by Kory Stamper
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There are some fairly strict rules in place for writing verbal illustrations. First and foremost, no jokes or anything that could possibly be construed as a joke. Do not write
You must also excise all potential double entendres from the book; they say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind, and they are right. Editors are, at heart, twelve: if we can construe something as a fart or sex (or a fart and sex) joke, we will. This is a double-edged sword as you write verbal illustrations: the elevation of your adult duty is constantly pulling against the gravity of your native gutter thinking. Duty must prevail because duty ostensibly pays the bills, and so gets changed to ;
(And yet here I must confess that I am aware of two good double entendres that have made it into our dictionaries and have stayed there. The first is in a paperback dictionary at the entry for “tract” and references a boob joke from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
Once you have removed all vestiges of fun from your verbal illustration, you must go through another pass and remove names. You may think it’d be a great way to win friends and get people to buy dictionaries—hey, anyone named Larry, you’re in the dictionary at the entry for “awesome”!—but it’s fraught with peril. Who will think of Trisha, the woman who just broke up with a Larry, who then picks up the dictionary and sees
In addition to names, be very careful about pronouns and how you use them. English pronouns, gendered as they are, tend to inspire a lot of teeth grinding in general use, because they end up communicating something about the user’s views of men and women whether the user wants them to or not. It’s a pronounal catch-22. Don’t even think about writing
This goes well beyond pronouns, of course. You must avoid any hint of perceived bias anywhere in the verbal illustration. Your illustration for “conservative” that reads
Further, be aware that writing a verbal illustration like
It is best, in fact, to assume that every verbal illustration you write will offend someone, somewhere, at some point.
All this can send an editor skittering over the edge in their own quietly unhinged way. Here is a list of verbal illustrations, compiled by a proofreader, that used to appear in two of our children’s dictionaries:
Perhaps they are a little depressive, you counter, but how else are you going to illustrate words like “overboard” and “arsenic” and “knife”? Well reasoned. If only those were the words those examples were illustrating:
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 ,
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If example sentences are such a pain in the ass to find and to write, then why not leave them out? Who will miss them? Surprisingly, lots of people will. One of the most common requests we have gotten over the years is for more example sentences in our dictionaries. From a linguistic point of view, this makes sense. People don’t learn language in individual words but in chunks of language. Think about any foreign language you’ve learned (or attempted to). What’s the first thing you learn? Usually how to say “Hello, my name is [Kory]. How are you?” You don’t learn the word for “name,” and then learn the conjugation of “be” (and good thing, too, because it is stubbornly irregu
lar in most languages). You don’t learn the interrogative “how” and the various declensions of the second-person pronoun. All that comes later when you have a little something to hang that information on. You learn two complete, if rudimentary, sentences, and that gives you the confidence to keep moving forward—until you reach the subjunctive, anyway.
The point of example sentences in dictionaries isn’t just to fill out space and drive lexicographers to a nervous breakdown but to help orient the user in terms of a word’s broader context, its connotative meanings, its range, its tones. In all the things that people look for in writing—narrative, color, dialogue—it must be bland, yet it must be lexically illuminating, showing formality of tone and collocative use, sounding completely and utterly natural even if it is the most highly constructed sentence you’ve ever written. It’s a difficult balance to get right.
Six years into my tenure at Merriam-Webster, I was working on a reference book that was heavy on verbal illustrations. The senior editor who was managing the book and overseeing my work was an excellent editor, but not one who was free with compliments or encouragement. More than once during the project, I opened e-mails from him that asked me what, exactly, I was thinking while working on thus-and-such batch. I often left the office during that era wondering if maybe I should pack it in and go work at a Renaissance Faire instead.
One difficult afternoon, I sent him an e-mail about a batch I was copyediting, asking him for thoughts on another editor’s verbal illustration. He answered at length, crabbed and cantankerous, then ended his miserere with an unlooked-for compliment. “ ‘Gobs’—of all things—perhaps is an example of your commendable creativity. You took a difficult word, and created a sentence in which that particular word looks at home.”
The verbal illustration I came up with was
* * *
*1 I have no good answer for that, which is perhaps why I am a lexicographer and not an English teacher.
*2 de·sert di-ˈzərt n, pl -s…2 : deserved reward or punishment—usually used in plural
*3 We hear an awful lot about the entry for “love.” I have received some form of this complaint for years, though not specific to pizza.
Take
On Small Words
We were working on revising the Collegiate for its eleventh edition, and we had just finished the letter S. For the Collegiate, it was broken up into two batches, so by the time that last batch in S had been signed back in, the editors were not just pleased; we were giddy. You’d go to the sign-out sheet, see that we’re into T, and make some little ritual obeisance to the moment: a fist pump, a sigh of relief and a heavenward glance, a little “oh yeah” and a tiny dance that is restricted to your shoulders (you are at work, after all). Sadly, lexicographers are not suited to survive extended periods of giddiness. In the face of such woozy delight, the chances are good that you will do something rash and brainless.
Unfortunately, my rash brainlessness was obscured from me. I signed out the next batch in T and grabbed the galleys for that batch along with the boxes—two boxes!—of citations for the batch.*1 While flipping through the galley pages, I realized that my batch—the entire thing—was just one word: “take.” Hmm, I thought, that’s curious. Lexicography, like most professions, offers its devotees some benchmarks by which you can measure your sad little existence, and one is the size of the words you are allowed to handle. Most people assume that long words or rare words are the hardest to define because they are often the hardest to spell, say, and remember. The truth is, those are usually a snap. “Schadenfreude” may be difficult to spell, but it’s a cinch to define, because all the uses of it are very, very semantically and syntactically clear. It’s always a noun, and it’s often glossed because even though it’s now an English word, it’s one of those delectable German compounds we love to slurp into English.
Generally speaking, and as mentioned earlier, the smaller and more commonly used the word is, the more difficult it is to define. Words like “but,” “as,” and “for” have plenty of uses that are syntactically similar but not identical.*2 Verbs like “go” and “do” and “make” (and, yes, “take”) don’t just have semantically oozy uses that require careful definition, but semantically drippy uses as well. “Let’s do dinner” and “let’s do laundry” are identical syntactically but feature very different semantic meanings of “do.” And how do you describe what the word “how” is doing in this sentence?
It’s not just semantic fiddliness that causes lexicographical pain. Some words, like “the” and “a,” are so small that we barely think of them as words. Most of the publicly available databases that we use for citational spackling don’t even index some of these words, let alone let you search for them—for entirely practical reasons. A search for “the” in our in-house citation database returns over one million hits, which sends the lexicographer into fits of audible swearing, then weeping.
To keep the lexicographers from crying and disturbing the people around them, sometimes these small words are pulled from the regular batches and are given to more senior editors for handling. They require the balance of concision, grammatical prowess, speed, and fortitude usually found in wiser and more experienced editors.
I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course, because I was not a wise or more experienced editor. I was hapless and dumb, but dutifully so: grabbing a fistful of index cards from one of the two boxes, I began sorting the cards into piles by part of speech. This is the first job you must do as a lexicographer dealing with paper, because those citations aren’t sorted for you. I figured that “take” wasn’t going to be too terrible in this respect: there’s just a verb and a noun to contend with. When those piles were two and a half inches high and began cascading onto my desk, I decided to dump the rest of the citations into my pencil drawer and stack my citations in the now-empty boxes.
Sorting citations by their part of speech is usually simple. Most words entered in the dictionary only have one part of speech, and if they have more than one, the parts of speech are usually easy to distinguish between—the noun “blemish” and the verb “blemish,” for example, or the noun “courtesy” and the adjective “courtesy.” By the time you’ve hit T on a major dictionary overhaul like a new edition of the Collegiate, you can sort citations by part of speech in your sleep. For a normal-sized word like “blemish,” it’s a matter of minutes.
Five hours in, I had finished sorting the first box of citations for “take.”
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It is unfortunate that the entries that take up most of the lexicographer’s time are often the entries that no one looks at. We used to be able to kid ourselves while tromping through “get” that someone, somewhere, at some point in time, was going to look up the word, read sense 11c (“hear”), and say to themselves, “Yes, finally, now I understand what ‘Did you get that?’ means. Thanks, Merriam-Webster!” Sometimes, in the delirium that sets in at the end of a project when you are proofreading pronunciations in six-point type for eight hours a day, a little corner of your mind wanders off to daydream about how perhaps your careful revision of “get” will somehow end with your winning the lottery, bringing about world peace, and finally becoming the best dancer in the room.
But nowadays, thanks to the marvels of the Internet, we know exactly what sorts of words people look up regularly. They generally don’t look up long, hard-to-spell words—no “rhadamanthine” or “vecturist” unless the National Spelling Bee is on TV.*3 They tend to look up words in the middle of the road. Some of the all-time top lookups at Merriam-Webster are “paradigm,” “disposition,” “ubiquitous,” and “esoteric,” words that are used fairly regularly but also in contexts that don’t tell the reader much about what they mean.
This also means that the smallest words, like �
�but” and “as” and “make,” are not looked up either. Most native English speakers know how to navigate the collocative waters of “make” or don’t need to figure out what exactly “as” means in the sentence “You are as dull as a mud turtle.” They recognize that it marks comparison, somehow, and that’s it. But that’s not good enough for lexicography.
It is also a perverse irony that the entries that end up taking the most lexicographical time are usually fairly fixed. Steve Kleinedler notes that one of the American Heritage Dictionary editors overhauled fifty or sixty of the most basic English verbs back in the first decade of the twenty-first century. “Because he did that, they don’t really need to be done again anytime soon. That was probably the first time they’d been done in forty years.” This isn’t dereliction on The American Heritage Dictionary’s part: these words don’t make quick semantic shifts. “Adding new idioms to these entries: easy-peasy,” Steve says. “But in terms of overhauling ‘take’ or ‘bring’ or ‘go,’ if you do it once every fifty years, you’re probably set.”
That’s not to say that these tiny words don’t have semantic shift at all. Emily Brewster had the indefinite article “a” in one of her defining batches for the Eleventh, and she “found” a new sense of the word. I put “found” in quotations for a reason: the semantic shift that Emily outlined in her overhaul of “a” isn’t new. Her careful reading of the citations for “a” and her splitter nature led her to tease out a finer meaning of “a” than had been previously recorded. The new sense: “—used as a function word before a proper noun to distinguish the condition of the referent from a usual, former, or hypothetical condition,” as in “With the Angels dispatched in short order, a rested Schilling, a career 6-1 pitcher in the postseason, could start three times if seven games were necessary against the Yankees.”