by Kory Stamper
It worked like this. Say you have a group of editors who typically go out to lunch together on Friday. You don’t want to bother each editor by sauntering over to their cubicle to blab about whether it’s Indian or Thai this week, so you write a pink. The initials of each editor go in the upper-right corner of the card; the question goes in the middle. You sign the note and throw it in your out-box for the first morning interoffice mail pickup. The note goes to the first editor on the list; they answer, then cross their initials off and drop the note in the next editor’s in-box.
Circuitous and less efficient than a conversation? Absolutely. But risk walking to a colleague’s desk only to see them startle and freeze like a rabbit as the hawk swoops in? No, thank you.
Because gabbing around the watercooler isn’t encouraged, lexicographers are perhaps a little awkward when it comes to the niceties of casual human interaction. When I was being given my tour of the building after joining the staff, we came up to one editor’s desk to find it was chock-full of historical Merriam-Webster ephemera: old advertising posters and giant prints of historical illustrations and, above them all, a black-and-white portrait of a man. The editor happily explained what all the pictures and posters were, then pointed at the portrait. “And that,” he said, “is an editor who used to work here, and one day he went home and shot himself.” My eyes widened; he merely crossed his arms and asked us where we had all gone to college.
Nowhere else is our institutional introversion borne out than at the Merriam-Webster holiday parties. The parties are usually held in the afternoon, and in the basement of the building, which in some years is literally spruced up for the occasion. Traditionally, the editors ring the cafeteria in groups of twos and threes, clutching our wine and murmuring quietly among ourselves while the marketing and customer service folks whoop it up in the center of the room near the shrimp cocktail, having quantifiable, voluble amounts of loud fun. It’s not that editors don’t like fun; it’s that we like our fun to be a little less whoop-y.*7 “We’re not antisocial,” says Emily Vezina, a cross-reference editor. “We’re just social in our own way.”
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Lexicographers spend a lifetime swimming through the English language in a way that no one else does; the very nature of lexicography demands it. English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air. To be a lexicographer, you must be able to sit with a word and all its many, complex uses and whittle those down into a two-line definition that is both broad enough to encompass the vast majority of the word’s written use and narrow enough that it actually communicates something specific about this word—that “teeny” and “measly,” for instance, don’t refer to the same kind of smallness. You must set aside your own linguistic and lexical prejudices about what makes a word worthy, beautiful, or right, to tell the truth about language. Each word must be given equal treatment, even when you think the word that has come under your consideration is a foul turd that should be flushed from English. Lexicographers set themselves apart from the world in a weird sort of monastic way and devote themselves wholly to the language.
Which leads to the third, and possibly most slippery, personality quirk required to do lexicography: the ability to quietly do the same task on the same book until the universe collapses in on itself like a soufflé in a windstorm. It’s not just that defining itself is repetitive; it’s that the project timelines in lexicography are traditionally so long they could reasonably be measured in geologic epochs. A new edition of the Collegiate Dictionary takes anywhere from three to five years to complete, and that’s assuming that most of the editors on staff are working only on the Collegiate. Our last printed unabridged dictionary, Webster’s Third New International, took a staff of almost 100 editors and 202 outside consultants twelve years to write. We began work on its successor in 2010; because of attrition, there are, as of this writing, 25 editors on staff. If we hold to the schedule, the new Unabridged should be finished a few weeks before Christ returns in majesty to judge the quick and the dead.
Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid. When you finish defining, you must copyedit; when you finish copyediting, you must proofread; when you finish proofreading, you must proofread again, because there were changes and we need to double-check. When the dictionary finally hits the market, there is no grand party or celebration. (Too loud, too social.) We’re already working on the next update to that dictionary, because language has moved on. There will never be a break. A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.
It is this slog through the fens of English that led Samuel Johnson, the unofficial patron saint of English lexicography, to define “lexicographer” in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” It’s a definition people chuckle over, but it is in earnest. In a 1747 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, Johnson writes,
I knew that the work in which I engaged is generally considered as drudgery for the blind, as the proper toil of artless industry; a task that requires neither the light of learning, nor the activity of genius, but may be successfully performed without any higher quality than that of bearing burthens with dull patience, and beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution….It appeared that the province allotted me was of all the regions of learning generally confessed to be the least delightful, that it was believed to produce neither fruits nor flowers, and that after a long and laborious cultivation, not even the barren laurel had been found upon it.
Bearing burdens with patience, beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution, the least delightful, the long and fruitlessly laborious—and that was how Samuel Johnson felt about lexicography before he started writing his famous Dictionary.
He didn’t lighten up any once he had finished, either. The preface to his magnum opus begins,
It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries.
And yet these unhappy mortals continue their work. An academic friend who studies old dictionaries remarked that it seemed less like a job and more like a calling, and so, in some ways, it is. Every day, lexicographers plunge into the roiling mess of English, up to the elbows, to fumble and grasp at the right words to describe ennui, love, or chairs. They rassle with them, haul them out of the muck, and slap them flopping on the page, exhausted and exhilarated by the effort, then do it again. They do this work for no fame, because all their work is published anonymously under a company rubric, and certainly not for fortune, because the profit margins in lexicography are so narrow they’re measured in cents. The process of creating a dictionary is magical, frustrating, brain wrenching, mundane, transcendent. It is ultimately a show of love for a language that has been called unlovely and unlovable.
Here’s how it happens.
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*1 No matter how book smart, we are all idiots at seventeen.
*2 The edition of Bright’s I used was edited by Frederic Cassidy, a lexicographer of some renown. Lexicography and medievalists go together like swords and shields.
*3 The company lore is difficult to substantiate: the methodology behind many best-seller lists is murky and opaque. It’s safe to say that the Collegiate is probably America’s best-selling desk dictionary just by dint of being one of the oldest continuously published desk dictionaries around. No list I consulted placed it at number two, however.
*4 The company now called Merriam-Webster lost exclusive rights to the name “Webster” in 1908 when the First Circuit Court of Appeals averred that the name “Webster” had passed into the public domain when the copyright on Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary expired in 1889.
Easy come, easy go.
*5 “Measly” is defined in the Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, as “contemptibly small.” Emily Brewster thinks it might be the best definition in the whole book.
*6 Even though everything has been electronic for some time, the word “pink” has stuck. When we annotate a production spreadsheet, we still refer to it as “sending a pink to the file.”
*7 The editorial floor has its own holiday potluck that is much more our speed. The long galley tables are cleared off for the food, and editors congregate around the citation files, the tall banks of drawers holding our plates while we all practice talking in a normal tone of voice. The editorial potlucks have gone on for over twenty years and will probably go on for another twenty, along with that damned coffeemaker.
But
On Grammar
My husband is a musician, which means that I occasionally get invited to swank parties full of cool people with interesting hair. I go along for spousal support and mostly as a dorky foil; I plant myself near the food and start shoving as much of it in my mouth as I can in the hopes that no one will engage me in conversation.
Inevitably, someone with better social skills comes over and asks, “What do you do?”
“I write dictionaries,” I will say, and then sometimes the inquisitor will brighten. “Oh, dictionaries!” they’ll respond. “I love words! I love grammar!”
This is the point at which I will begin eyeing the room for exits and sending strong telepathic messages to my husband, who is deep in conversation across the room, talking about Schoenberg or electronica. I know what’s coming, and here it is, uttered between sips of cheap box wine: “You must be great at grammar.”
I will grab a handful of whatever snack is closest and cram it into my maw so all I can do in response is nod in a noncommittal sort of way. I hope that the head waggle does it and I am not required to say what I am actually thinking: one of the first things you encounter as a working lexicographer is the stark reality that you only think you’re good at grammar, and the kind of grammar you are good at is—sorry—useless.
You might have been the sort of student who loved diagramming sentences, or the one who could theoretically hold forth at raging parties on the difference between the disjuncts and conjuncts (if people invited lexicographers to raging parties, that is). Maybe you’re a polyglot, collecting languages like lucky pennies, cherishing their differences and similarities until you can evoke an entire language’s feel and weight by running your thumb over the face of one word. People who become lexicographers are naturally interested in the clockwork of English, but years of studying those little wheels and cogs can make you myopic. You don’t realize how myopic until you back away from the bench and take a look around.
Your first training as a lexicographer, the Style and Defining classes, is that chance to push back from English and get your grammatical bearings. The Style and Defining classes I took as part of my orientation were held in a small conference room at the back of the editorial floor. The editorial conference room is really nothing more than a glorified storage space, a little nook left over after the freight elevator and the stairwell were built, but it has a window and so was deemed too nice to fill with cleaning supplies. It’s currently stuffed with old dictionaries and a small table, around which four editors can sit comfortably and six in introverted terror, warily holding their elbows to their sides and breathing shallowly so as not to make unintentional physical contact with anyone else in the room.
The editor training us was E. Ward Gilman, or Gil as we called him. By the time I came around, he had been at Merriam-Webster for forty years and had trained at least two generations of definers. He was the editor who wrote most of our Dictionary of English Usage and was a regular sparring partner with The New York Times’s On Language columnist, William Safire. On paper, Gil was intellectually imposing, though in person he was amiable: ample of gut and with an unaffected, folksy manner, a bit like a nineteenth-century sea captain gone to seed. None of us knew that at the time, though, and so we sat across from him, eager and slightly cowed in the over-warm editorial conference room. Our Style and Defining notebooks were open to the section called “A Quirky Little Grammar for Definers” (third edition, fourth printing). The sun dawdled through the window, and the musty, vanilla fug of old dictionaries hung around us. Gil leaned back and sucked his teeth. “Grammar. Some of you,” he warned, “are not going to like what I am about to tell you.”
A lexicographer’s view of grammar begins with the parts of speech, eight tidy categories we shunt words into based on their function within a sentence. If you survived the American educational system, you can probably rattle off at least four parts of speech—noun, verb, adjective, adverb—and here the nerds among us chime in with the remainder: conjunction, interjection, pronoun, and preposition. Most people think of the parts of speech as discrete categories, drawers with their own identifying labels, and when you peek inside, there’s the English language, neatly folded like a retiree’s socks: Person, Place, Thing (Noun); Describes Action (Verb); Modifies Nouns (Adjective); Answers the W Questions (Adverb); Joins Words Together (Conjunction); Things We Say When We Are Happy, Surprised, or Pissed Off (Interjection).
Your first disconcerting realization as a lexicographer is that you are the person who is responsible for sifting the language and placing individual words in those drawers. This is a sharp whack against your naive assumptions about how words come into being and exist. You mean words don’t just appear ex nihilo in the drawer they’re supposed to be in? Some slob in a beige office in Massachusetts is the one who decides what a word is?
Not quite. Your job as a lexicographer, and part of the reason why Gil is looking doubtfully in your general direction this afternoon, is to learn how to carefully parse English as it is used, sentence by sentence, and correctly classify the words within that sentence by their function. You don’t decide what part of speech a word is—the general speaking, writing public does. You merely discern what its part of speech is and then accurately report it in the dictionary entry.
This should be a comfort, but it is not. English is a remarkably flexible language, and its grammar is not nearly as tidy as we have been led to believe. Those parts of speech are not discrete boxes keeping everything dust-free and separate but more like a jumble of fishing nets. Randolph Quirk, lead author of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, calls this “gradience.” Many words are caught easily in those individual nets: In the sentence “dictionaries are great,” we can tell that “dictionaries” is a noun because it fits into the common, oversimplified paradigm we are all taught to identify nouns: person, place, thing. There are, however, plenty of words that live on the periphery of a part of speech, and they can get tangled between those fishing nets. Nouns can act like adjectives (“chocolate cake”); adjectives can act like nouns (“grammarians are the damned”); verbs can look like verbs (“she’s running down the street”) or adjectives (“a running engine”) or nouns (“her favorite hobby is running”). Adverbs look like everything else; they are the junk drawer of the English language (“like so”).
Even within one net, the catch is still eel slick: a lexicographer can look at the sentence “The young editors were bent to Webster’s will” and, after some mental finagling, decide that “bent” is actually a verb here (the past tense of “bend”). Very good. Is this use of “bend” transitive (that is, it requires an object, as in “I bend steel”) or intransitive (that is, it doesn’t require an object, as in “reeds bend”)? “Were bent” could be a passive use of “bend,” where the force doing the bending is hidden from lexical view, and transitive verbs are generally used in passive constructions—but who is the actor? Webster’s disembodied will? Older editors who were not going to take any young-upstart bullshit? It is all muddling in your mind. You put the end of your pencil in your mouth to keep yourself from muttering in exasperation and wonder if you’re nonetheless wrong: that “bent” here is actually
the adjective we’ve formed from the past participle of “bend”—the adjective that appears in “go to hell and get bent.”*1 You have pulled your notepad toward you and are scrawling all sorts of unintentionally creepy sentences on it—“the young editors were subdued,” “[someone] subdued the young editors”—trying to figure out whether this use is transitive or not, and the more you write, the less you know.
You’re not alone. Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster now keeps a rare editorial artifact, passed down from editor to editor: the Transitivity Tester. The Transitizer, as some of us call it, is a pink with a sentence on it and a hole cut out where the verb of the sentence is so you can lay the card over your problem verb and read the resulting sentence to see if that verb is, in fact, transitive. The Transitizer reads, “I’ma ______ ya ass.” I’ma bend ya ass (to Webster’s will). There you go: this sense of “bend” must be transitive.
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This mayhem is possible in part because those hallowed parts of speech we hew to aren’t inherent to English. In the West,*2 they were first hinted at in the fourth century B.C. by Plato in Cratylus, where he names verbs and nouns as two parts of a sentence. Aristotle, never one to be left out of an opining party, added “conjunction” to Plato’s two parts of speech but defines it in his Poetics as “a sound without meaning” (English teachers who have encountered one too many “and…and…and…” run-on sentences would heartily agree). The parts of speech we use today were established in the second century B.C. in a treatise called The Art of Grammar, which gives us our first incarnation of the eight parts of speech: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. This system has been futzed with over the centuries: article was dropped, interjection was added, participle was later considered a flavor of verb, and adjective was pried out of the noun class and became its own thing. By the time English lexicographers came on the scene in the late Middle Ages, our parts of speech were fixed and based entirely on Latin and Greek.