Word by Word

by Kory Stamper

  “It was one of my most exciting days as a lexicographer for sure,” Emily says. “The process was simpler than it sometimes is because I didn’t have to go back and forth in my head about whether the meaning was already covered or not; it was immediately apparent to me that it wasn’t. From there it was just a matter of formulating the definition itself. I felt very proud of myself when it was all done.”

  It seems ludicrous—all that futzing for “a”? No one pays attention to little words like this. Everyone knows what they mean, and all this foofaraw has exactly zero impact on the way we live our lives. Then again, debate over the meaning of “is”—one of the simplest words in the English language—helped set in motion the impeachment of a sitting U.S. president.

  Q: [Mr. Wisenberg]…Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was “no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton,” was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?

  PRESIDENT CLINTON: It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. If “is” means is, and never has been, that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.

  So perhaps not precisely zero impact.

  —

  The citations sorted, I decided to tackle the verb first. The entry for the verb is far longer than the entry for the noun: 107 distinct senses, subsenses, and defined phrases. And, perhaps hidden in all those cards, a few senses or idioms to add.

  You will recall that when one works with paper citations, the unit of work measurement is the pile. Every citation gets sorted into a pile that represents the current definitions for the word, and new piles for potential new definitions. I looked at the galleys, then my desk, and began methodically moving everything on my desk that I could—box of pinks, date stamp, desk calendar, coffee—to the bookshelf behind me.

  My first citation read, “She was taken aback.” I exhaled in relief: this is simple. I scanned the galley and found the appropriate definition—“to catch or come upon in a particular situation or action” (sense 3b)—and began my pile. The next handful of citations were similarly dispatched—a pile for sense 2, a pile for sense 1a, a pile for sense 7d—and I began to relax. In spite of its size, this is no different from any other batch, I reasoned. I am going to whip through this, and then I am going to take a two-week vacation, visit my local library, and go outside.

  Fate, now duly tempted, intervened. My next cit read, “Reason has taken a back seat to sentiment.” I confidently flipped it onto the pile with “taken aback” and then reconsidered. This use of “take” didn’t really mean “to catch or come upon in a particular situation or action,” did it? I tried substitution: reason did not catch or come upon a backseat.*4 No: reason was made secondary to sentiment. I scanned the galleys and saw nothing that matched, then put the citation in a “new sense” pile. But before I could grab the next citation, I thought, “Unless…”

  When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them a supply of water and enough nonperishable food to last several days. “Unless…” almost always marks the beginning of a wild lexical goose chase.

  —

  There is a reality to what words mean that is amplified when you’re dealing with the little words. The meaning of a word depends on its context, but if the context changes, so does the meaning of the word. The meaning of “take” in “take a back seat” changes depending on the whole context: “There’s no room up front, so you have to take a back seat” has a different meaning from “reason takes a back seat to sentiment.” This second use is an idiom, which means it gets defined as a phrase at the end of the entry. I started a new pile.

  My rhythm had been thrown off, but upon reading the next citation, I was confident I’d regain momentum: “…take a shit.” Profanity and a clear, fixed idiom that will need its own definition at the end of the entry—yes, I can do this.

  Only “take a shit” is not a fixed idiom like “take a back seat” is. You can also take a crap. Or a walk, or a breather, or a nap, or a break. I scanned the galleys, flipping from page to page. “To undertake and make, do, or perform,” sense 17a. I considered. I tried substitution with hysterical results: “to undertake and make a shit,” “to undertake a shit,” “to undertake and do a shit,” “to undertake and perform a shit.” This got me thinking, which is always dangerous. Can one “perform” or “do” a nap? Does one “undertake and make” a breather? Maybe that’s 17b, “to participate in.” But my sprachgefühl screeched: “participate” implies that the thing being participated in has an originating point outside the speaker. So you take (participate in) a meeting, or you take (participate in) a class on French philosophy. I tentatively placed the citation in the pile for 17a, then spent the next five minutes writing each sense number and definition down on a sticky note and affixing it to the top citation of each pile. My note for sense 17a included the parenthetical “(Refine/revise def? Make/do/perform?).”

  I sat back and berated myself a bit. I have redefined “Monophysite” and “Nestorianism”; I can swear in a dozen languages; I am not a moron. This should be easy. My next citation read, “…arrived 20 minutes late, give or take.”

  What? This isn’t a verbal use! How did this get in here? I took a pinched-lip look around my cubicle for the guilty party—someone has been in here futzing with my citations!—then realized I was the guilty party. Clearly, I needed to refile this. But where? After five minutes of staring at the citation, I took the well-trod path of least resistance and decided that maybe it’s adverbial (“eh, close enough”). Yes, I’ll just put this citation…in the nonexistent spot for adverbial uses of “take,” because there are no adverbial uses of “take.” My teeth began to hurt.

  I placed the citation in a far corner of my desk, which I mentally labeled “Which Will Be Dealt with in Two or Three Days.”

  Next: “…this will only take about a week.” My brain saw “take about” and spat out “phrasal verb.” Phrasal verbs are two- or three-word phrases that are made up of a verb and a preposition or adverb (or both), that function like a verb, and whose meaning cannot be figured out from the meanings of each individual constituent. “Look down on” in “He looked down on lexicography as a career” is a phrasal verb. The whole phrase functions as a verb, and “look down on” here does not mean that the anonymous He was physically towering over lexicography as a career and staring down at it, but rather that he thought lexicography as a career was unimportant or not worth his respect. Phrasal verbs tend to be completely invisible to a native speaker of English, which is why I was so very proud of spotting one at first glance. I created a new pile for the phrasal verb “take about,” and then my sprachgefühl found its voice: “That’s not a phrasal verb.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and silently asked the cosmos to send the office up in a fireball right now. After a moment, I realized that my sprachgefühl had picked loose a bit of information that fell neatly to the bottom of my brainpan: the “about” is entirely optional. Try it: “this will only take a week” and “this will only take about a week” mean almost the same thing. The pivot point for meaning is not “take” but “about,” which means that this use of “take” is a straightforward transitive use. I flipped the card onto the pile for sense 10e(2), “to use up (as space or time).”

  It had been an hour, and I had gotten through perhaps twenty citations. I sifted all my “Done” piles into one and grabbed a ruler. The pile of handled citations was a quarter inch thick. Then I measured the cit boxes. Each was full. Each was sixteen inches long.

  Over the next two weeks, the tensile strength of my last nerve was tested by “take.” My working definition of “desk” expanded as I ran out of flat spaces to stack citations. Piles appeared on the top of my monitor, in my pencil drawer, filed between rows on my keyboard, teetering on the top of the cubicle wall, shuffled onto the top of the CPU
under my desk. Still I didn’t have enough space: I began to carefully, carefully put piles of citations on the floor. My cubicle looked as if it had hosted the world’s neatest ticker-tape parade.

  When dealing with entries of this size, you will inevitably hit the Wall. If you run, or have tried to run, then you are familiar with the Wall. It’s the point in a run when you are pushed (or pushing) beyond your physical endurance. Your focus pulls inward on your searing lungs, your aching calves, that hitch in your right hip that is probably because you didn’t stretch but might just be a precursor to your lower body literally*5 exploding from the effort you are putting forth. The ground has tilted upward; your feet are made of concrete and are fifty times bigger than you thought; your neck begins to bow because even the effort of holding your fat melon upright is too much. You are not euphoric, or Zen, or any of the other things that Runner’s World magazine makes running look like. You are at the Wall, where you are nothing but a loose collection of human limits.

  I hit my human limits about three-quarters of the way through the verb “take.” As I looked at a citation for “took first things first,” I felt myself slowly unspooling into idiocy. I knew the glyphs before me had to be words, because my job was all about words, and I knew they had to be English, because my job was all about English. But knowing something doesn’t make it true. This was all garbage, I thought, and as I felt my brain slip sideways, and the yawing ache open up in my gut, one thought flitted across my mind before I slammed headlong into the lexicographer’s equivalent of the Wall: “Oh my God, I’m going to die at my desk like in that urban legend, and they will find my body under an avalanche of ‘take.’ ”

  That night over dinner, my husband asked if I was okay. I looked up at him, utterly lost. “I don’t think I speak English anymore.” He looked mildly alarmed; he only speaks English. “You’re probably just stressed,” he said. “But what does that even mean?” I whined. “Just thinking about what it means makes my brain itch!” He went back to looking mildly alarmed.

  —

  It took me three more days to finish sorting the citations for the verb “take.” I was ecstatic—yes, I had done it!—and then immediately depressed: shit, I still had to actually do defining work on “take,” and I still had the noun to go! Lucky for me, I had decided to use the sticky notes to make changes to existing entries. “Make, do, or undertake” didn’t end up getting a revision in the end, but a rough handful of senses needed expanding or fixing; one definition meant to cover uses like “she took the sea air for her health” had been unfortunately phrased “to expose oneself to (as sun or air) for pleasure or physical benefit,” which I hurriedly changed to “to put oneself into (as sun, air, or water) for pleasure or physical benefit” so as not to encourage medicinal flashing.

  On the floor were my piles for citations that I needed to mentally squint at a bit more and piles of citations for new senses of “take.” It was late in the afternoon, the sun slicing gold along the wall. Before I took care of those, I decided to reward myself by answering the e-mail correspondence I had let accumulate while I had been ears-deep in “take.” I’d start afresh in the morning.

  The next morning, I came into work and discovered that the overnight cleaning crew had decided to move all the piles I had left on the floor, dumping them into a cascade of paper on my chair. It was a cinematic moment: I dropped my bag and stared openmouthed at the blank spaces where twenty or so piles of citations used to sit. As my sinuses prickled, I realized, almost too late, that I was about to cry, and if I cried, I would most certainly make noise. I left my bag in the middle of the floor and went to the ladies’, where I leaned against the paper towel dispenser and wondered if it was too late to go back to the bakery and have people throw cakes at my head.

  Lexicography is a steady plod in one direction: onward. I was doing no good standing there with my head on the cool plastic. Besides, a few of my colleagues were waiting for me to move so they could dry their hands. I re-sorted the tidy stack the cleaning crew left and papered every flat surface within five feet of my cubicle with “DO NOT MOVE MY PAPERS!!! KLS!!!!” I sat grimly in my chair and decided that a little fun was in order: it was time to stamp the covered citations and file them away.

  When you’re done working on an entry, the paper citations get put in one of three places: the “Used” group, which are the citations used as evidence for every existing definition in the entry; the “New” group, which holds the citations for each new sense you draft; and the “Rejected” group, which holds the citations for any use whose meaning isn’t covered by the existing entry or by a newly proposed definition. Used and new citations are stamped by the editor who worked on the entry to mark that they were used for a particular book. When the whole floor was consumed with a defining project, you’d occasionally hear a sudden rhythmic thumping, like someone tapping their toe in miniature. It was an editor stamping citations.

  I took out my customized date stamp and began marking the covered cits, pile by pile, as used. After the first handful, I stamped a little more exuberantly, and my cube mate hemmed in irritation. No matter. I had no punching bag to pummel; I had no nuclear device to detonate. But I had a date stamp, and by the power vested in me by Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, I was going to put this goddamned verb to bed.

  —

  That small act of brutality against index cards marked the other side of “take.” After I reshuffled the citations from the floor back into new piles, the verb went smoothly. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote some more. I got up from my desk to run proposed revisions and new entries past a few colleagues, and after climbing out of their hiding places, they were very helpful. I teased a new sense out of sense 6f, “to assume as if rightfully one’s own or as if granted,” which covered uses like “she took all the credit for it,” and created sense 6g: “to accept the burden or consequences of” to cover “she took all the blame for it”—a little splitty by lexicographical standards, but a distinction that Steve thought was good enough to leave in. I came up with verbal illustrations for the more opaque senses of “take.” Momentum begets momentum: I was suddenly able to see that “take the plunge” was a fixed idiom, “give or take” should be covered at “give,” that these three piles of citations for uses that are kinda-sorta close to the meaning of 12b(3) (“to accept with the mind in a specified way”) can be covered by 12b(3) if I change the definition by two words, that this phrasal verb I had a pile for had its own entry in the dictionary and so I can happily foist it on some other unsuspecting editor. It only took two days of scribbling and shuffling to finish the verb. When it was done, I took no break for e-mail but went straight on into the noun—a blissfully manageable twenty piles. And when that was done, in mere days, I was so pleased with myself that I pushed back from my desk, looked left and right to make sure that no one was within glancing range, and then emphatically punched the air and mouthed “YES.”*6

  I marched my finished batch back to the galley table, flipped the sign-out sheet back several pages—we were already in U—and signed “take” back in. It had taken a month of nonstop editorial work.

  —

  A month, I have come to discover, is not that long in lexicographical terms. In 2013, the University of Georgia hosted the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, an academic society for lexicographers, linguists, and logophiles interested in dictionaries. One of the attendees was Peter Gilliver, a lexicographer from the Oxford English Dictionary, who joined a crew of us for dinner.

  We had the restaurant mostly to ourselves, and talk turned shop-wise. We discussed the differences between defining for the OED, which is a historical dictionary with over 600,000 senses, and defining for the Collegiate Dictionary, a relative lightweight at about 230,000 senses. While discussing this, I announced to the table that I had done “take” for the Eleventh Collegiate, and it had taken me about a month. One of the academics at the table shook his head. “Wow.”

  Peter piped up. �
��I revised ‘run,’ ” he said quietly, then smiled. “It took me nine months.”

  The table burst forth in a chorus of “Jesuses!” Nine months! But of course it did. In the OED, “run” has over six hundred separate senses, making the Collegiate’s “take” look like kid stuff.

  I lifted my glass of wine from the other end of the table. “Here’s to ‘run,’ ” I said. “May it never come up for revision again in our lifetimes.”

  * * *

  *1 The Eleventh was an odd duck production-wise: the citations we needed to review for the new edition straddled the divide between paper and database. So though we had a database in place when the Eleventh was being written in the late 1990s, we reviewed citations in print. I do miss those boxes of citations, if I’m being perfectly, stupidly honest.

  *2 See the grammatical rabbit hole of one use of “but” in the chapter appropriately titled “But.”

  *3 rhad·a·man·thine ˌra-də-ˈman(t)-thən, -ˈman-ˌthīn adj : rigorously strict or just (MWU)

  vec·tu·rist ˈvekchərə̇st n, pl -s : a collector of transportation tokens (MWU)

  *4 This is not an error. For whatever reason, people tend to use the open compound “back seat” in the phrase “take a back seat” but the closed “backseat” when referring to the seats behind the driver. English!

  *5 Sense 2.

  *6 I saved the hooting and hollering for when I was outside.

  Bitch

  On Bad Words

  When you spend all day looking carefully at words, you develop a very detached and unnatural relationship with them. It’s much like being a doctor, I imagine: a beautiful person walks into your office and takes off all their clothes, and you spend all your time staring raptly at the sphygmomanometer.

  Once you get them in your office and have their clothes off, all words are the same for a lexicographer. Words that are crude, vulgar, embarrassing, obscene, or otherwise distasteful get treated just as clinically as science terms and other general vocabulary. It takes some getting used to. A new editor was recently sitting quietly at her desk, when two other editors walked by, engrossed in a conversation. “Should we have cock at all?” asked one editor as they sailed down the cubicle aisle. “It’s got shithead in it, it’s got turd in it…” That was all she heard before they were out of earshot.