/ with a /k/ as in “kitten.” That is the pronunciation of “Hrafnkell.”
No one could get that last sound right; the whole class sounded like cats disgorging hair balls. “Ch, ch,” our professor said, and we dutifully mimicked: uch, uch. “I’m spitting all over myself,” one student complained, whereupon the professor brightened. “Yeah,” he chirped, “yeah, you’ve got it!”
That final double-l in Old Norse, he said, was called the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. “What?” I blurted, and he repeated: “voiceless alveolar lateral fricative.” He went on to say it was used in Welsh, too, but I was lost to his explanation, instead tumbling in and over that label. Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. A sound that you make, that you give voice to, that is nonetheless called “voiceless” and that, when issued, can be aimed like a stream of chewing tobacco, laterally. And “fricative”—that sounded hopelessly, gorgeously obscene.
I approached the professor after class. I wanted, I told him, to major in this—Icelandic family sagas and weird pronunciations and whatever else there was.
“You could do medieval studies,” he suggested. “Old English is the best place to start.”
The following semester, twenty other students and I sat around a large conference table of the kind you only see in liberal arts colleges or movies with war rooms in them, while the same professor introduced us to Old English. Old English is the great-granddaddy of Modern English, an ancestor language that was spoken in England between roughly A.D. 500 and 1100. It looks like drunk, sideways German with some extra letters thrown in for good measure:
Hē is his brōðor.
Þæt wæs mīn wīf.
Þis līf is sceort.
Hwī singeð ðes monn?
But speak it aloud, and the family resemblance is clear:
He is his brother.
That was my wife.
This life is short.
Why is that man singing?
We stuttered our way through the translations. My professor went on to explain the pronunciation conventions of Old English; there is a handy and completely abstruse pronunci
ation section in our Bright’s Old English Grammar,*2 and the class delved right in.
But that first translation exercise left me with an itch at the back of my brain that wouldn’t go away: “Hwī singeð ðes monn?” I stared at the sentence for a while, wondering why the other sentences seemed to match their translations so well, but this one didn’t.
This was not the first of these itches: I had had them in high-school German class, when I realized how Vater and Mutter and Schwester looked like Amish cousins of “father” and “mother” and “sister.” I had had the same mental scratch in Latin, when I mumbled through my amo, amas, amat and realized that “amour”—an English word that refers to love or the beloved—looked a lot like the Latin verb amare, “to love.” I waited until after class and asked my professor about his translation of “hwī singeð ðes monn?” and he confessed that it wasn’t a literal, word-for-word translation; that would be “why singeth this man?” The itching intensified. I was vaguely aware that Shakespeare used certain words that we didn’t anymore—“singeth” being one of them—but I had never wondered why those earlier forms were different from the current ones. English is English, right? But English, I was fast learning, was fluid. “Singeth” wasn’t just a highfalutin flourish deployed to lend a sense of elevation and elegance to Shakespeare’s writings; “singeth” was a normal, boring way to say “sing” in the late sixteenth century. And it happened to be a holdover from Anglo-Saxon. We used “singeth” as the third-person form longer than we used “sings.”
I had spent years hoovering up words as quickly and indiscriminately as I could, the linguistic equivalent of a dog snarfing up spilled popcorn; I gobbled up “sing” and “singeth” without much thought about why the forms were so different. My only thought was stupid English. But those illogical lunacies of English that we all suffer through and rage against aren’t illogical at all. It’s all spelled out here, in the baby pictures of English.