Word by Word

by Kory Stamper

  Thinking about documenting language brings on a gurgle of dread deep in the editorial gut. The philosophy of citation gathering actually runs counter to how language forms. Because we live in a literate society with comparatively easy access to books and education, we tend to believe that the written word is more important and has more weight than the spoken word. It makes some sort of sense: speech is ephemeral, captured only once by the listener and sorted like mental junk mail, a little slip of information that may or may not be useful and that either gets tossed or ends up moldering underneath the grocery list, the name of your first pet, and the chorus to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” Writing, on the other hand, is eternal; just ask anyone who has posted anything of questionable taste on the Internet. Once it’s written down, it’s real.

  But this is, to use a technical term, totally bogus. Speech is actually the primary way that language gets transmitted, and linguistic research of all stripes bears this out. Under ordinary circumstances, we learn to speak before we learn to read, and anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the gold standard of fluency isn’t your reading comprehension but your ability to ask a native speaker of that language which team they favor in the World Cup and to fully understand and participate in the argument that will inevitably ensue. That means that new words and phrases are almost always coined and spoken for some time before they get written down, and that is a whole area of language creation that the lexicographer doesn’t have access to.

  But ah—so what? If a word is really important, you may reason, then someone will eventually write it down, and then lexicographers will eventually see it, catalog it, and define it. Alas, not always. First, not all writing is public. Letters, grocery lists, notes we’ve written to each other in middle school, are not typeset and put in volumes for general consumption. Even the letters of great men and women—letters that would have some sort of literary or historical significance—are published in incomplete volumes or are lost to time. That’s a linguistic loss: many people are freer in these personal communiqués with the language they use. They’re willing to innovate, abbreviate, create nonce words, and let their linguistic guard down, and this means that there is a whole host of new and exciting words that will never be seen by a lexicographer.

  Which brings us to the second difficulty: a word has to be seen by a lexicographer, and while we are voracious, compulsive readers, there is no way that the world’s lexicographers could possibly read everything in print. Not only are there more print sources around than ever before, but the Internet gives everyone with access the opportunity to be a well-read author. That’s not hyperbole. 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.”

  My colleague Emily interviewed Monroee for a blog post and asked where “on fleek” came from. Was it family slang, a play on “on point” and “flick,” some sort of blend of “fly” and “chic”? No: Monroee says she just made it up.*10

  —

  Madeline Novak, our director of editorial operations, had just come by my desk to drop off the list. I was busy reading the front matter of the Third, a form of hazing that all new hires at Merriam-Webster are required to undergo as part of their training, but was happy to set those forty-five pages of four-point type aside for this. “Take a look,” she had said, “and let me know what you want to get started on.”

  The list I was now scanning was the official Reading and Marking list—the catalog of sources we regularly read and marked, arranged both alphabetically (natch) and by subject area. I whumped my copy of the Third shut, hissed a quiet “yes,” and hunched over the list like a kid who had just discovered her older sibling’s stash of M&M’s. My eyes flitted up and down the pages: everything from Better Homes and Gardens to Today’s Chemist at Work, Vibe to Commonweal, The New York Times to—I squealed as quietly as I could and ended up sounding like a slow leak—the Rocky Mountain News, one of my hometown papers. Madeline suggested I pick three or four to start out; within five minutes, I had already written out a list of about fifteen sources I’d like to read, and this was just the list of periodicals and newspapers! I hadn’t even seen the book list yet. Forget the M&M’s: this was a whole candy store.

  I put my pencil down and marveled at my luck. Here I was, a woman who didn’t just like to read, but who couldn’t stop reading—a woman who read ads on the bus, then moved to receipts in my pockets, then finally to reading over strangers’ shoulders because I couldn’t help it, I had to—here I was, actually getting paid to read. This job, I decided, is the shit.

  Reading and marking is*11 one of the core skills of a lexicographer, and like the other core skills of a lexicographer—defining, proofreading, assiduously avoiding eye contact—it takes practice. The process itself is simple: read something and be on the lookout for a word that catches your eye; when you find a word, underline it; bracket enough of the context around the word so that a future definer can determine how the word is used and what it means; put a check in the margin next to the marked word so the typists don’t go blind trying to find your faint, chicken-scratch underlining in all that text. Repeat until you have nothing else to read. But it’s the reading itself that requires some work. Most people assume it’s the idyllic, lost-in-it-all reading that most logophiles (and prospective lexicographers) dream of. Alas, it’s no relaxation fest, or it’s not intended to be. “I get the sense that most people read and mark at the end of a long day,” says Steve Perrault, “and I think that’s the wrong approach.”

  For a new lexicographer, this means that in addition to unlearning and relearning grammar as a new editor, you need to unlearn and relearn reading. This is done with practice sessions. While my new-hire crew was having Gil hammer out our linguistic prejudices like a mechanic with an old bumper, Steve was teaching us how to read. The goal behind reading and marking is to add new and interesting words to the citation files, and to do that well, you must pay attention to what you’re reading—but not too much attention. The commonest problem a lexicographer encounters in reading and marking is finding oneself interested in the content and not the language. For instance,

  At the Barbra Streisand $5000-a-head Demo fund-raiser on her Malibu spread, Hugh Hefner arrived with a scantily clad youngie who noticed Nancy Pelosi staring at her and snapped, “Don’t think I’m dumb, sweetie, just because I’m not wearing anything!”

  Who was the half-naked bimbo, and was she really as smart as she thought she was? What did Nancy Pelosi say in response? What did Hugh Hefner say in response? Oh God, I am dying to hear how this went down.

  If you are too, then you are not actually reading and marking, you are just reading. You are so focused on the potential for drama that you probably missed “Demo,” a great shortened form of “Democratic” that you don’t see often, and “spread,” a word that you usually see in reference to an array of foods, not a house. It wasn’t all a wash: you likely caught “youngie” because it appears after “scantily clad.” O tempora! O mores!

  For lexicographers, skimming is just as dangerous as diving headfirst into the story behind the words. When we skim, we are looking for key words and familiar patterns in text, not reading word by word or line by line. Skimming that passage above, you can quickly latch onto a few blockbuster words: “sweetie,” “scantily clad,” “Barbra,” “Hugh Hefner.” But you will likely miss the “a” and “head” in “$5000-a-head”—both uses that are not necessarily new but certainly don’t appear in print as much as they do in speech, and so are worth potentially marking. You might also mark “fund-raiser,” hyphenated as it is, so that you have evidence of it moving from an open compound to a hyphenated compound. That’s the sort of subtle shift that reading and marking intends to catch.

  But you only catch these shifts with pr
actice. Our practice reading and marking consisted of photocopies of articles that Steve had already read, from magazines with some narrative interest to make you work harder—trial by Entertainment Weekly. Steve gave you the reading; you went back to your desk and marked; and then you reviewed it together in the editorial conference room, with Steve suggesting good words you might have missed and explaining why marking other words is less helpful.

  One of my colleagues, Emily Vezina, vividly remembers her reading and marking training. She was reading a page of Entertainment Weekly, and Steve was going paragraph by paragraph with her. “What did you mark in the first paragraph?” he’d ask, and she’d run down what she marked. If he thought it was a good mark, he’d just nod and say, “Okay, good.” They went on like this until the last paragraph, which was a review for the movie American Pie 2. “And what did you mark here?” Steve asked.

  She paused. “I had just started working here,” she explains now, “and I didn’t know this guy very well. And he was my boss! But he asked, so I answered.” She cleared her throat and said, “Ah, I marked ‘horndogs,’ ” and he paused a bit, and then said, “Okay, good.” No word, no matter how stupid, is beneath your notice.

  You may note that I keep referring to “words that catch your eye.” It’s true that the words that tend to catch a lexicographer’s eye are words that are new in some way. But because lexicographers write definitions based on the citations they collect, you end up with a very unbalanced file if all you’re marking are new words. Consequently, there have been times when the muckety-mucks at Merriam-Webster have requested that we all mark every third or fifth word in at least one source just to fill our files with words that would not usually catch our eye. Modern online corpora help us fill in those gaps, but in the pre-corpora days we did citational spackling ourselves (and with a lot of apologies and homemade cookies for the stalwart typists who had to take all those sources and turn each underlined word into a discrete citation).

  Part of that spackling also involved making sure that we were reading a wide variety of sources. With the reading and marking list in front of me, I whittled my choices down to an eclectic four—Time, Car and Driver, Popular Mechanics, and Christianity Today—and, in due time, began to receive copies of them in my in-box, along with that day’s lunch pink. In the top-right corner of the cover was a label with my initials on it, heralding that this copy of Car and Driver was mine, all mine, and, directly below my initials, another editor’s initials. I was moderately irked: I had chosen these magazines for me, not for MDR or DBB or KMD or any other editor on staff. I had to share? This was becoming less “the shit” by the moment.

  The vast majority of periodicals read at Merriam-Webster are read by more than one editor. That makes sense: to reading and marking, each editor brings their own idiolect—their own unique collection of vocabulary, grammar, dialect markers, specialized vocabulary gleaned from hobbies, and other linguistic odds and ends you pick up as you move through time and space in English. What I thought was a completely boring and well-established use of “hot rod” in Car and Driver was, to someone who didn’t grow up with a hot-rodder,*12 new and exciting vocabulary. The flip side also applies: if I don’t know anything about cars, then I may completely miss a very subtle shift in the meaning of the word “drivetrain”; perhaps now drivetrains are not merely mechanical but incorporate computers and other underhood magic that I barely understand. If the same person (me) misses the same shift long enough, then the definition will eventually be out of date because you (I) don’t know jack about drivetrains.

  Or, because it’s all unfamiliar vocabulary, I might decide that I’m going to mark every single instance of “V-6” and “cat” for “catalytic converter” and “horses” for “horsepower” that I run across in every issue I read. This is a problem we call “overmarking.” When you overmark, you accidentally and unintentionally inflate the number of times that this particular use of “cat” shows up in the citation files. Worse, it’s very likely that no one has marked the feline sense of “cat” nearly as much because it’s so damned common, and therefore some hapless editor down the road has to explain in the file that in spite of what the objectively collated evidence in the file suggests, “cat” is not used in written English to mean “catalytic converter” more than it’s used to mean “a small domestic feline usually appearing on the Internet in widely shared videos, pictures, and memes.”

  The aforementioned MDR and DBB were physical science editors who would go behind me and make sure to mark those shifts in specialty vocabulary that I would inevitably miss, because I am no kind of scientist or mechanic. KMD was another editor with thirty years of experience on me, and when I would casually flip through an issue of Time that she had marked after I had, I would marvel at the things she found. While waiting for the coffeemaker to finish up a pot of orange-foil gack, I pulled one of the latest issues toward me and checked the page numbers she had listed next to her initials. One was a full-page ad that she had marked: “The acclaimed new Dodge Durango sport utility vehicle from the drawing board to production in 23 blazing months.” Goddamn, I thought. Ads! I had been so focused on mining the articles that I didn’t think to read Time for the ads.

  There’s a less philosophical and more prosaic reason to have multiple editors mark a source: there’s a lot to read, and we do have editorial deadlines to keep. After all, lexicography is entirely a commercial enterprise. Editors have to meet deadlines because we need to publish a dictionary at a certain point in time to increase sales; we need to sell a certain number of dictionaries a year to pay all our expenses; if we can’t meet our expenses, then we need to find ways to save money; saving money, as most modern American workers know today, usually involves getting rid of people or processes that you need to do your job. As much as I would like it, I can’t spend the day with my feet on my desk, languorously reading instead of tackling a particularly nasty definition (let’s say, “as”).

  The reading and marking list is an illusion: given enough time, you will end up reading things you didn’t want to. When one of my colleagues left to go teach, I inherited part of her reading and marking—in particular, the political magazines. Though I don’t mind discussing politics, I hate reading anything that smacks of a political screed or rant, yet now I had weekly periodicals full of them to sift through. Eventually, we all give up some of our early cherished sources simply because we don’t have the time to read them. Car and Driver is no longer delivered to my desk, nor is Popular Mechanics. 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.

  And yet. Most lexicographers are compulsive readers, and reading and marking teaches you to be a close compulsive reader. You can’t help it: once you start, you cannot—no matter what—stop. I have interrupted dinners to take blurry cellphone pictures of the menu for the citations files; I have shushed my children to transcribe that someone on public radio used the word “ho-bag”;*13 I have swerved to the side of the road to take pictures of road signs when they feature interesting vocabulary; I have gotten in the habit of taking the complimentary soaps when I travel, not because I like complimentary soaps, but because sometimes they have really interesting copy on them. Here is a partial list of items that I’ve seen waiting to be sent to the typists for citations (and not all of them put there by me):

  • frozen TV dinner boxes

  • diaper boxes

  • beer bottles

  • medication inserts

  • matchboxes

  • pictures taken from family albums (sorry, kids, you were standing under a sign that advertised a “dinor,” and that is a very rare and specific regional spelling of “diner,” and neither of you cares about that picture anyway—you didn’t even know I had it until you saw me take it to work)

  • the packaging from a set of Odor-Eaters

  • cereal boxes

  • take-out menus

  �
�� cat food bags (empty)

  • concert announcements or programs

  • mail-order catalogs of wide variety and scope

  • labels torn off skeins of yarn

  • the Yellow Pages. The entire Yellow Pages.

  Even when you do your damnedest to shut it off, you can’t stop reading and marking. You can still enjoy reading, of course, but you will always have a mental hangnail that catches on certain words and hurts until you attend to it. You may be reading the latest best seller, taking it in as smooth as silk on glass, and your eye jerks to a stop at the word “fuckwad.” Should I? you think, and a small voice from within pleads with you not to, dear God, we probably have thousands of instances of “fuckwad” in the citations file, this is not linguistically interesting at all, please just let it go—and before your inner hedonist has finished, you have already grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper and are transcribing the quotation to bring into the office the next day. I imagine it’s like being a podiatrist: after a while, the whole world is nothing but feet.

  A job where you read all day can be a pleasure, to be sure, but it can also ruin you. Words cease to be casual, tossed off, and able to be left alone. You are that toddler on a walk, the one who wants to pick up every bit of detritus and gunk and dead insect and dog crap on the sidewalk, asking, “What’s that, what’s that, what’s that?” while a parent with better things to do tries to haul your over-inquisitive butt away.

  Out of the corner of my eye even now I can see an oatmeal canister crammed onto a shelf in my pantry, emblazoned with the words “Quick Cook Steel Cut Oats.” “Quick cook.” “Steel cut.” Hmm. I wonder.

  Pardon me: I have a package of oatmeal to vandalize.