by Kory Stamper
The evidence we had for the color sense of “nude” was, as I feared, completely useless without pictures. “A nude silk crepe dress with fringe,” “almost all your bras should be nude,” “shapely legs, covered by nude hose”—all completely idiomatic uses of “nude” that give me no information whatsoever about what color “nude” actually is.
Meanwhile, talk on the e-mail chain had turned philosophical. One editor defended the definition: defining colors by analogy to something in the real world is an established practice, and effective. You could say the word “nude” refers to a range of colors that are light yellow-brown or yellow-pink to dark tan, but that sort of abstraction leads you on a Technicolor romp through the dictionary without conveying useful information. His verdict: “It’s a good definition.”
I indulged in some audible groaning. In a theoretical world, it’s a perfectly fine definition. But we weren’t living in a theoretical world: we were living in this very real world, a world where everything from fashion to the way photography film captures color has been calibrated for whiteness. Referencing race in a color definition in this day and age was messy at best and stupid at worst. Against my better judgment, I put my oar in: you could make an argument, I wrote, that the definition as it stands needlessly racializes something that doesn’t need to be racialized. Ah, another person chimed in, but what’s actually telling the truth about this word: a definition that ignores the white-normative fashion industry that gave rise to the color name “nude,” or a definition that tries, however poorly, to communicate something about the history of racism in America?
Regardless of the sociolinguistic implications of the word “nude,” we now had, according to another editor on e-mail duty, a growing pile of angry correspondents who needed an answer. They wanted a change: Were we going to give it to them?
Lexicography, even in the digital age, is a slower process than most people want it to be. The citation files would have to be combed through to see if the definition merited revision. I did a bare search for “nude” in the database: over one thousand hits. That would take time to sift through. We’d likely have to do some Internet searches for images and then manually add those to the database, because our citation program only slurped text from the net. If the definition merited a revision, someone would have to come up with one, and then someone else would have to vet it, and then another editor would have to do the copyedit and cross-reference work on it. Then we would have to wait for the next data upload to the website to add it in. None of this was going to be accomplished in the next ten minutes.
Others came up with a response; I set my citation spelunking aside. The definition struck me as antiquated, and at the very least I thought it could be better worded, but I was under deadline, as were we all. We’d have to delve deeper when we had more time.
These things have a way of digging in and wriggling around your brainpan, though. A few weeks later, I was walking the aisles of a large department store with my fifteen-year-old daughter, trying to be a Good Mom who takes her child shopping, even though I would rather pull my own fingernails out with pliers than spend an afternoon wandering around the mall. We were ostensibly picking up a few things she needed for an after-school activity when, surprise, she also totally forgot to tell me earlier that she was completely out of foundation and mascara. “Forgot,” I intoned, watching my afternoon stretch into an infinite hellscape of linoleum walkways and tinny pop music under fluorescent lights. She beamed brightly. “Might as well get them while we’re here!”
While waiting for her to choose between Deep Black and Blackest Black mascara, I let my eyes wander over the racks of makeup, then started. I grabbed a box of makeup from the shelf, then awkwardly swished my free hand through my purse, trying to find my cellphone. My daughter narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing?”
In my hand was a set of eyeshadows ranging from white to dark brown. I held it at arm’s length, then fumbled my cellphone camera into operation. Beep, sh-shk: now I had a good enough photograph for the cit files of the eyeshadows, lined up in order of hue, encased in a wrapper that read “NUDE palette.” I put the makeup back, then turned to see my daughter staring at me. She looked world-weary, like a circus clown two shows away from retirement, dolefully waiting for the inevitable pie right in the smacker. “Are you taking pictures for work again?”
“Just one.”
“Oh my God,” she moaned, “can you ever just, like, live like a normal person?”
“Hey, I didn’t choose the dictionary life—”
“Just stop—”
“—the dictionary life—”
“MOM—”
“—chose me,” I finished, and she threw her head back and sighed in exasperation.
The next day at work, I did a series of Internet image searches for “nude lip,” “nude eyeshadow,” and “nude makeup,” then remembered to turn on the “Safe for Work” filter after the IT administrator e-mailed to remind me that all Internet searches made using company property were logged and reviewed. I snagged picture after picture of brown, dark pink, and mauve lipstick all labeled “nude”; eyeshadows that ranged from black to white and every shade of brown and gray in between; makeup palettes called “nude” that contained muted shades of the rainbow, including what my makeup-dumb eyes would call “green” and “blue”—colors that certainly don’t match a white person’s skin.
I clicked one lipstick image to save it and gasped when I saw the name of the article it was attached to: “12 Nude Lipsticks That Are Actually Nude on Darker Skin.” Though I had the picture proof that the word “nude” as used of colors didn’t just refer to beige or tan, here was something I was used to dealing with: plain words. And it was the perfect use: the second instance of “nude” here, applied to darker skin, was an unglossed, completely idiomatic use. If I could have burst into song and triumphantly moonwalked in my cubicle without getting fired, I would have.
Instead, I sent off an e-mail to Steve. Whenever we get the chance, I said, we should revise “nude.” He responded with a proposed revision. The definition as it was written erred in being too narrow, he said. His proposed revision was “having a color that matches a person’s skin tones—used especially of a woman’s undergarments.” Certainly better, but I responded that the usage note, “used especially of a woman’s undergarments,” didn’t encompass the other uses of “nude” that I had been scouting out recently, like “nude lip” and “nude makeup.” He responded by saying that maybe we could drop the usage note and just insert some example sentences to orient the reader—say, “nude pantyhose” or “nude stockings.”
The revision looked good, but we both let it simmer for a few days. A definition is a bit like stew (sense 4a):*5 the longer you let it sit, the better it ends up getting. Steve sent another revision: “having a color (typically a pale beige) that matches a person’s skin tones
The minute it was on the page, we both began squirming. That “typically” didn’t really sit right with either of us. “On the one hand,” Steve wrote, “it seems accurate. On the other hand…” Was the word “nude” typically used to refer to a pale beige color? Our recent spelunking seemed to suggest not. Does the word “typically” imply that the word “nude” when used of a pale beige was “normal”? If so, this is just another way of implying that white skin was normative. I suggested we change it to “often”; Steve countered that maybe the best way to go was with the tried-and-true formulaic “such as”: “having a color (such as a pale beige) that matches a person’s skin tones.”
I felt the scalp-prickling mental fission that comes when I’m getting closer to a good definition. When definers use “such as” in a parenthetical, it gives us the opportunity to use more than one modifier. What if, I suggested, we added “or tan” to the parenthetical to make it clear that “nude” actually represents a range of colors? Steve liked that addition. “I’m now also inclined to change ‘a person’s’ to ‘the wearer’s,’ ” he sai
d. I wasn’t sure; after all, not all colors called “nude” end up matching the wearer’s skin tone, right? I was, I assured him, happy to second-guess myself and would start doing so right now.
Steve explained that the advantage of “the wearer’s” was that it subtly communicated that this sense was generally limited to things that you wore, rather than something like a bicycle or a loaf of bread. “Though,” he said, “I suppose you could wear a loaf of bread if you really wanted to.” No judgment, I replied.
The revision, “having a color (such as pale beige or tan) that matches the wearer’s skin tones
It becomes startlingly clear when you begin answering letters from people that the way people use language is personal. The indignant looking for justice or justification in “misogyny” or “misandry”; the incarcerated asking us to explain the difference between “misdemeanor” and “felony”; the parents who have lost a child and write hoping that we know of a simple word, like “widow” or “orphan,” that is a placeholder for their pain, some word that will spare them the inevitable and exhausting explication of their loss to a stranger. We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to mean something, and the difference is palpable.
Correspondence is not the primary job of a lexicographer, but it ends up being a way to make English—a difficult language that’s got more twists and turns in it than the cumulative plotline of Days of Our Lives—human. It’s an ironic thing that people who enjoy solitude and quiet, and have chosen to work in a place that rewards you for it, end up being the very human connection behind English for thousands of people.
—
We answered the question about how long love lasts. Of course we did. The blurb in the back of the dictionary promised we would:
Dear [redacted]:
We thank you for your letter, but your question about how long love lasts is not something we can answer. We lexicographers are good at defining words. Questions about the nature and permanence of deeply felt human emotions, though, are a little outside our field.
We’re sorry not to be more helpful.
Sincerely,
Stephen J. Perrault
* * *
*1 ret·ro·nym ˈre-trō-ˌnim n : a term consisting of a noun and a modifier which specifies the original meaning of the noun <“film camera” is a retronym> (MWC11)
*2 The referent of that phrase is intentionally vague.
*3 Here is the one thing that our pronunciation editor wishes everyone knew: those dots in the headwords, like at “co·per·nic·i·um,” are not marking syllable breaks, as is evident by comparing the placement of the dots with the placement of the hyphens in the pronunciations. Those dots are called “end-of-line division dots,” and they exist solely to tell beleaguered proofreaders where, if they have to split a word between lines, they can drop a hyphen.
*4 Easier to replace in a hurry because you don’t have to square the corners; no, they merely chew wood, not throw it; probably because seven is a sacred or holy number, and we probably start with red because that’s generally the color that is at the outermost edge of a rainbow; good yet varied breeding stock; no; probably not; definitely not.
*5 1 stew n ˈstü, ˈstyü…1 obsolete : a utensil used for boiling 2 : a hot bath 3 a : WHOREHOUSE b : a district of bordellos—usually used in plural 4 a : fish or meat usually with vegetables prepared by stewing b (1) : a heterogeneous mixture (2) : a state of heat and congestion 5 : a state of excitement, worry, or confusion (MWC11)
Marriage
On Authority and the Dictionary
It was Friday, morning-break time, and I was not just tired; I was beat, wiped, whipped, laid out, done in, dead. Usually during morning break, I got up for a bit of a stretch, walked around, refilled my coffee. I was working from home at the time and sometimes indulged in a little wander around my yard—a hard reset before I got back to work. Today, however, I had ignored the nice weather and instead put my head on my desk, forehead pressed to the Formica and arms covering my skull. I had joked with one of my yoga-loving co-workers that I was developing a series of poses we could do at our desks—a head-in-hands slump over galleys called Drudge’s Hunch, the arms-over-head seated stretch called Fluorescent Salutation, the hand-out position used to catch the fire door so it didn’t slam and bother everyone was Worrier’s Pose. My current pose was called Nuclear Fallout.
It had been two weeks of workplace hell. I was attempting some deep, yogic breaths (facedown on my desk—not the ideal position), intently listening to the sounds of my home office: the bone creak of the house corner being pushed by wind, the borborygmus*1 rumble of a delivery truck idling outside, that goddamned mockingbird that had built a nest in the eaves right outside my office and was currently doing the Top 40 Birdcalls of North America on repeat. In a few minutes, I heard my e-mail program bing, then bing again. I turned my head and peeped out from under my arm; Peter had sent me a link to a video, followed by about fifteen exclamation points.
I ducked my head back under my arm and tried to be as Zen as possible, but curiosity got the better of me. I clicked the link and was taken to a clip from The Colbert Report. “Folks,” Colbert began, “turns out my old nemesis is back.” As he pulled a Collegiate up onto his desk, I maneuvered the mouse over to the pause button and jabbed violently. Noooooope, I thought, no, I can’t watch this. Not after the last two weeks. But the screen had frozen at an odd point, and I felt slightly uncomfortable staring at a grimacing Stephen Colbert. I relented. I slid my glasses up to the top of my head and rubbed my face vigorously. My forehead throbbed where I had been pressing it to my desk.
Colbert was finishing up a joke about “zymosan” when I focused on the screen again. He was saying that we had changed the definition of “marriage,” and added a new meaning: “the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage.” This was true. “That means, gay marriage,” he explained. “I’m beginning to suspect that Merriam and Webster were conjugating more than just irregular verbs.”
I snickered. It had been the first honest laugh I’d had in a while.
The segment was only three minutes long, but I devoted the rest of my break to it, then wandered—a changed woman—out of my office and into the house. My husband was sitting at the dining room table, headphones on, scribbling out a horn arrangement. I stood next to him until I had his attention. I smiled incandescently, radiant; my face was damp with tears; the world smelled beatifically of roses. He raised an eyebrow in expectation.
“Welp,” I said, “I’ve made the big leagues. I’ve been parodied by Colbert.”
—
Lexicographers like to justify our existence by saying that words matter to people, and that the meaning of words matter to people, therefore lexicography matters. This is only a bit of a lie: if a word matters to a person, it’s most likely because of the thing that word describes and not because of the word itself. Sure, everyone has a word (or a handful of words) that they adore because they love the sound, the feel, the silliness or silkiness of the word; I defy anyone to say the word “hootamaganzy” aloud and not immediately fall in love with it, regardless of what it means.*2 But scanning through the top lookups on any dictionary website shows that most words that interest us do so because we are unclear about the thing to which they are applied or we want to use the definition to run a litmus test on the situation, person, event, thing, or idea that that word was used of.
We know this bit of behavioral trivia not because this is innate knowledge lexicographers have about how people interact with their dictionaries but because of Internet comments. As dictionaries have moved online, lexicographers have developed a direct connection with users that they’ve never had before. Th
e one thing that is most striking about all these comments—good, bad, ugly, and uglier—is that lots of people are really interacting with language in the etymological sense, expecting a mutual and reciprocal discourse from the dictionary definition.
Lexicographers are the weirdos in the room: they’ll rhapsodize about the word itself, talk endlessly about the etymology or history of usage, give you weird facts about how Shakespeare or David Foster Wallace used the word. But ask them to comment on the thing that word represents, and they fidget. Ask them to do that with a word whose use and meaning describe systems, beliefs, and attitudes that have shaped Western culture, and they will do their damnedest to leave the room as quickly and quietly as possible.
The problem is not so much that lexicographers are objectively disordered when it comes to words (though they undeniably are). It is that the general public—particularly in America—has been trained to think of the dictionary as an authority, and so what “the dictionary” says matters. “The dictionary,” in a bid for cultural relevance and market share, is the one who has trained the public to think this way, but what we hold ourselves to be authorities on has changed dramatically since we started this gambit.