Word by Word

by Kory Stamper

  This has bitten us in the ass a few times.

  —

  In the late 1990s, we undertook a revision of the Collegiate Dictionary in which we added about ten thousand new entries. The new edition, the Eleventh, was released in 2003, and in an attempt to get people actually to buy dictionaries and not just talk about them, we highlighted some of the new entries in a marketing campaign and handed out “New Words Samplers” like candy at a parade. People wrote in for a few weeks asking about the new entries, and we had lively e-mail discussions with correspondents about “phat” (which, contrary to widespread belief, is not an acronym of “pretty hips and thighs” or “pretty hot and tempting”)*3 and “dead-cat bounce” (which despite looking like a phrase is actually considered a word for entry purposes).*4 But not all ten thousand new entries were highlighted; lots of new information lived in that dictionary for a long time before people found it.

  One of the new additions was a second-level subsense—a sub-subsense—at the entry for “marriage” that was designed to cover uses of “marriage” that referred to same-sex marriage. We had hundreds of citations sitting in the files for this use, and more and more were coming in daily as states were debating the legality of gay marriage. The definition we settled on was “the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage.”

  Given the nature of the thing being described, we were very careful with how we defined that use of the word. We felt, reading through the citational evidence at the turn of the millennium, that it would be best to cover gay marriage in a separate subsense instead of broadening the existing definition of “marriage” (“the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law”). The reasons straddled that line between the thingness and the wordness of “marriage” in ways that make lexicographers sink into Drudge’s Hunch. In 2000, while we were writing the Collegiate, the legality of same-sex marriage (the thing) was hotly debated; no state in the union had passed a law that allowed same-sex marriage, though several had challenged constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and one (Vermont) had passed a law allowing same-sex civil unions. Heterosexual marriage, however, was legal nationwide. So it’s not surprising, then, that the vast majority of our citations for the “romantic partnership” uses of the word “marriage” touched on the legality of the thing “marriage.” One thing being called “marriage” was legal, and another thing being called “marriage” was in a state of legal flux, but “marriage” was used to describe both things.

  There was also a lexical marker that swayed us toward dividing this into two separate subsenses: “marriage” was increasingly used with modifiers to tell us what sort of marriage the writer was referring to. Prior to the 1990s, “marriage” was, relatively speaking, seldom modified by words like “gay,” “straight,” “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” or “same-sex.” But by 2000, all these words were common modifiers of the word “marriage”; by 2003, when the Eleventh Collegiate was released, “gay” and “same-sex” were the top two most frequently used modifiers of the word “marriage.” This signals two interesting (and seemingly contradictory) facts about the word “marriage”: that it was being used of a union between gay people, which accounts for the modifiers “gay,” “same-sex,” and “homosexual,” and that people were also seeking to differentiate between same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage, which accounts for the use of modifiers like “heterosexual” and “straight.” If we had seen more use of the unmodified “marriage” of any committed couple, regardless of their genders, that would signal to us that the “gay” marriage sense and the “heterosexual” marriage sense were merging into one. Modifiers mark a philosophical—and, in this case, lexical—divide.

  We were one of the last major dictionary makers to make this change to our dictionaries: the vagaries of dictionary production cycles meant that The American Heritage Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary both entered definitions or usage notes that covered same-sex marriage in 2000. The Oxford English Dictionary went with a usage note at its existing definition (“The condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony”) that read, “The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex,” with a cross-reference to the entries for “gay.” The American Heritage Dictionary revised the first sense of its entry for “marriage” in 2000 to “A union between two persons having the customary but usually not the legal force of marriage,” and then in 2009 to “The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife, and in some jurisdictions, between two persons of the same sex, usually entailing legal obligations of each person to the other.” Dictionary.com had also already entered a definition that covered the same-sex meaning: “a relationship in which two people have pledged themselves to each other in the manner of a husband and wife, without legal sanction: trial marriage; homosexual marriage.”

  Our decision was neither unique nor, in dictionary circles, controversial. It was boring, lexical. We gave it due thought, entered it, and moved on. The language is a big place: you can’t stop in one spot for too long. We moved ahead into the second half of the alphabet. The world, meanwhile, was spinning circles in court.

  You cannot look at the evolution of the word “marriage” without looking also at the evolution of the thing itself. Though words have a life of their own, they are tethered to real-world events. Throughout the late 1990s, states began passing amendments to their own constitutions limiting marriage to a union between one man and one woman. In 1993, the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated the equal protection clause of the Hawaii Constitution, which became the trigger for H.R. 3396—the bill known as the Defense of Marriage Act. By the time the Eleventh came out in July 2003, two states had already passed domestic partnership and civil union legislation, with one more soon to do it (Merriam-Webster’s home state, Massachusetts), and four states had, through judicial action or legislation, declared that marriage was restricted to one man and one woman. That left forty-three states on the table. The War on Marriage was in full swing.

  Not that we saw much of it in the dictionary offices. “We never heard a peep,” notes Steve Kleinedler. “Nothing. I kept expecting it, but…” He trails off, his hands opening into a shrug. A handful of questions about the new subsense began to trickle in to the Merriam-Webster editorial e-mail, but it was a literal handful, and they were mostly questions about when we updated the entry. A small grump of correspondents complained—but to be honest, fewer correspondents complained about the changes we made to the entry for “marriage” than complained about the inclusion of the word “phat” in the Eleventh Collegiate. The culture war seemed to have passed us by.

  The operative word in that sentence is “seemed.”

  —

  On the morning of March 18, 2009, I padded into my home office with a large cup of coffee and booted up my work e-mail. I blew on my coffee while the e-mail loaded, then blew again; the e-mail was taking a very long time to load. When the program crashed, I groaned and took a huge, scalding gulp of coffee. An e-mail program crash could mean only one of two things: (1) the servers and building were on fire or flooded, or (2) there was a write-in campaign afoot. I rebooted my computer and fervently prayed for number 1 to be the case. My computer dinged to life, and the e-mail began downloading again, which meant the building was not on fire; I covered my face and mooed in despair. The resident mockingbird heard me and answered with a litany of birdsong.

  Write-in campaigns are the inevitable product of a strong conviction that someone or something is wrong, a woefully misguided sense of grassroots justice, and unfettered Internet access. A person discovers an entry they don’t like in the dictionary, and they petition nine hundred of their closest friends to write to us and tell us to remove or revise that entry. Those nine hundred people then
post the write-in request to their blogs or social media profiles, and then nine hundred of their closest friends write in about the word they want removed or revised. It’s like a perverse, linguistic pyramid scheme: everyone pays in a little and gets nothing in return except for the person at the top (me). I get a ton of e-mail to answer.

  When the morning e-mail loaded, I saw why my computer had balked: sitting in my in-box were hundreds of e-mails, most of them with subject lines like “Definition of marriage” and “OUTRAGED!” While I scanned the numbers, my e-mail program binged again: fifteen new e-mails in the last two minutes. I slunk into Drudge’s Hunch and wished for a swift and painless death.

  The first thing an editor must do in the face of a write-in campaign is figure out where the e-mail is coming from. Fortunately, one of the first people to write in, frothing with rage, handily linked to one source of their displeasure: a story published on the conservative news site WorldNetDaily titled “Webster’s Dictionary Redefines ‘Marriage.’ ” The article began, “One of the nation’s most prominent dictionary companies has resolved the argument over whether the term ‘marriage’ should apply to same-sex duos or be reserved for the institution that has held families together for millennia: by simply writing a new definition.”

  I carefully scooted my keyboard and coffee cup to one side and then placed my head on my desk and groaned. No, no, no: we were not involved in this cultural argument. Leave the dictionary be.

  The article included a one-minute video that, from the get-go, makes it clear that this was not just about recording a word’s use for some folks. Over ominous music, the question appears: “What do you do if the dictionary does not support your definition of a word?” I knew where this was going—straight to Panictown. The video flashed some various definitions of “marriage” on-screen to make its point: that marriage has been described as “permanent” and between a man and a woman. Then it showed the new definition we had added in 2003, and suggested that we changed the definition of “marriage” because we didn’t agree with what the institution of marriage was: permanent and between one man and one woman. The definition faded to black, and the video ended with a giant “WAKE UP!” which grew until it swallowed the screen.

  Reluctantly, I clicked back to the article. It went on to note that a dictionary from 1913 made no mention of same-sex marriage and, in fact, offered biblical support for marriage. At this, I began cackling, desperately. Of course one of our dictionaries from 1913*5 didn’t mention same-sex marriage: it wasn’t a common use of the word “marriage” back then! And of course it offered example sentences from the Bible. If you were literate in the United States during that time period, you were likely familiar with the Bible, because it was one of the few books that even the poorest families had on their shelves, and so was used didactically in educational settings.

  The article claimed we refused to comment—“Hey, that’s a lie, I have to respond to everything that comes in!” I yelled at the computer—but noted that an editor denied any agenda to a World Net Daily reader.

  Upon reading this, my stomach slid into my shoes and tried to hide under the desk. I bet I knew that editor:

  “We often hear from people who believe that we are promoting—or perhaps failing to promote—a particular social or political agenda when we make choices about what words to include in the dictionary and how those words should be defined,” associate editor Kory Stamper wrote in response.

  “We hear such criticism from all parts of the political spectrum. We’re genuinely sorry when an entry in—or an omission from—one of our dictionaries is found to be offensive or upsetting, but we can’t allow such considerations to deflect us from our primary job as lexicographers.”

  Stamper justified the redefinition, too. “In recent years, this new sense of ‘marriage’ has appeared frequently and consistently throughout a broad spectrum of carefully edited publications, and is often used in phrases such as ‘same-sex marriage’ and ‘gay marriage’ by proponents and opponents alike. Its inclusion was a simple matter of providing our readers with accurate information about all of the word’s current uses,” Stamper wrote.

  I took a deep breath, and began searching through my e-mail replies while half of my brain ran circles around my head, screaming in terror. I found the very lengthy response I had sent months earlier to a reader and compared it with what had been quoted in the article. Yes, that was exactly what I had written. They had quoted a big middle chunk of my reply without altering it. I exhaled, and only then did I realize I had been holding my breath.

  I looked at the very first e-mail that came in after the article ran. It began, “Sirs: Your company decision to change the definition of the word ‘marriage’ to include same-sex perversion is an utter disgrace.”

  In the meantime, while I had been reading the article and watching the video, fifty more e-mails had come in. With an acid pit opening in my stomach, I decided to see who else was calling for God’s judgment on the dictionary. Time to go googling for controversy.

  One of the first hits I turned up was from a web forum that quoted my very first correspondent, Hal Turner. He had a blog, where he had posted his response to us and encouraged all his listeners and readers to share their upset with us. Something scratched deep in my brain; I knew that name, where had I heard that name? I opened up a new browser window and searched for Hal Turner and discovered where I had heard that name before: I had read and marked an article in The Nation about him:

  In 2003 Turner said US District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow was “worthy of being killed” for ruling against white supremacist leader Matthew Hale in a trademark dispute. The day after Lefkow’s husband and mother were found murdered on February 28, Turner penned an article for the far-right chat room Liberty Forum outlining tips to help white supremacists avoid scrutiny from federal agents. “So what can we, as White Nationalists (WN), expect as a result [of the killings]?” Turner wrote. “Frankly, a SHIT STORM!”

  The rationalizing nerd part of my brain spoke up. But look, it reasoned, at least he didn’t advocate violence against dictionary editors, right?

  I went back to the original browser window and clicked a link to the forum that had re-posted his blog post. There was a short inscription to introduce the re-post and set the tone for readers: “fucken [sic] gay homosexual pervert pedophile sodomizing faggot shit-eaters.” I shoved the keyboard aside and slid into Nuclear Fallout position.

  After a few deep breaths, and bolstered by the decision that, come hell or high water, I was absolutely going to have two beers tonight, I closed out the hate forum and went back to the WND article to scan for comments. I caught the author’s last name and the silken thread of my sanity snapped cleanly. It was “Unruh,” which means “smooth” in Old English. Mr. Smooth.

  I cackled for a long enough time that my husband set aside his work, came downstairs, and poked his head into my office. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I laughed, “no, I am not, and I will not be so for—” Here I looked at my e-mail and made a quick calculation on how long it would take me to answer all 500, nope, now 513 complaints about “marriage.” “I will not be okay for at least three days. Assuming nothing else comes in.” Two beats, then my e-mail binged obligingly, notifying me of new mail. Only the universe could have such impeccable comedic timing. I redoubled my laughter.

  My husband furrowed his brow. “Hon…”

  “Hey,” I said, suddenly serious, “you didn’t drink the last two beers in the fridge, did you?”

  —

  The complaints about this subsense of “marriage” came down ultimately to one common sore spot: gay marriage (the thing) was not legal or moral, and so our revisions to “marriage” (the word) were also not legal or moral. Enough people felt passionately about this that the defining batch I had been working on prior to March 18, 2009, ended up being three weeks late.

  There’s certainly nothing wrong with feeling passionately about language; hell, if lexicographer
s feel passionate about anything, it is most certainly language. But people who start up and perpetuate write-in campaigns to the dictionary are usually grossly mistaken about what a change to the dictionary will actually accomplish. They believe that if we make a change to the dictionary, then we have made a change to the language, and if we make a change to the language, then we also make a change to the culture around that language. We see this most poignantly in requests to remove slurs of various kinds from our dictionaries. If you remove “retarded” from the dictionary, people tell us, then no one will smear someone as “retarded” ever again, because that word is no longer a word. I am the unfortunate drudge who must inform them that we cannot miraculously wipe out centuries of a word’s use merely by removing it from the dictionary.

  To letter this sign with a slightly larger brush: removing a word from the dictionary doesn’t do away with the thing that word refers to specifically, or even tangentially. Removing racial slurs from the dictionary will not eliminate racism; removing “injustice” from the dictionary will not bring about justice. If it were really as easy as that, don’t you think we would have removed words like “murder” and “genocide” from the dictionary already? Jerkery, like stupidity and death, is an ontological constant in our universe.

  It’s easy to scoff at that notion, but before you do, consider this: dictionary makers themselves are the ones who have created this monster.

  The prevailing attitude toward words in the nineteenth century, you will remember, was that right thinking led to right usage, and right usage was a hallmark of right thinking. American lexicographers had, to a certain extent, bought into this notion. Even Uncle Noah gets into the act: he makes it clear in the preface to his 1828 dictionary that his work is a natural extension of American exceptionalism, the same doctrine by which the nation “commenced with civilization, with learning, with science, with constitutions of free government, and with that best gift of God to man, the christian religion.”*6 But in the end, it wasn’t American exceptionalism that gave rise to the notion that the dictionary was an authority on language and life: it was marketing.