Consider this cautionary tale: I don’t say ˈnü-kyə-lər; none of my family say it; none of my colleagues say it; I have no contact with any person who naturally says ˈnü-kyə-lər. But since having researched the pronunciations, and emphatically saying “new-kyoo-lur” and “new-klee-ur” aloud every time I’ve typed the pronunciations in throughout the writing of this chapter, I have caught myself saying ˈnü-kyə-lər twice when telling people what I was writing on, like some lexical version of guilt by association. I know what the standard pronunciation is, but circumstance ties my tongue.
* * *
*1 Why do some pronunciations get set off in double quotation marks and others with forward slashes? This is another esoteric lexicographical convention: phonetic renderings of a pronunciation get the quotation marks and normal letters, while actual pronunciations in the weird alphabet get set off by forward slashes.
*2 And each company has its own proprietary alphabet, just to be difficult.
*3 KEY:
ā as in ace; a as in ash; ä as in mop; ē as in easy; e as in bed; ǝ as in abut; ī as in ice; i as in hit; ō as in go; ü as in loot; ᵫ as in German füllen; ˈ primary stress; ˌ secondary stress.
*4 Some folks ask why we don’t make everything simpler by using the International Phonetic Alphabet instead of whatever weird system we’re using, but the answer is in the name: “International Phonetic Alphabet.” IPA, as it’s called, isn’t accent agnostic.
*5 vi·ti·ate ˈvi-shē-ˌāt vb -ed/-s/-ing vt 1 : to make faulty or defective : IMPAIR 2 : to debase in moral or aesthetic status 3 : to make ineffective (MWC11)
*6 Webster likely enjoyed some success with “honor,” “center,” and “plow” because they were spelling variants already in use; they just weren’t as common as “honour” and “centre” and “plough.”
*7 Josh says that the pronunciation seems to be regularizing to the län-jə-rā and läⁿ-zhə-rā variants. Nothing gold can stay.
*8 And you are not alone, though here I ask you, again and graciously, to read the goddamned front matter.
*9 Jimmy Carter spent his time in the U.S. Navy working on propulsion systems for nuclear submarines, acting as an engineering officer of a nuclear power plant, and actually being lowered into a nuclear reactor core that had melted down in order to dismantle it. To my mind, he has earned the right to pronounce “nuclear” however he damned well pleases.
*10 Ironically, I have, for years, been mispronouncing “metathesis” as “MEH-tuh-THEE-sus.” It is “muh-TATH-uh-sus.” I am reproved.
*11 The linguist Geoff Nunberg notes that “nuclear” is phonologically pretty similar to “likelier,” and we don’t have any problems saying that, but my completely half-informed opinion is that the first vowel in “likelier” is more frontal (that is, when you say that vowel, it happens near the front of your mouth) than the first vowel in “nuclear,” and so it matches the frontal nature of that long e in -klē-ǝr a whole lot better. The first vowel in “nuclear” is near back—that is, it happens in the middle of your mouth, maybe heading a little bit more toward your throat, like the vowel in “food.” That matches up better with that final back vowel in the diphthong in -kyə: ˈnü-kyə-lər. Sometimes we are mush mouths because we like symmetry.
*12 A newish portmanteau of “anecdote” and “data,” “anecdata” refers to personal experiences or anecdotes that are treated like objectively collected and analyzed data.
*13 It’s worth noting that this is a joke from The Simpsons and isn’t representative of how people in Springfield, Massachusetts, say “Springfield.” It’s also worth noting that I didn’t catch the reference until Josh pointed it out to me.
Nude
On Correspondence
The Friday lunch crew had chosen (via pink) the Indian place downtown, and I tagged along in an effort to get to know my co-workers. Because none of us talked to each other during the workday, this was our only opportunity to mingle. Conversation came in bursts, punctuated with sudden silences and lots of staring down at our pappadum. Though it didn’t look like it, we were all enjoying the opportunity to attempt small talk with other people who got us.
Someone asked what I had been doing most recently, and I said I had been going through the letters. Each month, the editorial secretaries passed out copies of the answers we sent to people who wrote in with questions. It’s an old and helpful tradition: you get to see the kinds of questions people ask and how other editors answer. Steve had given me an assorted stack of correspondence from the last year or two to look through, to get a sense of tone. “They’re interesting,” I offered. “Some of them, whew.”
Dan cocked an eyebrow. “What do you mean, ‘whew’?”
Some of the responses had been very curt, I said, and others seemed to ramble on before getting to the point. I had just left a job where every piece of correspondence I sent out was orchestrated and edited into a shapeless, tasteless mash. Here, everyone’s personalities, both writer and editor, shone, for better or worse.
Dan put his fork down and quickly swallowed his bite. “You know what? You need to see the best piece of correspondence we’ve ever gotten. It’s in the file.”
“Oh, yes,” Karen Wilkinson, another editor, said, “I know exactly what Dan means. It’s worth the time to find it.”
Once back in the office, Karen sent me a pink with a name on it. “Check the correspondence file,” she wrote. “Worth the time.” I found the archive of incoming mail with a bit of sleuthing and then went through the alphabetical index to find the name. The folder had just one piece of mail in it: a short typewritten note on office-standard typewriter paper. There was no signature; nothing that marked this as standout correspondence. Then I read the letter. It was very simple and straightforward. The correspondent wanted to know how long love lasts.
As I mentioned earlier, editorial correspondence is one of the duties of the Merriam-Webster lexicographer. It’s considered a service to our users: anyone can write to the company and ask any question at all about the English language and get a response from an expert.
Allow me to generously shower that statement with caveats. Editorial correspondence is indeed one of many duties that Merriam-Webster editors have to take on; that said, it is one of the lesser duties that can be set aside when the deadlines are not just looming but have begun climbing the building and pawing around inside for hostages. We call it the “press of editorial duties” in our correspondence; for a while, there was a physical Press of Editorial Duties in Gil’s office, an old letterpress brought up from the depths of basement storage. Maybe it strikes you as a tired joke, but we are lexicographers, and tired jokes are our forte. The press of editorial duties is real.
It sounds risky, perhaps, to give agency over correspondence to people who would rather proofread than do customer service. But this is less about stretching the lexicographer and more about practicality: sometimes the “questions about the English language” we receive are not about the English language. Sometimes they aren’t even in the English language.
—
Editorial correspondence at Merriam-Webster was originally a guerrilla marketing tactic. During the mid-nineteenth century, the G. & C. Merriam Company faced stiff competition from Joseph Worcester, Noah Webster’s protégé/nemesis. Worcester’s dictionaries were much more popular than Webster’s dictionaries were, and the Merriam brothers, shrewd businessmen that they were, knew they needed some sort of angle to lure in buyers. They began running advertisements offering a free dictionary to any person who wrote in with evidence of a word that wasn’t already entered in one of the Webster dictionaries. It worked: they gave away hundreds of dictionaries and gained some pen pals in the process.
In the 1980s, we formalized the process a bit and created the Language Research Service, which conjures images of tie-clad eggheads
in their shirtsleeves, hordes of them, bustling around looking for the answer to “what’s the word for when you have to explain what kind of a thing you’re using when you didn’t have to do that in the past, like now we have to say ‘film camera’?”*1 The Language Research Service, or LRS for short, is a service offered by the editorial staff at Merriam-Webster and open to anyone with a copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, as the very last page of the book explains. It worked: we have, over the course of the LRS, answered hundreds of thousands of queries and gained hundreds and hundreds of pen pals.
It’s a rare and charming thing, these days, to write to a company and get a response from a real person. The number of people who write back to us merely to say, “Wow! I didn’t expect a person to reply!” is surprisingly high. It’s an even rarer thing to love words and find a group of other people who not only love them as much as you do but also know a lot about them, so you can understand the impulse to keep the conversation going, to enmesh yourself into this unique community. We’ve all had correspondents over the years who send question after question, some worth answering and some not.*2 Emily has a Japanese professor who writes to her and asks questions that are deceptively simple: Why do we say “he gave his grandma a kiss” and not “he gave a kiss to his grandma,” or when do you use “how come” and when do you use “why”? The minute you begin digging for an answer, you turn up convoluted root system layered on convoluted root system, but because the lexicographer loves and respects English, we tease things apart as best we can. That sort of expertise is winning, and some of these correspondents hang on for a long time: we’ve had one correspondent who has asked these sorts of questions for almost twenty years. He began writing to us in high school, always asking us to explain the usage differences between two words—say, “continual” and “continuous.” In time, he sent us his prom picture; later, articles he wrote for his college newspaper, as if we were distant but kindly relatives.
You can tell just from handling the letters that writing in to the dictionary involved pomp and ceremony for some. Letters are meticulously typewritten or very carefully scribed; questions are phrased very carefully, and the usual protocols of salutation and closing are observed. This is a question sent to the dictionary, after all: this is serious shit.
The correspondence was initially intended to alert Merriam-Webster to words missing from its dictionaries, but as its history has grown, so too have the questions. The amount of scrutiny some of our correspondents give the dictionary is dizzying. I once got an e-mail from someone who caught what’s called a bad break in one of our dictionaries: the word “silence” was at the end of a line and was split into “sil-” and “-ence” instead of “si-” and “-lence,” as the dots in the headword indicate.*3 This correspondent wondered if we had ever consulted our own dictionary, because if we had, we would have seen that the word “silence” is split after the “-i-”: “si / lence.” When I finished reading the e-mail, I realized that my hands had floated, palms up, and were on either side of my head, while my mouth had fallen open and remained that way. I looked like an Edvard Munch painting. One bad break in a book that has literally tens of thousands of breaks in it, and this person found it. That is commitment to the dictionary that goes above and beyond.
Sometimes the questions are ones that we cannot possibly answer. “I remember when I was handling the earliest e-mail correspondence,” Karen said. “Someone wrote to us and asked us where to buy beans.” Some of the more notable queries I’ve received include the following: Why are manhole covers round? Do woodchucks actually chuck wood? Why is the rainbow divided into seven colors, and why we do start with red? What should you look for when purchasing an Alaskan malamute? If you sneeze with your eyes open, will your eyeballs fall out? Can dogs dive three hundred feet? Are babies natural?*4
There are two phrases you see in editorial responses a lot: one you are already familiar with (“the press of editorial duties”); the other is “outside the scope of our knowledge.” That’s the hedge that enables us to do what we’ve promised—respond to queries that come in—while at the same time not giving any sort of substantial answer whatsoever. Because how can we? Are babies natural? I don’t even know what that string of words means, and finding the meanings of words is my wheelhouse.
—
Though the correspondence that we receive can be wide-ranging, most of it comes from well-meaning people who petition us to enter, remove, or change a word for them. We often have to tell these correspondents that lexicography doesn’t function like reality TV: people don’t get to vote words in or out of the language by contacting us. Of course, this being lexicography, there is always an exception. Sometimes correspondents let us know that there’s a definition that is plain wrong or outdated that needs attending to.
In 2015, BuzzFeed put together a smart video featuring women of color trying on garments whose color is called “nude” by the manufacturer. Every item the women tried on was some variation on beige. The women in the video are laconic about the mismatch between dark skin and nude undergarments. One woman smirks that if she wanted nude pantyhose, she’d be better off wrapping her legs in plastic wrap.
The video heats up unexpectedly when each woman is asked to comment on the dictionary definition of the adjective “nude.” The online entry from Merriam-Webster.com, which is the one the news site used, has a number of different definitions, including a set of definitions written in simpler language for people learning English as a foreign language. These are the definitions the women in the video read:
: having no clothes on
: of or involving people who have no clothes on
: having the color of a white person’s skin
The women are justifiably outraged. “These definitions don’t make sense,” says one participant. “ ‘Having no clothes on’—me naked is not the same thing as me having the color of a white person’s skin.” At the end of the video, the same woman shakes her head at the printout with the definitions on it. “I still can’t believe this is actually in the dictionary. It is?” She drops the paper and looks heavenward. “That is insane.”
I didn’t see the video the day it came out but the day after. I had just logged in and was scanning the editorial e-mail while sipping my coffee, when I saw I had been CC’d on an e-mail that we had four complaints about the definition of “nude.”
People write in to the dictionary about all sorts of things, but it’s very unusual for more than one person to write in to the dictionary about the same thing on the same day. As I scrolled through the editorial in-box, the cluster turned into a long smear of e-mails, all with the word “nude” in the subject line. On a hunch, I checked the spam folder, and yep: there were more letters, shunted into the junk drawer of our e-mail program. Evidently, our internal netminder decided that between the subject line of these e-mails—“nude”—and the content, which featured the word “fucking” a lot, these complaints were pornographic spam. I opened up my web browser and, now dyspeptic, began searching for the source of all the complaints.
My sour stomach was the result of some deep, burbling editorial angst. I don’t mind when people have complaints about definitions; hell, there are definitions that I could complain about, and I’ve written some of them. More often than not, though, these complaints stem from misunderstandings that are (usually) easily cleared up. Someone doesn’t know, for instance, that we list definitions in chronological order and so is upset that the “whorehouse” sense of “stew” shows up before the “thick soup” sense does. Or we might hear from a person who is upset that we have entered the word “impactful” even though it is jargon (true) and meaningless (not true) and ugly (amen). A short note will generally assuage any concerns people have about the entry.
This complaint, however, was an onion of suck, layer after layer of problems. The entry as it appeared online was presented poorly: without sense numbers, those separate definitions read like one long definition, and that’s ab
solutely not the case. There were no example sentences to help orient the reader, nothing that ties a definition, which speaks in generalities, to a particular use, which grounds that generality in everyday life. Moreover, the contested sense is a color definition.
Color definitions are notoriously difficult for the lexicographer, who must accurately describe what the color “nude” is using only printed descriptions from catalogs that are usually no help whatsoever: “Ladies’ S, M, L, available in Cranberry, Mauve, Holly, Navy, Nude, Ebony, Coral.” The advertisement might as well be listing the Seven Dwarfs for all the lexicographer knows; there is nothing here to orient you as to what color “nude” actually is. The files are full of this: no color plates, no good images. Just lots of catalog copy.
Wrap those three things around the acrid heart of the complaint—that the differentia refers to “a white person’s skin” and drags into that eight-word definition the weight of being a person of color navigating a white world—and no matter how you slice it, there will be indigestion and tears.
I put my head down on my desk and breathed a procession of “shits” into my mouse pad for good measure.
Whenever a sensitive topic is broached over e-mail, and especially when it is likely that more than one person will write in, it’s normal form to consult with people who know more than you do in vetting your reply. I followed the chain of e-mails about this that had been started by one of the digital team members. How should we respond? Is the definition problematic? For my own part, I couldn’t see how that definition wasn’t problematic. This called for a quick review of the evidence. I pulled up the citations database and searched for “nude” near any word I could think of that would be paired with this particular sense. Eyes closed, fingers wiggling over the keyboard, I poked my sprachgefühl awake and started rummaging through my internal citation files. What things get called “nude”? Panty hose, bras, underwear for sure—I added those three to my search criteria. Keep digging, I urged. What else? I suppose any piece of clothing could be nude, though no one would call khakis “nude trousers.” Ah, but nude dresses—yes, I know I had seen that phrase. I added it to the criteria, then closed my eyes again. A flash of catalog whizzed mentally by, a host of feet: nude pumps. The search engine began spitting out results. Yes, I thought, now we are most assuredly cooking with gas.
‹ Prev Next ›