Word by Word

by Kory Stamper

  If legislatures and courts are looking at dictionary definitions, it’s not the definitions that are swaying their opinions. To quote the 2013 study again, “The image of dictionary usage as heuristic and authoritative is little more than a mirage.” But try convincing people upset over the Court’s decision to redefine marriage that that’s the case.

  —

  Two weeks after the kerfuffle began, I sat at my desk, wheezing with much-needed laughter, as Stephen Colbert deftly skewered the whole write-in campaign. Every joke and punch line landed like a water balloon on a hot day. “The most sinister part is,” he continued, “Merriam-Webster made this change back in 2003.” Here I hollered at the screen—“Oh God, yes! Thank you!”—while he continued. “Which means that for the past six years of my marriage, I may have been gay-married and not known it.”

  The floodgates opened and I sobbed with laughter, delighted that someone else was open throatedly mocking the whole situation. The little bits that I heard between my braying—calling us “same-sexicographers” who might “engayify” other straight words—were a balm unto Gilead, just the right response to two weeks of being told I was single-handedly bringing judgment down upon this great nation because I happened to answer an e-mail about the word “marriage.”

  —

  We continue to get a handful of e-mails complaining about the definition for “marriage” in the Collegiate, but around 2012 the substance of the complaints changed. Now we get just as many complaints that the two subsenses aren’t combined into one gender-neutral sense as we do that gay marriage is ruining America.

  The definition, as of this writing, is still divided into those two subsenses. Language always lags behind life. Even after Obergefell v. Hodges, people still debate the dictionary definition of “marriage,” waiting for the Voice of Authority to prove them right once and for all.

  Us “same-sexicographers,” however, have moved on. We’re well into the letter N at this point.

  * * *

  *1 bor·bo·ryg·mus ˌbȯr-bə-ˈrig-məs n, pl bor·bo·ryg·mi -ˌmī : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas (MWC11)

  *2 It’s another name for a hooded merganser. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a hooded merganser is, because that doesn’t detract from the wonder of “hootamaganzy.” Shout it out an open window; it’s as good as Prozac and cheaper.

  *3 phat ˈfat adj phat·ter; phat·test [probably alteration of 1fat] (1963) slang : highly attractive or gratifying : EXCELLENT (MWC11)

  *4 dead-cat bounce n [from the facetious notion that even a dead cat would bounce slightly if dropped from a sufficient height] (1985) : a brief and insignificant recovery (as of stock prices) after a steep decline (MWC11)

  *5 This dictionary, Webster’s Revised Unabridged, is actually a warmed-over version of Webster’s International Dictionary from 1890. The Revised Unabridged doesn’t cover a lot of modern linguistic territory, like “automobile” or “airplane,” and its definition of “Republican” mentions slavery and Lincoln.

  *6 The word “Christian” never appears with an initial capital in the entirety of the 1828. This is likely a holdover from Johnson’s styling of the word “Christian” in his dictionary (from which Webster “borrowed” liberally, ahem). Worcester capitalized “Christian” in his 1830 Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language.

  *7 To give you a sense of how much money twenty dollars was in New England at that time, here is an ad from the January 11, 1829, Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel for W. M. Gray, a grocer on Main Street: “One Dollar will Buy 25 lbs. Rolled Oats or 10 Packages Rolled Avena, or 14 lbs. Nice Rice, or 25 Cakes Good Laundry Soap, or 12 lbs. Pure Lard, or 12 lbs. Salt Pork, or 15 lbs. Muscatel Raisins, or 30 lbs. Best Flour, or 2 gallons Best Molasses.”

  *8 It goes without saying that Worcester’s dictionary name was in homage to Johnson’s dictionary and a direct refutation of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language—the name of the latter being equal parts homage and repudiation. Johnson fetishism runs deep in lexicography.

  *9 There are far better writers who have undertaken a full study of the production, sale, and fallout from the Third, and if the subject interests you, I would recommend you read those books (particularly Morton’s Story of “Webster’s Third” and Skinner’s Story of Ain’t) in addition to this one. Alas, I have but one book to write, and that book ain’t it.

  *10 Gil claims that no editors gave much credence to all this critical foofaraw. “Our problem was getting a Collegiate out, not worrying what some ignorant journalists thought.”

  *11 It turns out that she had heard a report about Finland and thought of me.

  *12 It makes perfect sense that Justice Scalia would have preferred The American Heritage Dictionary, because he was a member of its Usage Panel.

  *13 Not quite: The Third doesn’t say that “imply” and “infer” mean the same thing, though it does use the word “implication” in one definition of “infer” and “inference” at one definition of “imply.” The firewall between “imply” and “infer” is a fairly recent invention; the two words have had close meanings since at least the seventeenth century, when that slacker Shakespeare used “infer” to mean “imply” and vice versa.

  Epilogue

  The Damnedest Thing

  If people think at all about lexicography, they think of it as a scientific enterprise. Go to the web, type in “define insouciance,” and you assume that the magic algorithms that buzz around Google’s servers like bees will do their secret dance and produce a definition for you. Most modern books on lexicography—and there are some, if you can believe it—are scholarly, and therefore make defining sound more like coding: IF [“general” = gradable,comparable,+copula,+very] THEN echo “adjective” ELSE echo “adverb.” The exactness of defining, the logic conditions put in place during parsing, the clinical approach that lexicographers take when analyzing words, even the language we use when talking of lexicography (“analyze,” “parse,” “clinical,” “objective”), are borrowed from the realms of lab coats and test tubes.

  In the end, however, lexicography is as much a creative process as it is a scientific one, which means that good lexicography relies on the craft of the drudges at their desks. Lexicographers will frame their work as “an art and a science,” though we only throw that tired old coat over the bones of our work because it’s recognizable shorthand for saying that this thing—the act of creating a definition, sifting through pronunciations, conjuring Proto-Indo-European roots, ferreting out dates of first written use, rassling with the language—isn’t just a matter of following a set of rules.

  I call it “craft” and not “art” for connotative reasons. “Art” conjures an image of the lexicographer as medium or conduit—a live wire that merely transmits something unkenned, alien. But “craft” implies care, repetitive work, apprenticeship, and practice. It is something that is within most people’s reach, but few people devote themselves to it long enough and with enough intensity to do it well. That sort of dedication to words comes across as batty, so we speak in metaphor. Defining is the mental equivalent of free throws in basketball: anyone can stand at the free-throw line and sink one occasionally; everyone gets lucky. But the pro is the person who stands at the free-throw line for hours, months, years, perfecting that one motion until it is as fail-safe as humanly possible, until it looks so much like second nature that an uncoordinated clod like me can watch them lob a rare miss at the net during a game and say, “Are you kidding? How easy is it to shoot a free throw?”

  “The analogy I use,” says Steve Perrault, “is the carpenter. When you first start a project, you’re hesitant: you miss the nail, you don’t know what you’re doing. When you hire a professional, he or she will come in, and what seems like an insurmountable problem to you, they’ve done it before. It’s the same thing for a definer.”

  “I think everything about defining is easier t
he longer that you’ve been doing it,” says Joan Narmontas, one of Merriam-Webster’s science editors, echoing a sentiment I have heard from everyone who has done practical lexicography for any length of time. “Someone might ask me for a definition, and I can just”—she snaps, a simple, practiced motion—“there it is. It’s out.” “Experience has a great deal to do with competence,” Steve says.

  Our modern conception of art happens in a flash; we speak of the lightning striking, the lightbulb going on, the inspiration hitting. Craft takes time, both internal and external. You need patience to hone your skill; you need a society willing to wait (and pay) for that skill.

  Unfortunately, time is one thing everyone’s short on.

  —

  Though this book has been a nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty, worm’s-eye view of lexicography, one cannot ignore that dictionary making and reference publishing are commercial enterprises. American dictionaries, in particular, are a slave to the dollar: they are not magnanimously sponsored by academic institutions, as many people believe. Most of the innovations in American dictionaries have been driven by a desire to gain market share and outcompete other publishers, and it’s been that way since Noah Webster. The difference between then and now is in how people consume and use dictionaries.

  Nineteenth-century lexicographers produced books, and their audience had fixed expectations of what those books were: static things that were the culmination of years of research. If you wanted a dictionary, you scrimped and saved for it, and if you couldn’t afford one, then you went to your local public library and used the one copy it had on that rickety maple stand. This was the mode of consumption until the 1990s, when a slow shift from print to digital books began. When I graduated from high school in the early 1990s, I was given a print dictionary as a graduation gift.*1 It got plenty of use during my college years, but by 2000 it was another doorstop collecting dust. I no longer used print dictionaries; I used online ones.

  The Internet is our double-edged sword. Lexicographers have access to new materials for free (or close to it), a better sense of what the user is doing with the entries they create, and a flexible way to organize and present dictionary information that is more intuitive and less fusty and esoteric. We suddenly have unlimited space: we can expand abbreviations that were opaque, stretch our legs a little bit in defining, indulge in some extra example sentences and etymology notes. Gone are the business concerns that if we turn a line here, we will turn a page, and if we turn a page here, we’ll end up with six more pages than we have room for, and if we do that, then we need to append a new thirty-two-page folio to the book, and if we append a new folio to the book, we will have to increase the price of the dictionary by a dollar, and studies have shown that while people will buy a twenty-six-dollar dictionary, they will not buy a twenty-seven-dollar dictionary. But the Internet, keen and fast, is also a knife’s edge publishers have to dance along: slow down too much and you’ll feel the blade bite into your feet.

  People expect information on the Internet to be comprehensive, free, and up to date, which puts reference publishers in a pretty pickle. No information is ever fully free: dictionaries are written by slobs like me, and even slobs need a paycheck. And, as mentioned, it takes time to write a good definition. Assume that a lexicographer can handle one word per workday, on average. That means that doing nothing but defining, one lexicographer can churn out 250 entries a year. Do you spend that editorial time adding new words to be comprehensive or revising out-of-date entries so you’re up to date? It’s not like this is a new consideration for the lexicographer—we’ve never had enough time to do everything we want—but the Internet magnifies that time crunch. Dictionaries move online and they are no longer fixed objects, revered books kept on the family shelf, but malleable, ever-changing works that mirror the quicksilver nature of our language.

  There’s another cutting edge to the Internet: it has made it easier to find an answer to your question, but it’s also given us a surfeit of information to sift through. The lexicographer feels this keenly: Joanne Despres when searching data sources for dating, Emily Brewster when searching for the perfect quotation for an entry, Neil Serven when looking through hundreds of thousands of citation hits for a simple word, Dan and Joan and Christopher when trying to collate information for science entries. No one has time to go through six pages of search engine results to weigh which of those results best suits their needs or is most trustworthy, so they rely on the search engine to do that for them. This is the new way of finding information, and it privileges the sources that play the game of search engine optimization.

  Of course, all publishers have had to rely on others to ply their wares for them. It used to be that bookstores were the middlemen that sold our products; now it’s mostly Google and other search providers. But as Neil pointed out, it’s hard to draw an analogy between the two. Bookstores shared “a cultivative interest” with publishers: more book buyers were good for both of them. But search engines and Internet ad providers don’t share that interest, or at least not in the same way. They truck in a type of user engagement that dictionaries are historically not good at. As Emily said, people now pay with their eyes, not with their wallets, which means that an online dictionary that runs ads needs to keep eyeballs on its pages longer. The craft of writing a good definition isn’t important in the click economy: what is important is being agile enough to do what it takes to get to the top of an Internet search results page. It’s a very sudden shift for the staid lexicographer who likes to keep low to the ground.

  Like everyone else, lexicographers need to move faster. This is, to be frank, nothing new: we have always felt the heavy thumb of business concerns whenever we define. And while defining gets easier with experience, and the easier it is to do something, the faster you can do it, there is a terminal velocity in lexicography. After a certain point, you simply can’t go any faster; to do so compromises the quality of what you’re doing. “The job is to get it right,” says Neil. “But I do aspire to go faster,” answers Emily. Craft takes time, but time is money, and that is another thing that reference publishers are not particularly swimming in.

  —

  As I was wrapping up the writing of this book, Merriam-Webster had its first large-scale layoff in decades. I got the news via phone call, and though I had a defining batch open on my desktop and feebly poked at it throughout the day, most of that Tuesday was spent sending everyone else in the office e-mails. “Are you okay?” I asked, and in return I got an echo: “Are you okay?” I was not sure if I was okay. None of us were sure if we were okay.

  The story of Merriam-Webster’s layoff itself isn’t interesting or unique. It played out the same way at Merriam-Webster that it has in every other industry in the world; in reference publishing itself, it was just par for the course. The language is booming, but lexicography is a shrinking industry: Funk & Wagnalls, Random House, Encarta, and Century are just a few of the dictionary publishers who have ceased operations in recent history. This is the reality of a commercial enterprise: some will flourish and others will not. Them’s the breaks.

  But for those of us left trying to ply our trade, we feel each reduction’s loss in triplicate. It isn’t just that we lose friends; it isn’t just that we lose colleagues; it’s that we lose craftspeople. Most of the editors who are let go when a dictionary publisher shutters have decades of experience writing and editing dictionaries, and the craft that represents is irreplaceable.

  “The real strength of a dictionary that is written by skilled lexicographers is sadly perhaps in the entries that are not so commonly examined,” Emily says. “If you want to know what ‘FTW’ means, you can find that in any number of online acronym glossaries. But if you want to know what ‘disposition’ means, you really need a competently written definition.” She thinks for a moment. “I worked really, really hard on the definition of ‘build-out,’ but I’m sure no one has ever really looked at it.”

  “I sometimes find it frustrating,” S
teve says. “I don’t think people appreciate all the thought that has to go into the creation of a dictionary, and of a particular dictionary entry. Everything behind it—it’s kind of invisible. I feel like people take the dictionary for granted to a large extent. They don’t think of it as having been written by anybody, and they don’t appreciate all the decisions that had to be made for everything in it. They’ll notice errors, but you can’t notice excellence in a dictionary, for the most part, because it consists of a lack of errors.” He continues. “When was the last time anybody was looking up something in the dictionary and they were so struck by the excellence of it that they had to read it aloud to somebody—‘I mean, isn’t this wonderful?’ ”