Top Quotes: “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries” — Kory Stamper

Introduction

“Merriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary maker in America, dating unofficially back to 1806 with the publication of Noah Webster’s first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and officially back to 1844, when the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Webster’s dictionary after his death. The company has been around longer than Ford Motors, Betty Crocker, NASCAR, and thirty-three of the fifty American states. It’s more American than football (a British invention) and apple pie (ditto). According to the lore, the flagship product of the company, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is one of the best-selling books in American history and may be second in sales only to the Bible.”

“There is no “the dictionary” but rather “a dictionary” or “one of several dictionaries.” The red Webster’s dictionary that we all used is just one of many “Webster’s” dictionaries, published by different publishers; “Webster’s” is not a proprietary name, and so any publisher can slap it on any reference they like. And they do: nearly every American reference publisher since the nineteenth century has put out a reference and called it a “Webster’s.””

“The problem with this rule is a familiar one English grammar is not Latin grammar. The languages are cousins, but not close ones, because they come from different branches of the Indo-European language tree. English has a grammatical structure similar to other Germanic languages, and Latin has a grammatical structure similar to other Italic languages. Blending grammatical systems from two languages on different branches of the Indo-European language tree is a bit like mixing orange juice and milk: you can do it, but it’s going to be nasty.

One of the grammatical hallmarks of English is that you can stick a preposition at the end of a sentence without any deleterious effect whatsoever. In fact, the terminal preposition isn’t just possible, but is and has been standard operating procedure for prepositions from the very beginnings of English. The terminal preposition had been in continuous, easy use seven hundred years before John Dryden was in short pants, and it continues in easy, idiomatic use. You can, of course, choose not to end your sentence with a preposition, but that is a stylistic choice, not a grammatical diktat from on high.

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.”

Rivers of English

“Think of English as a river. It looks like one cohesive ribbon of water, but any potamologist will tell you that rivers are actually made up of many different currents — sometimes hundreds of them. The interesting thing about rivers is, alter one of those currents and you alter the whole river, from its ecosystem to its course. Each of the currents in the river English is a different kind of English: business jargon, specialized vocabulary used in the construction industry, academic English, youth slang, youth slang from 1950, and so on. Each of these currents is doing its own thing, and each is an integral part of English.”

“In African-American Vernacular English, for instance, there’s a difference between “he been sick” in which “been” stands in for Standard English’s present perfect “has been,” and “he been sick,” where that stressed “been” marks that the action or state came into being a long time ago. Native speakers of AAVE have no problem navigating the two “beens.””

“There are times when the marginalization of a dialect, or of vocabulary from that dialect, has more dire results. John Rickford, a professor of sociolinguistics, has done an extensive analysis of the testimony given in the Trayvon Martin case by Trayvon’s friend Rachel Jeantel. Jeantel was on the phone with Martin as he was being pursued, and later shot, by George Zimmerman. She was, then, really the only witness to the shooting (apart from George Zimmerman) who was present in that courtroom.

Jeantel is black, and she natively speaks Haitian Creole as well as English. Throughout her testimony, the defense kept asking her if she understood English or if she was having a difficult time understanding the questions put to her. She consistently objected: she understood the questions just fine, and she was answering them honestly and completely. The problem was that she was answering them in AVE, a dialect whose speakers are often painted as ignorant and uneducated. The white jury interrupted proceedings several times and claimed they could not understand her, and the defense attorney questioned one part of a pretrial deposition she gave concerning what she heard during the struggle. During that interview, she said she heard someone yell, “Get off!” and when she was asked, “Could you tell who it was?” the transcript indicated that she first answered, “I couldn’t know Trayvon,” and later, “I couldn’t hear Trayvon.” But Rickford points out that, even in Haitian Creole, those answers make no sense in context. “When another linguist and I listened to the TV broadcast of the recording played in court we heard, instead, ‘I could, an’ it was Trayvon.’ “ Rickford notes that he’d need to listen to a better recording of the initial interview that was transcribed. “But,” he goes on, “she definitely did not say what the transcript reports her to have said.””

Origins

“Johnson was bewilderingly chosen by a group of English booksellers and authors to write the authoritative dictionary of English.

Because of the seriousness of the charge, and because Johnson was scholarly but not a proper scholar, he began work on his dictionary the way that all of us now do: he read. He focused on the great works of English literature — Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Locke, Pope — but also took in more mundane, less elevated works. Among the books that crossed his desk were research on fossils, medical texts, treatises on education, poetry, legal writing, sermons, periodicals, collections of personal letters, scientific explorations of color, books debunking common myths and superstitions of the day, abridged histories of the world, and other dictionaries.

When he saw a word that piqued his interest, he underlined it, put the first letter of that word in the margin of the book, and then passed those heavily marked texts to his assistants, who would copy the passage down on a piece of paper. The pieces of paper were filed alphabetically; they were what Johnson referred to in writing his dictionary.

Johnson’s system became the basis upon which nearly every dictionary from 1755 forward was prepared. Noah Webster used heavily annotated copies of books (and many, many other dictionaries) in preparing his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language; every managing editor at what would be called the Oxford English Dictionary oversaw a public reading program to gather quotations and rare words from an international cadre of readers (including at least one murderous nutbar);’ dictionary companies today still underline, bracket, and extract quotations, which we call “citations,” from a wide variety of sources.”

“In June 2014, a sixteen-year-old teen named Peaches Monroee made a six-second video in which she called her eyebrows “on fleek,” meaning “good” or “on point.” In November, just five months after Monroe posted her video, nearly 10 percent of all Google searches worldwide were for “on fleek.”

My colleague Emily interviewed Monroe for a blog post and asked where “on fleek” came from. Was it family slang, a play on “on point” and “flick,” some sort of blend of “fly” and “chic”? No: Monroee says she just made it up.”

““Portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau: it’s the medieval French word for a large suitcase and is a blend of porter (“to carry”) and manteau (*mantle, cloak”).”

How to Lexicograph

“Reading and marking is one of the core skills of a lexicographer — defining, proofreading, assiduously avoiding eye contact — it takes practice. The process itself is simple: read something and be on the lookout for a word that catches your eye; when you find a word, underline it; bracket enough of the context around the word so that a future definer can determine how a word is used and what it means.”

Quotes

“Quotations used in dictionaries need to meet three main criteria: they need to illustrate the most common usage of the word; they need to use only words that are entered in that particular dictionary; and they need to be as boring as humanly possible. Writers generally want to catch and hold your attention, and so they write things that are full of narrative interest, clever constructions, and tons of proper names. These things are a delight to read, and because of that they make for the worst example sentences possible.

The goal of a dictionary is to tell people what words mean and show them how they are used in the most objective, dispassionate, and robotic way possible.”

“Once you have removed all vestiges of fun from your verbal illustration, you must go through another pass and remove names. You may think it’d be a great way to win friends and get people to buy dictionaries — hey, anyone named Larry, you’re in the dictionary under “awesome!” — but it’s fraught with peril.”

Revisions

“Peter piped up. “I revised ‘run, “ he said quietly, then smiled. It took me nine months.”

The table burst forth in a chorus of “Jesuses!” Nine months! But of course it did. In the OED, “run” has over six hundred separate senses, making the Collegiate’s “take” look like kid stuff.

1 lifted my glass of wine from the other end of the table. “Here’s to ”’run,” I said. “May it never come up for revision again in our lifetimes.””

What’s in a Name?

“Why do we call them “sideburns”? It’s a play on the name of the Civil War officer who made them popular, General Burnside. Why do we call practical and unflappable people “phlegmatic”? Because we used to believe they were unexcitable because they had an overabundance of phlegm in them.”

“The name was taken from the name of John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich and quite the gambler. He loved gambling so much that he once sat at the gaming tables for a 24-hour stretch, so absorbed that he didn’t stop to take a proper meal but ate cold beef between toast while playing. This bread and filling concoction became very much in vogue and came to be called a sandwich.”

“No fallacist suggests that we need to reorder the months of the year because the names for a bunch of them — September through December — don’t match up etymologically with their placement in the calendar. September (seven) is the ninth month of the year; October (eight), the tenth; November (nine), the eleventh; and December (ten), the twelfth. No one complains that “redact” is now used to excise writing from text when its Latin root means “to put in writing.” No fallacist objects now to words that came about through mistakes or misreadings, like “apron” (which was a fifteenth-century misapprehension of “a napron” as “an apron”) or “cherry” (taken to be the singular of the Old French cherise, which Middle English speakers wrongly assumed was plural because of the final -s), because these mistakes are so very old and well established.”

“OK, which might 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 19th century for intentional misspellings and the abbreviation thereof.”