by Kory Stamper
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.”
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As staunch a defender of dialect as I am, I fall into the same trap that all of us do: I consider myself the center of the lexical universe. The difference is that I should know better.
My younger daughter has spent her formative years in the mid-Atlantic region of America, which means that she and I speak different dialects. You would think that this would be a source of wonder to me daily, but it started out as a source of utter frustration.
One day, she came home from school, and I wandered out of my office to chat with her. “Do you have any homework?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m done my homework.”
This particular construction is a marker of the local dialect (and also happens to be a marker of Canadian English). It’s usually used with the participles “done” (as above) and “finished” (“I’m finished my burger”), though I also hear it with the participle “going” (“I’m going Emily’s house”). These are all completely normal sentences around here, and in my town this construction is used by people of all socioeconomic levels, from doctors to panhandlers. It is wholly unremarkable.
Except it was wholly remarkable to me.
“No,” I corrected her. “You’re done with your homework.”
“Right,” she answered. “I’m done my homework.”
All my years of training, all those hours spent carefully crafting responses to people who complained about the dialectal “ain’t” or “irregardless,” were thoroughly defenestrated. What motivated me was fear of judgment. “I’m done my homework” is not a part of Standard English, and my beautiful little girl was going to be judged on the basis of her abilities with Standard English, and I didn’t want anyone to think she wasn’t smart because she says “I’m done my homework.” Never mind that just about everyone who spent their formative linguistic years here says that. Never mind that she will eventually learn that “I’m done my homework” is not Standard English, and she will, like the rest of us, learn to switch between her native dialect and the prestige dialect. Never mind that my own dialect is “wrong” here. Maternal worry surfaced in dialect shaming.
There are times when the marginalization of a dialect, or of vocabulary from that dialect, has more dire results. John Rickford, a professor of sociolinguistics, has done an extensive analysis of the testimony given in the Trayvon Martin case by Trayvon’s friend Rachel Jeantel. Jeantel was on the phone with Martin as he was being pursued, and later shot, by George Zimmerman. She was, then, really the only witness to the shooting (apart from George Zimmerman) who was present in that courtroom.
Jeantel is black, and she natively speaks Haitian Creole as well as English. Throughout her testimony, the defense kept asking her if she understood English or if she was having a difficult time understanding the questions put to her. She consistently objected: she understood the questions just fine, and she was answering them honestly and completely. The problem was that she was answering them in AAVE, a dialect whose speakers are often painted as ignorant and uneducated. The white jury interrupted proceedings several times and claimed they could not understand her, and the defense attorney questioned one part of a pretrial deposition she gave concerning what she heard during the struggle. During that interview, she said she heard someone yell, “Get off!” and when she was asked, “Could you tell who it was?” the transcript indicated that she first answered, “I couldn’t know Trayvon,” and later, “I couldn’t hear Trayvon.” But Rickford points out that, even in Haitian Creole, those answers make no sense in context. “When another linguist and I listened to the TV broadcast of the recording played in court we heard, instead, ‘I could, an’ it was Trayvon.’ ” Rickford notes that he’d need to listen to a better recording of the initial interview that was transcribed. “But,” he goes on, “she definitely did not say what the transcript reports her to have said.”
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.
* * *
*1 Insurance claims adjuster, alumni donations solicitor, and bakery assistant (where I once had an angry customer pick up an Elmo cake and throw it at my head).
*2 Some people write back to tell me I am “A Idiot”: “irregardless” can be broken down into “ir-” and “regardless.” This is true, but “ir-” is not a unit capable of independent use, and so I am not “A Idiot” in this particular case.
*3 A perfectly cromulent word. Sorry, world.
*4 pot∙a∙mol∙o∙gist ˌpätəˈmäləjə̇st n, pl -s : a specialist in potamology (MWU)
pot∙a∙mol∙o∙gy ˌpätəˈmäləjē n, pl -gies : the study of rivers (MWU)
*5 A name that has, for a very long while, been a dog whistle. This dialect has several names—Black Vernacular English, Black American English, African-American Vernacular English—but linguists never call it Ebonics.
*6 My favorite example of this bouncing between dialects, called code switching, comes from the comedy duo Key and Peele. In one of their skits, two black men on cellphones approach a crosswalk. One is talking to his wife about buying her tickets to the orchestra; the second is making a call. As soon as they see each other, they both immediately and emphatically slip into speech patterns consistent with AAVE. The second man crosses the street, and as soon as he’s out of earshot of the first man, he slips back into his natural voice: higher and slightly lisping. “Oh my God, Christian,” he says, “I almost totally got mugged just right now.”
Corpus
On Collecting the Bones
After I got my job at Merriam-Webster, friends would ask me what my day-to-day work looked like. It makes sense: the idea that anyone spends eight hours a day doing anything with dictionaries beyond shelving them or using them as doorstops is absurd. And yet there I was, spending eight hours a day eyeballs-deep in dictionaries. Absurd is as absurd does.
So what does absurd do? I assured my friends that the work was utterly dreamy for a nerd like me: I spent most of my day reading.
Heads would tilt; drinks would float back down to the tabletop. Sly incredulity would slide over their faces. Reading. Really. Not finding new words, not culling old ones. Just reading. I’d smile broadly. Oh, yes. Yes, yes.
There is a common perception about lexicographers—common insofar as there is any perception about lexicographers—that they are the creators, redeemers, and sustainers of the language, some nebbish Holy Trinity. This misperception leads to all sorts of odd assumptions about what my work looks like. Folks assume that I spend my day in a locked, smoky conference room, chomping on cigars
and guzzling scotch, where other lexicographers and I bark out the latest, greatest additions to the language like caricature admen. Dartboards and blindfolds are sometimes invoked; extensive bribery setups are hinted at—how else did “Xerox” and “Kleenex” get into the dictionary?
After such a buildup, it is perhaps disappointing to find that dictionary work really is so mundane. One of my daughter’s friends summed it up best: after he heard what I did, his mouth fell open and he proclaimed, “Oh my God, that is the most boring thing I have ever heard in my life.” But for others, that sounds like heaven. One new acquaintance reached across the table and grasped my wrist:*1 “They pay you to sit and read for eight hours a day?” Her eyes went glassy with delight.
As a record of language in actual use, a dictionary has to be based on something outside the lexicographer’s head, and that something is a representative sample of the gargantuan bulk of printed English prose. How you get this representative sample is through a long-standing tradition that begins and ends with reading.
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As we have seen, English dictionaries began to proliferate in the late sixteenth century as power and wealth in England began to shift from the aristocratic class to the merchant class. London became a center for global trade and exploration, and your average merchant needed a level of literacy that he (or she) hadn’t needed in previous ages. Early English dictionaries were bilingual—Latin and English, French and English, Italian and English—because English was a newly global language. Bilingual dictionaries served not only the London merchants who were doing trade in these languages but also the foreigners who did dealings with English merchants and had to wrestle with a language whose vocabulary and grammar were serpentine.
As literacy ramped up in London, and grammar schools (particularly for young men) became more common, so too did reference books that were the forerunners of modern dictionaries. By the late sixteenth century, several popular primers included word lists to help the student progress in reading and writing English: the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 Elementarie (or, more properly, The First Part of the Elementarie Vvhich Entreateth Chefelie of the Right Writing of Our English Tung, Set Furth by Richard Mulcaster) ended with a list of around 8,000 words that every learned student should know; Edmund Coote’s 1596 The English Schoole-Maister contained a list of about 1,680 words.*2
The first book that scholars will call a proper monolingual English dictionary is the 1604 A Table Alphabeticall…*3 by Robert Cawdrey. Cawdrey’s book likely grew out of his work as a schoolmaster, and he makes it clear in the letter to the reader that opens his dictionary that his intention is to get people to use words that fit the context, to learn when to use high-flown language and when to use down-home words, and generally quit putting on lexical airs. The letter’s a marvel: it not only tells people how to use a dictionary but deliciously throws shade at educated and well-traveled people who speak only to impress (“Doth any wise man think, that wit resteth in strange words…? Do we not speak, because we would haue others to vnderstand vs?”).
Though Cawdrey claims his dictionary is for everyone, it’s not: it’s a list of hard words for the educated. No gentleman trained at Cambridge needs a slob like Cawdrey to tell him what the word “say” or “dog” means; Cawdrey’s book instead focuses on higher-level words like “cypher” and “elocution” and the sadly now-rare “spongeous” (“like a sponge”). But how did Cawdrey decide which hard words to cover? Certainly his work as a schoolmaster helped him discern which words students had trouble with, but he also borrowed liberally from specialty glossaries and primers that had already been printed, including both Mulcaster’s and Coote’s. So Cawdrey has two lexicographical claims to fame: first proper monolingual English dictionary, and originator of the great lexicographical tradition of plagiarism.
This is the general approach that lexicography takes for another sixty years or so: dictionaries are lists of hard words for educated, well-read people, and the words worth defining sprang generally from the mind of the lexicographer and the drudgery of others who had gone before. These early dictionaries focused sometimes on foreign words that we had kidnapped into English and sometimes on multisyllabic words we had churned out. What they did not include were simple, ordinary words, because those were already common enough that no scholar needed to know them. Early dictionaries were entirely didactic: they were meant to improve the education of those who already had some education.
That began to change in the mid-seventeenth century. A handful of dictionaries devoted to “thieves’ cant,” or the words used by the lower, sometimes criminal, classes in London, appeared on the scene. It may seem like an abrupt shift to go from the elevated language of the educated to the slang of pickpockets, but even this change is motivated by reading: there was a genre of writing called rogue literature that was popular during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. These books, plays, and pamphlets purported to be the true-crime pulp fiction of Elizabethan England: they were tell-all confessionals by beggars, hustlers, and thieves, and the educated class ate them up. Consequently, authors of rogue literature began to publish dictionaries of thieves’ cant so their readers could better understand their works.
Books during this era were big business, and dictionaries flourished: in the hundred years after Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall was published, a rough dozen new dictionaries hit the market. If books flourished, it was because of the push into literacy. The Protestant Reformation put a new emphasis on the ability to read and understand the Scriptures for oneself in one’s native language, and schools popped up to aid that purpose. When the age of Enlightenment eclipsed the Protestant Reformation, the value of literacy as a byway to reason skyrocketed: we exhibit right thinking, the maxim went, by using exactly the right words. By the eighteenth century, dictionaries included ordinary words so that everyone, from scholar to slob, could express themselves properly.
Expanded literacy didn’t just mean more money for booksellers. Readers needed—and wanted—more information about the words they were using: what made a particular word more meet than another, how were certain words pronounced, when was one meaning base while another elevated? Existing dictionaries didn’t comprehensively answer these questions. One dictionary might include a handful of ordinary words; another might include cant; another might focus only on the words of law or botany; another might not be comprehensive enough. In short, readers wanted more bang for their buck and, in wanting, wished into existence the modern dictionary and the modern lexicographer.
First was Nathaniel Bailey, whose 1721 An [sic] Universal Etymological English Dictionary*4 not only included everyday words but also gave extensive histories, notes on various uses, and stress marks so people would know where to put the emphasis on a word they might have only read. It was aimed at everybody—students, tradesmen, foreigners, the “curious,” and the “ignorant”—and accordingly included a good number of taboo and slang words, including “cunt” and “fuck” (both coyly defined in Latin, not English). Bailey’s dictionaries were wildly popular.
After Bailey came Samuel Johnson, His Cantankerousness. Son of a London bookseller, a university dropout, afflicted with depression and what modern doctors think was likely Tourette’s—“a man of bizarre appearance, uncouth habits, and minimal qualifications”—Johnson was bewilderingly chosen by a group of English booksellers and authors to write the authoritative dictionary of English.
Because of the seriousness of the charge, and because Johnson was scholarly but not a proper scholar, he began work on his dictionary the way that all of us now do: he read. He focused on the great works of English literature—Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Locke, Pope—but also took in more mundane, less elevated works. Among the books that crossed his desk were research on fossils, medical texts, treatises on education, poetry, legal writing, sermons, periodicals, collections of personal letters, scientific explorations of color, books debunking common myths and superstitions of the day, abridg
ed histories of the world, and other dictionaries.
When he saw a word that piqued his interest, he underlined it, put the first letter of that word in the margin of the book, and then passed those heavily marked texts to his assistants, who would copy the passage down on a piece of paper. The pieces of paper were filed alphabetically; they were what Johnson referred to in writing his dictionary.
Johnson’s system became the basis upon which nearly every dictionary from 1755 forward was prepared. Noah Webster used heavily annotated copies of books (and many, many other dictionaries) in preparing his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language; every managing editor at what would be called the Oxford English Dictionary oversaw a public reading program to gather quotations and rare words from an international cadre of readers (including at least one murderous nutbar);*5 dictionary companies today still underline, bracket, and extract quotations, which we call “citations,” from a wide variety of sources.