by Kory Stamper
Nonetheless, the panel has historically trended toward being linguistically conservative, particularly in eschewing both new meanings of old words and functional shift (that is, a word’s moving from one function to another, like the verbing of nouns). If there was ever a haven for fallacists, the panel was it. And while they hold to bits of etymological fallacy—in the early years of the twenty-first century, 58 percent of the panel reported that in their own writing they restricted the use of “dilemma” to refer to one of two options rather than using it as a general synonym of a problem, because its root “di-” means “two”—enough of the panel finds the positive “awfully” and the great “fantastic” so unremarkable that usage discussions for these two words don’t even appear in the latest edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.
People who supposedly care about correct English love the Usage Panel, but for reasons that are all smoke and mirrors. The panel didn’t have, and still doesn’t have, authority to decide which words are actually entered into the AHD. Steve Kleinedler says, “I think everyone on the Panel recognizes the role of a dictionary. No one has ever said, ‘Ain’t shouldn’t be in,’ or ‘Irregardless shouldn’t be in.’ ” Good thing, too, because “irregardless” and “ain’t” both appeared in the first, most conservative edition of the book, and they continue in it today, stubborn barnacles of nonstandard English that can’t be completely scraped off the hull of the language. (Interestingly enough, only 90 percent of the panel disapprove of “irregardless,” which makes me wonder: Who are the turd stirrers infiltrating the panel?) Today, the panel comprises 205 people; they are, as a whole, much less linguistically conservative than their forebearers. Eighty-one percent of them, as of the 2005 balloting, have no problem with the extended sense of “decimate” that refers to widespread death, not just death restricted to one-tenth of a group, and 36 percent of them are fine with the sense of “decimate” that refers to extensive damage (as in “The crops were decimated by drought”).
“These things can have a complex history,” says Jim Rader, but few of us want to live with that complexity. We think that we have the right to go through the photo album of English’s life and throw away the pictures that don’t make sense—blurred pictures, or snaps from that unfortunate stage when it was surly and uncooperative. But those deviations from the plumb line contain surprises and delights not just about English but about the world we live in. “OK,” which might just be one of the most widely understood English words in the world, came into being as an initialism from “oll korrect,” which was a facetious misspelling of “all correct” that came about because of a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings and the abbreviation thereof. And now you, too, know that there was a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings.
English has survived through conquest and adaptation, and many of those adaptations are blunt mistakes and misreadings. A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.
* * *
*1 The Latin virus is a wonderfully evocative yet tidy word: it can mean “poison,” “stench,” “venom,” or “slimy liquid.” It got its distant tie to “ooze” because of the “slimy liquid” sense, and to “weasel” and “bison” for the “stench” sense.
*2 For more information on the history of “OMG” that will make you pause, foot wavering in midair, sail over to the chapter “American Dream.”
*3 We just cannot accept the fact that such a colorful word doesn’t have an amazing story behind it, but c’est la langue.
*4 Properly, an acronym is a word that is created from the initial letters or major parts of a compound term whose pronunciation is a word (“NAY-toe,” “SNAF-oo”), and an initialism is an abbreviation created from the initial letters of a compound term, like “FBI,” whose pronunciation is a collection of letters (“EFF BEE EYE”). “Acronym” gets used of both of these, however, and such use burns the biscuits of some.
*5 Memorize this fact and become the life of your next party.
*6 Itself an impure language that underwent substantial change during the millennia it was in use. Sorry, fallacists.
*7 Not everyone was as circumspect. The historian Barbara Tuchman, another panelist, roundly rejected the use of “author” as a verb with “Good God, No! Never!”
American Dream
On Dates
Lexicographers don’t expect their readers—normal people who have a healthy relationship to reference works, which is to say, a casual one—to scrutinize every part of a dictionary entry. But there is one small part that ends up getting a lot of attention: four numbers hugged by parentheses. A date.
Dates haven’t always been a part of dictionary entries. They are an innovation brought to market by historical dictionaries like the OED, and they’re a feature primarily of historical dictionaries. By most general dictionary publishers, dates at entries were deemed impractical and uninteresting to the layperson. But those publishers were wrong: dates are popular.
Our dating project, as we call it in-house, has an odd history. Dates at entries were proposed by Merriam-Webster’s then president, Bill Llewellyn, back in the 1980s. The reaction from the editorial department was extremely negative; the amount of work it would require to track down the dates of first written use seemed prohibitive. The company would need an army of editors scurrying around the country’s libraries looking for dates for new and existing entries. Llewellyn wanted something that would make Merriam-Webster dictionaries more distinctive, and he told the editorial department that if it didn’t want to add dates, that was fine, but then it needed to come up with something else. The senior editorial staff settled on adding usage paragraphs to a handful of entries in place of the dates. “Of course, what happened,” says Steve Perrault, “is that when that was done and we presented them to Bill Llewellyn, he said, ‘Okay, good, we’ll put those and the dates in.’ ”
“That was an enormous project,” says Joanne Despres, our senior dating editor, “because everything had to be dated from scratch.” The daters, as we call them in-house, began by checking the OED, the granddaddy historical dictionary of them all, and then moved to more specialty dictionaries, like the Middle English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Slang. From there, we moved into our own library and citation files. It was a massive undertaking but was finished in time for the Ninth Collegiate in 1983.
It turned out Llewellyn was right: everybody loves the dates in the Collegiate. So much so that we’ve begun adding them to entries in the Unabridged Dictionary as well.
At Merriam-Webster, the dates represent the first time that an English word was used in print (in English) with the earliest meaning given in that dictionary. You may be able to tell from the awkward and deliberate wording of that statement that there is plenty of misunderstanding about the nature of the dates.*1 The biggest misunderstanding is that a date of first written use is the date of that word’s creation. At one conference I attended, a speaker noted that according to the OED Jane Austen was the first author to use the words “shoe-rose” and “shaving glass” in her novels—which says some interesting stuff about the sort of world that Jane Austen inhabited and depicted—but then went on to claim that Jane Austen invented these words because she was the first to use them in print. I maintained an outward detached, scholarly air as I listened, but inside I had slapped a figurative hand to my forehead, à la Homer Simpson. A little thought reveals that the idea is complete nonsense. Why would Jane Austen have created new words for very common items of the toilet—items that were in use and already had common names—and use these new words, unglossed and unexplained, in her books? It’s likely she wouldn’t have. She would likely have explained, in running text, what a shoe-rose or a shaving glass is if she felt that her audience was going to be unfamiliar with it. She did not, because those words were already circulating in society by the time Jane Austen wrote her books.*2 J
ane Austen is not the person to have coined those words.
Most words come into being first in speech, then in private writing, and then in public, published writing, which means that if the date given at the entry marks the birth of a word, the moment when it went from nothing to something, then Merriam-Webster must have an underground vault full of clandestine recordings of each word’s first uttering, like something out of the Harry Potter books, only less magical. But the fact remains: because of how words are born, we will probably never know who coined a particular word and when they first used it, because language begins as something private and then moves into the public sphere.
Jane Austen will eventually lose her claim to “shoe-rose” and “shaving glass.” Dates of first written use change frequently because new material comes to light, either by being published for the first time or by being digitized and easily searchable. “The number of full-text databases has multiplied, and now we’re using them almost exclusively,” says Joanne.
Dates can also change depending on the dictionary. Because we date to the first written use of the earliest entered sense of that word, we may have a different date for the word in the Unabridged Dictionary if there is an early obsolete sense in the Unabridged that isn’t in the Collegiate Dictionary. “Actress” in the Unabridged Dictionary is dated to 1586, and to 1680 in the Collegiate, because the Unabridged enters the earlier and obsolete sense “a woman that takes part in any affair,” whereas the Collegiate only enters the common “a woman who is an actor” sense.
Because the dates are so precise in a way that seems measurable compared with the precision of a good definition—it’s just a number!—they are the one part of a dictionary entry that many correspondents like to pick at, like scabs. Many people think that the dates don’t describe the word but the thing represented by the word. “Boston marriage” (defined in the Unabridged Dictionary as “a long-term loving relationship between two women”) is a good example. As best we can tell, the term wasn’t used to describe this relationship until 1980, which some people decry as startlingly late. We have received long e-mails on the subject of hidden lesbianism throughout the ages, which are always educational but don’t shed any light whatsoever on the term “Boston marriage.” Some point out that Henry James described one such relationship in his 1886 novel The Bostonians; well and good, but he never used the phrase “Boston marriage” to describe that relationship, so we can’t cite the book as the origin of the phrase.
Sometimes, a correspondent will forget what language we’re dating in. “I noticed that some of the word origin dates are really off,” one correspondent wrote recently. “For example, it says that ‘brothel’ was first used circa 1566, when in reality Tacitus used the term in his account of Rome burning as far back as A.D. 64.” Tacitus did mention brothels in his Annales, but he used the Latin word lupanaria for them, and lupanaria has been translated into English as “brothel.” That makes a good deal of sense, because Tacitus was a Roman (and therefore Latin-speaking) historian who flourished at the end of the first century A.D., a few centuries before English was even around as a language. Even when a word is borrowed directly from another language, we only look for evidence of that word that marks it as a fully English word. “Safari” was snatched into English from Swahili, but we are only concerned with the earliest point at which the word was clearly, undeniably English: “These Safari are neither starved like the trading parties of Wanyamwezi nor pampered like those directed by the Arabs.”
—
We have a cadre of scholars and language lovers who are looking to antedate our date—that is, find an earlier use than the one we draw our date from. It’s a natural impulse: everyone likes to one-up the experts, and the dates seem like a relatively easy place to do your one-upping.
On Twitter not too long ago, I was discussing the term “dope slap,” which I had traced back (using what was available to me at the time) to Tom Magliozzi, one of the hosts of NPR’s show Car Talk. A dope slap is, as Ray Magliozzi, Tom’s brother, says, “kind of a quick slap to the back of the head when the recipient is unaware that it’s coming,” and when Tom Magliozzi first used it in a Car Talk blog post, it was clear that the dope slap got its name from the dopey target of the smack: “Well, the first thing I’d do is give that kid a dope slap for driving home after the oil light came on. When the oil light comes on, you should always stop the engine immediately.” “I scoured all my sources and found nothing earlier than that,” I said. “Which means that someone will antedate it immediately.”
It only took fourteen minutes before someone chimed in to tell me that there was a Dope Slap Records putting out music in 1990. It’s true that there was, but because this appearance of “dope slap” shows up in a name and not in running text, it’s very difficult to tell what, exactly, it means. I said as much—good googling, but probably not an earlier date.
Six minutes later, my Twitterer found another instance from 1990, this time in running text: “the first annual Dope Slap Awards,” used in reference to the video Hockey: “A Brutal Game.” He was not going to give up; he was going to get his antedate, goddamn it. But all the same, there’s nothing in that citation he linked to from The Ottawa Citizen to tell me that this “dope slap” refers to the upside-the-head smack that I was highlighting, and that’s the particular sense that we’re dating here.
Though my Twitter friend was wrong in this instance, well-researched efforts like his can turn up antedatings that we’ve missed. Joanne sighs when we talk about this. In one dating spreadsheet we use to keep track of where an antedating was found, there are sixty-five listed sources to check—everything from a rough couple dozen dictionaries of varying vintage, to newspaper databases and archives, to repositories of scholarly works (like JSTOR and PubMed), to our own editorial library, scattered throughout the building and definitely not digitized. There is no ur-script we can run on those databases to query all of them efficiently; there is no easy way to sift through the results; there is no program we can run to dump all the false positives we get (scanning errors, database errors, query errors, errors that appear like gremlins in the machine just to fuck with you). Each result has to be looked at by a dater and evaluated—and all that for hundreds of thousands of entries and under deadline. “We have to cover so much material. I don’t have more than an average of fifteen minutes to research any given entry,” says Joanne. “Some of these guys are spending days doing deep research into every obscure newspaper archive they can find.” She shrugs. “They help us, you know, by digging this stuff up.”
Because dating relies so much on meaning, it’s just as squishy an enterprise as defining is. “It involves the same kind of semantic analysis that defining does, I suppose, although you don’t have to be productive. You don’t have to write the definitions, you just have to understand what’s being said,” says Joanne. But unlike defining, you have to hunt around for your source material, and this can lead the dater down a rabbit hole. Most uses that Joanne found of “day hike,” which we enter in the Unabridged Dictionary defined as “a hike that’s short enough to be completed in a single day,” were nearly indistinguishable from the meaning of “a hike taken during the day,” which is not entered in the Unabridged Dictionary and so is not the meaning that a dater is looking for. Searching through databases for uses of “day hike” turned up so many results for the “hike during the day” sense that Joanne eventually abandoned the method of searching in batches and went through everything she could from 1950 backward, year by year, looking for evidence of the “short hike” sense (as opposed to the “hike during daylight” sense) until she didn’t find any uses of “day hike” referring to a short hike for several years running. This was her indication that she had probably found the earliest written use of “day hike” meaning “a short hike” that we were going to find. The date we give this sense of “day hike” in the Unabridged is 1918. There are earlier uses: they are for a sense that we don’t enter, and so are invalid.
&n
bsp; This is the bit that frustrates antedaters: earlier evidence may be rejected if it doesn’t seem to clearly and completely fit the earliest given sense. “I’m very proud of ‘American dream,’ ” says Joanne. There were several variations on the sense that’s familiar to us now—“an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity; also : the prosperity or life that is the realization of this ideal”—and she found a number of early citations that didn’t quite fit:
The arrangements for shopping, like everything else, are divine. Public bands are playing seraphic music through the whole twenty-four hours, and you turn on the piece you like by telephone. Public buildings are palaces, and their equipment is a paragon of luxury. We only wonder how the unspeakable privileges of the city can be extended to the country, and who will be contented to stay in the country if they are not. The American dream is of city life.