In the flesh appearing: Chicago, IL

A quick update for my faithful readers (all four of you): I will be traveling to Chicago, IL this week, where I am a plenary speaker at ITBE’s 38th annual convention. I’m looking forward to meeting and reconnecting with the utterly delightful ESL educators of Illinois, and am hopeful that this trip to Chicago features fewer emergency room visits than my last trip to Chicago did. If you happen to be attending ITBE, stop by the M-W booth and watch me attempt human interaction say hello!

Confidential to ITBE members who fall asleep during my talk on the history of the English language: we’ve all been there.

Blog posts will resume when I return next week.

“Take”: My Life? (Please.)

We had finally finished the never-ending slog through S. You’re always relieved to be done with S–it is both the longest letter in the dictionary and the harbinger of the end of your project. After S, it’s a downhill glide to Z (with a small bump at W), so when you sign in that final S batch, you are giddy. Lexicographers have not adapted to survive extended periods of giddiness. In the face of such woozy delight, the chances are good that you will do something rash and brainless.

It took me a few minutes of flipping through the galleys of my next batch before I realized my rash brainlessness: I signed out “take.” But the rush of giddiness had done permanent damage: I didn’t trot the batch back to the galley table and sign something else out.

There are eight (sometimes nine) verbs that get pulled from most defining projects and given to senior editors, and “take” is one of them. As is the way in lexicography, the simplest words are often the hardest to define, and the Big 8 are hard six ways to Sunday: they’re used in phrasal verbs, idioms, collocations, with multiple parts of speech, and in ways that can be hard to define lexically. Handling them requires the balance of concision, grammatical prowess, and fortitude usually found in wiser and more experienced editors.

I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course, as I was not wise nor was I a more experienced editor. I was hapless and dumb, but dutifully so: grabbing a fistful of index cards from one of the two boxes, I began sorting the cards into part-of-speech piles. When those piles were 2.5 inches high and began cascading onto my desk, I decided to dump the rest of the citations into my pencil drawer and stack my citations in the now-empty boxes.

Sorting citations by their part of speech is usually quick and simple. A matter of minutes. Five hours in, I had finished the first box.

I decided to define the verb uses of “take” first–in for a penny, in for a pound. My first cit read, “She was taken aback….”  Oh, I thought, this is simple. I scanned the galley and found the appropriate definition, then began my pile. The next handful of citations were similarly dispatched, and I began to relax a bit. In spite of its size, this is no different than any other batch, I thought. I am going to whip through this and finish this project, and then I am going to take a two-week vacation and go outside.  (The desires of a lexicographer are simple, small, and just a tiny bit pathetic.)

Fate, now duly tempted, intervened: my next cit read, “Reason has taken a back seat to sentiment.” I confidently flipped it onto the pile with “taken aback”–and then stopped. I pulled the cit back off the pile. I pulled the galleys closer. This use of “take” didn’t really mean “to catch or come upon in a particular situation or action” (sense 3b), did it? Reason did not catch or come upon a back seat. That’s sloppy, Kory, very sloppy. Reason was made secondary to sentiment. I scanned the galleys and saw nothing that matched, then put the citation in a “new sense” pile. But before I could grab the next citation, I thought, “Unless….”

When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them an adequate supply of water and enough non-perishable food to last several days. “Unless…” marks the beginning of a wild lexical goose chase.

Pulling up the dictionary program on my computer, I looked up the current definition for “back seat.” There it is, sense 2: “an inferior position.” Awesome. So this sense of “take” means “assume,” and I can put it in the pile for sense 7a and–

Oh God. Wrong styling. This “back seat” is an open compound. The “backseat” on my screen is closed. I wondered if it really mattered, knowing all the while that it did. I sighed audibly, and my cubicle mate hemmed loudly to remind me that sound was verboten. Minding my volume level, I placed this citation in its own pile, far away from the other piles. I would deal with this later.

My rhythm had been thrown off, but upon reading the next citation, I was confident I’d regain momentum: “…take a shit.” Oh yeah, profanity and a clear, fixed idiom that will need its own definition at the end of the entry. YES.

Only it’s not a fixed idiom. You can also take a crap. Or a walk, or a breather, or a nap, or a break. I scanned the galleys, flipping from page to page. “To undertake and make, do, or perform,” sense 17a. I considered. I tried the time-honored trick of substitution with hysterical results: “to undertake and make a shit,” “to undertake a shit,” “to undertake and do a shit,” and “to undertake and perform a shit.” This got me thinking, which is always dangerous. Can one “perform” or “do” a nap? Does one “undertake and make” a breather? Maybe that’s 17b, “to participate in.” Mmm, yes, I mused, I would like very much to participate in a break right now. But that doesn’t solve “take a shit.” I tentatively placed the citation in the pile for 17a. I looked at my piles, then spent the next five minutes writing the sense number and definition down on a sticky note and affixing it to the top citation of each pile. The note for sense 17a included the parenthetical “(Refine/revise def? Make/do/perform?)”.

I sat back and berated myself a bit. “Take” should be simple. I have redefined “Monophysite” and “Nestorianism,” for God’s sake. I can swear in a dozen languages. I am not a moron. This should be easy. My next citation reads, “…arrived 20 minutes late, give or take.”

What? This isn’t a verbal use! How did this get in here? I took a pinched-lip look around my cubicle for the guilty party–someone has been in here futzing with my citations!–then realized I was the guilty party.  Another audible sigh, another muffled bark of warning from next door. Clearly, I needed to refile this. But where? After five minutes of staring at the citation, I decide it’s adverbial (“eh, close enough”). Yes, I’ll just put this citation in the nonexistent section for adverbial uses of “take,” because there are no adverbial uses of  ”take.” My teeth began to hurt.

I placed the citation next to “take a back seat” and dubbed that section of my desk “Which Will Be Dealt With In Two or Three Days.”

And the next citation: “…this will only take about a week….” Ah, finally, I am back on track! Phrasal verb! “Take about!” And as I began to lay it in a pile on the “Done” section of my desk, a derisive voice from deep inside the left hemisphere of my brain sneered, “That’s not a phrasal verb.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. The voice was still, waiting. I silently asked the cosmos to send the office up in a fireball right now. No rush of flame nor conflagration appeared. The voice in my head said, “You know that ‘about’ is entirely optional. This is a straightforward transitive use.” I muttered, “Shut it, Quirk,” and my cubemate groaned, angrily gathered the newspaper he was reading and marking, and left.

It had been an hour, and I had gotten through perhaps 20 citations. I sifted all my “Done” piles into one and grabbed a ruler. The pile of handled citations was 1/4″ thick. Then I measured the cit boxes. Each was full. Each was 16″ long. I renamed the problem section of my desk “Which Will Probably Not Be Dealt With Until Christ Returns In Majesty To Judge The Living And The Dead.”

Over the next two weeks, my sanity unspooled. I shilly-shallied over any use of “take” within four words of an adverb, a preposition, or any particle whatsoever. Every transitive use of “take” led to a long hunt through the dictionary and other galleys to see if this use of “take” was a fixed idiom, covered at the definition for the object, or needed covering here. I shuffled and reshuffled piles of citations so frequently I am now qualified to be a dealer in a Vegas casino. My working definition of “desk” expanded as I ran out of flat spaces to stack citations. A wrinkle in the time-space continuum had appeared in my cubicle; the rest of this project moved along at breakneck speed, but time slowed interminably the longer I worked with “take” until minutes were geologic eras. I muttered to myself with increasing frequency. One night during dinner, my husband asked if I was okay. I looked up at him, utterly lost. “I just don’t think I really speak English.” He looked mildly alarmed–he only speaks English–but then settled into a fixed look of sympathy when he realized that I was probably just stressed. “You’re probably just stressed,” he said. “But what does that even mean?” I whined. “Just thinking about what it means makes my brain itch!” He went back to looking mildly alarmed.

The next day, I finished sorting the citations. A flicker of triumph flared up within me: I was ready to define. The flicker was snuffed: oh shit, I still had to write definitions. I was only half done. Further, I was only half done with the verb. I still had to do this for the noun. To divert my attention away from the yawning pit of panic and despair that had suddenly opened up in my gut, I began counting. There were 107 piles of citations on my desk. Just for the verb. Panic and despair waved up at me from my midsection and invited me down for a picnic lunch.

I hit rock bottom the day I came in to work and found that my carefully constructed fortress of citations had been breached. The overnight cleaning crew–who, to be fair, were probably sick of trying to clean around my piles of citations balanced on top of my monitor, on top of the walls of my cubicle, on the edges of my bookshelves, on the armrests of my chair, and in between the rows of keys on my keyboard–had decided to tidy the piles of paper on the floor of my cubicle. It was a cinematic moment: I dropped my bag in the middle of the floor and stared open-mouthed at the blank spaces where 20 or so piles used to sit. My small nest egg of sanity cracked cleanly open; I could feel what little rationality I had slip out. My stomach decided to exit through my feet. My sinuses prickled. I realized, almost too late, that I was about to cry, and if I cried, I would most certainly make noise (snuffling at least, possibly wailing). I left my bag in the middle of the floor and went to the ladies’, where I leaned against the paper towel dispenser and wondered if it was too late to get a job as a baker instead.

What do you do? You press onward. Besides, a few of my colleagues were waiting for me to move so they could dry their hands.  I re-sorted the tidy stack the cleaning crew left (and papered every flat surface within five feet of my cubicle with “DO NOT MOVE MY PAPERS!!! KLS!!!!”). I sat grimly in my chair, careful not to disturb the four stacks of citations balanced on the armrests, and decided that a little fun was in order: it was time to stamp the covered citations and file them away. I took out my customized date stamp and began marking the covered cits, pile by pile, as used. My cubemate hemmed in irritation, but I stamped louder. I had no bread dough to throw around; I had no punching bag to pummel; I had no nuclear device to detonate. But I had a date stamp and, by the power vested in me by Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, I was going to put this goddamned verb to bed.

That small act of physical brutality against index cards marked the other side of “take.” I wrote and rewrote and wrote. I got up from my desk to run proposed revisions and new entries past a few colleagues (after climbing out of their hiding places, they were very helpful). I came up with what is perhaps the best verbal illustration of my career by lexicographical standards (“take the witness stand”). I was suddenly able to see that “take the plunge” was a fixed idiom, “give or take” should be covered at “give,” that these three piles can be combined into one if I revise this definition by two words, this phrasal verb has own-place coverage. When I finished the verb, I went straight on into the noun–a blissfully manageable 20 piles.

Three weeks after giddiness had made me stupid, I marched my finished batch back to the galley table. I had to flip the sign-out sheet back several pages–we were already in U–but I found the line for “take” and signed it back in.

A month later, as I was talking to the Director of Defining about something else, I mentioned “take.” “Oh, I wondered where that went.” It turns out he had forgotten to mark it as unavailable on the sign-out sheet. By the time he remembered, I had already defined it. His eyebrows crept up above the rim of his glasses. “You seem to have survived the ordeal.”

“I survived.”

He paused. “I was going to say ‘take a bow,’ but it might be too early to go there.” Older and wiser, he had stepped outside of hitting distance nonetheless.

Facts and Truth, Irregardless

It was such a lovely day. I was finishing up my work for the day and, about ten minutes before logging off, decided to post the most looked-up words of the day on Twitter. Those who follow me there know I try to have fun with the words when I can, because you should have fun with this crazy language. But there was one word that had been at the top of the list for several days and that I had been ignoring because I knew that simply mentioning it would cause a firestorm of controversy. But it was such a lovely day! It was sunny and warm, and as I weighed whether or not to post this word– this is not an exaggeration–two birds lit on the telephone wire outside my office and began to sing. I thought, “Oh, c’mon, Kory. Quit being such a moron. Just post the damn word. No one cares, everyone’s on their way home right now anyway.”

So I posted this:

I hit “post,” left my desk to refill my water glass, and less than two minutes later came back to a bunch of responses that essentially all read “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU, MORON?!?” Sighing, I looked out the window. The birds, sensing trouble, had buggered off. My eyes lingered on the sky; perhaps a satellite would fall out of it and crush me. A slip of paper caught my eye; it was a little inscription I came up with about a year ago and had presciently stuck on the window sash. It reads Aliqua non possunt quin merdam moveare, and it is Latin for “There are those who cannot help but stir the turd.”

“Stamper,” I muttered under my breath, “you turd-stirrer.” Resigning myself to another hour of work, I began answering the hate mail.

What got me sighing was not the response to that tweet, nor the fact that people felt strongly enough to tell me I was a moron. No, what made me long for sweet oblivion was the knowledge that, in a few minutes, I would once again come up against the Facts/Truth Dichotomy.

Lexicography deals entirely in fact–I know, the orgies, glitter, and drunken prescriptivism threw you, but it’s true. You spend much of your time as a lexicographer in pursuit of facts, and you spend the rest of your time as a lexicographer coming to terms with the facts you’ve just found. Recently, I stumbled across an early cit that led me to believe that  Shakespeare had coined the verb “puke.” A few hours later, Ben Zimmer told me that the Oxford English Dictionary had antedated it, so poor ol’ Willy was no longer the coiner (in print) of “puke.”  This saddened me–I really wanted Shakespeare to have coined “puke”–but the facts were in, and they were against me. What can you do in the face of facts?

Evidently, when it comes to words, their use, and their histories, you can just ignore them.

Let’s take “irregardless” as an example. Many people claim is that “irregardless” is not a word–but, see, the facts tell us it is. I have evidence of its use in edited, printed prose, going back to about 1912. It’s probably been in spoken use even longer. Now, the facts also tell us that it’s not generally accepted and that, if you choose to use it, others may think you are a dolt. But none of that matters to a bunch of my correspondents. One of them tells me it cannot be a word because it is a double negative. Another tells me that it is not grammatical. Another simply says “unacceptable.” How can you possibly have a dialogue about usage, substandard terms, the stigmatization of dialect, and whether context matters with people who have, for all intents and purposes, stuck their fingers in their ears and are yelling “UNACCEPTABLE” at you over and over again?

Why do people react so strongly? Because they believe these deeply held grammatical convictions are capital-T True. Remember the metaphor of building blocks I used in an earlier post? If I begin tapping at one of the blocks, what happens to that carefully constructed tower? It falls–and then what? I guess we all start speaking Esperanto or something. But if we glaze that tower in the unassailable veneer of Truth, then the only way to take it down is with an act of violence and aggression. Violence is never nice. Our little worlds are protected. Our existence is justified.

This attitude and response is not restricted to usage issues, of course. Most often I run into this attitude when it comes to etymology. People tell me all the time that they love etymology (and some of them even remember that it’s “etymology” and not “entomology,” which is the study of insects). Then they usually say something like this: “One of my favorites is the story behind ‘sincere’!” I force a smile and start eyeing the room for exits. I know what’s coming next: they are going to tell me that “sincere” comes from the Latin sine cera, “without wax,” supposedly because poorly made statues were rubbed with wax to hide imperfections and well-made statues were stamped with or advertised as “without wax.” They are going to spend several minutes relating this story to me, and I am going to have to tell them that it’s absolutely not true. If I take advantage of the moment when the hearer falls silent in shock and growing indignation, I may launch into a quick lecture on statuary in the Middle Ages, medieval methods of manufacture, or even the availability of wax to the common merchant. (I’m a medievalist, and I will take every opportunity I can to whip out that degree and beat someone about the head and neck with it, metaphorically speaking.) But I do this in vain, because the response will always be a variation on “But my PRIEST/DYING MOTHER/GOD HIMSELF told me this!” Suddenly, etymology has become a matter of loyalty. A trusted source has given me this information. And who are you? You are just some myopic boob in an office somewhere, not caring at all about the rest of us! What do you know about my trusted source? Are you saying my granny was a liar??

The same logic gets applied to contested usage. You say you have evidence that “irregardless” has been used since 1912 (fact). But it’s not a word because my teachers told me it wasn’t (truth)! I trust my teachers, but I don’t trust you, so I will disregard the evidence of its use and merely bleat over and over again that “irregardless” isn’t a word until you shut down your computer and pray for a meteor to smash into your office. Because if I trust you and admit that “irregardless” is a word, then why did I spend so much of my childhood trying to learn all these damn “rules” when I could have spent my afternoons getting to first and possibly second base with Jeannie Sucweki instead?? Therefore, and to make me feel like my youth was not wasted on stupid things that don’t matter, “irregardless” is not a word.

I understand this reaction so well, truth be told, because I struggle with it constantly. I am a displaced Westerner among New Englanders and everything I say is scrutinized for evidence of latent hickishness. I walk into the office and whisper “howdy” to the receptionist, and she looks at me like I have just stripped to my skivvies in the lobby and performed an interpretive dance. I used the positive “anymore” on Twitter once (as in, “People text anymore instead of calling”), and one of my colleagues was floored at my quaint nonstandard usage–which is completely standard outside of New England. Another colleague used to come up to my desk and ask me to say words like “drawers” just to lighten his mood. My vowels are all wrong, I add extra syllables to profanities when I’m tired, and I use “y’all” unironically.

And then, when I visit my ancestral lands west of the Mississippi, I am judged for my quick speech patterns, my new (undoubtedly elitist) vocabulary, my children’s East Coast accents. When I go out to eat with my parents and order a soda and a hoagie instead of pop and a sub, I am mourned over.

The longer I’ve been a lexicographer, the more aware I am of the gray areas of English. Etymologies change as we gain access to more of the written record. The given dates of first written usage should never be set in stone. Start delving into actual historical usage and you’ll discover that lots of the time-honored rules we were taught as children are nothing more than the opinions of a bunch of dead guys who wished we all spoke Latin. What’s a body to do?

A body can do what a body always does: speak and write the way we want to. If you think “irregardless” is a crusty, weeping pustule marring the face of English, then don’t use it. But there’s no need to act like “irregardless” is an untreatable cancer of the language.  We got through John Dryden and his asinine “no terminal preposition” rule okay–we’ll get through “irregardless,” too.

Dear Merriam-Webster

One morning around break time, one of my colleagues passed my cubicle and noticed the look of utter defeat on my face. While this is my default look after 3:00pm, it was still early. He approached with caution. “So,” he murmured, “what’s on the docket for today?”

“Well, first, about five  new words, then a bunch of typos. Then the job requests. Then I think I’ll finish up by ruining young minds and destroying Western civilization. Again.”

He peered at my computer screen. “Haven’t you ruined all the young minds already? Oh, well. Carry on, I guess?” And he sauntered back to his cubicle, happy in the knowledge that he did not have to answer the editorial correspondence that day.

For as long as there have been editors making citations, writing definitions, and silently despairing over the quality of the coffee in the office, there has been editorial correspondence. The Merriam brothers welcomed it; by the 1860s, they were running advertisements promising a free dictionary to anyone who wrote in with evidence of a word that was not in Webster’s. Hundreds of letters poured in. Times have changed–we don’t give free dictionaries to correspondents, so don’t even ask–but the editorial correspondence is forever. The notion is a simple one: if you have a question about the English language, you can send it in (on paper or through the magical Internet) and an editor will answer it for you.

The first hitch in this grand plan is what exactly is meant by “the English language.” To me–and perhaps this is narrow-minded of me, since my modus operandi is to, you know, focus on the meanings of words and all–the phrase “the English language” refers to a word, speech pattern, usage, und so weiter that appears in the language commonly called “English.” I have discovered, however, that this is crazy talk. “The English language” means anything that can be written using words that appear in the English language (though those words need not exhibit the grammar, syntax, or spelling we associate with standard English). In my many years answering the correspondence, I’ve been asked what to look for in purchasing an Alaskan Malamute, why manhole covers are round, how much wood a woodchuck can actually and literally chuck, if rain on your wedding day is really ironic if you live in Seattle, and whether I can make a rainbow–and that’s just a sample. (Answers: good blood lines, ease of replacement, 2 cords of wood per day, no, and of course I can.)

The second hitch in this grand plan lies in our response: “an editor will answer it for you.” That’s what’s called a “simple declarative statement” or, if you study it longer,  ”idealistic and naive in ways not seen since Eden.”  We really do try to answer all intelligible questions we receive. We may not answer them to everyone’s satisfaction, but we answer them. Whether we should is another question.

There are three types of e-mails that we commonly get: Enter My Word Into Your Dictionary; Your Dictionary Sucks; and Hire Me, I’m Amazing. Sometimes people economize and use all three types in one e-mail. (“Hi, I noticed you don’t have my coinage ‘flabulous,’ which means ‘tremendously fat,’ in your dictionary. While looking for my word, I also found a typo in an entry. Your dictionary sucks! Do you need a proofreader? You had better hire me. Here’s my resume. I look forward to being your boss.”)

Enter My Word Into Your Dictionary is fairly self-explanatory. These people get my thanks for their intrepid new coinage and an explanation of how a word makes it into the dictionary. If they write back and say, “Yeah, wevs, are you going to enter it or not??” then I usually respond with a little terse note asking them to read the delightful essay we’ve written on this very goddamned subject. Some people persist and think that simply by pointing out the empirical awesomeness of their word, I will come to my senses, delete all the other words in the dictionary, and just print their coinage over and over again as a paean to its sublimity. Haha! Silly correspondent! I am a lexicographer and therefore do not have any grasp on what is awesome, empirically or otherwise.

Your Dictionary Sucks has the most variety and encompasses everything from very polite and apologetic typo reports to flat-out abuse of our products, our persons, and our hygiene.  But all of them are marked by one underlying attitude: I can’t believe this is wrong because you are the dictionary!

It always comes as a shock to our correspondents that the dictionary is not a book most holy and inviolate, delivered unto us from On High, verily divine. It is  written by real, live, completely fallible human beings. These human beings have been known, while proofreading 2,000 pages of 4-point type, to miss a thing or two. There is no need to panic: the English language is not falling all to hell simply because I yawned at 6:00pm two days before the manuscript had to be at the typesetter’s and therefore missed “falllible.”

For those clamoring for computers to take lexicography over, please know that I spent a solid week many years ago hunting down all the programmatic misexpansions of “G” into “German” in the etymologies of the online dictionary (“Germanlobal Positioning System” was my favorite).

There’s a particularly draining variant of Your Dictionary Sucks that appears with regularity: Your Dictionary Is Ruining Young Minds. This is the catty, litigious aunt of Your Dictionary Sucks. It’s generally better spoken than Your Dictionary Sucks, knows more lawyers than Your Dictionary Sucks, and does not care at all what you have to say in your defense because it knows what is best.

Now, I have no problem with people thinking that the dictionary is ruining young minds (as I have so ably demonstrated previously). But at the root of these e-mails is a basic philosophical misunderstanding.

You see, lexicographers are interested in what is generally called “lexical defining.” That is, we aim to figure out and communicate how a word is used and what it means in a particular context. However, many people assume that the dictionary does “real defining”: the attempt to describe, to the best of one’s ability, the essential nature or identity of the person, thing, or idea behind the word. Real defining asks, “What is truth?” or “What is beauty?” Lexical defining asks, “How is the word ‘truth’ used in this particular context?” or “What does ‘beauty’ mean when it’s used this way?”

Some think this is ludicrous hair-splitting or blame-shifting. It’s not. This distinction has very practical applications for the definer. Let me give you an example.

Every year on one mid-May Monday, I open my e-mail program and see a number of angry e-mails that read like this:

“My Sunday school class was working on a Mother’s Day present, and we decided to look up ‘mother’ in your dictionary to find words we could use to describe how wonderful mothers are. You can imagine how shocked/upset/horrified I was to see such terrible language in the dictionary! This is a TERRIBLE way to define a mother! Mothers are kind and generous and loving, and THAT SORT OF LANGUAGE IS RUINING YOUNG MINDS.”

The correspondent has confused real defining (what mothers are) with lexical defining (how the word “mother” is used). The word “mother” is, in some contexts, used to mean “motherfucker,” as anyone over the age of 9 who has ever watched television will (gigglingly) tell you. What we are not saying is that mothers are mofos, though I’m sure some of them are.

Few correspondents, when worked up to that level of indignation, will blithely accept the “real defining vs. lexical defining” response I send them. So they write back and tell me that, unless I remove this egregious entry from the dictionary and replace it with something that would not make my mother ashamed of me, they will boycott us.

I know better than anyone that the dictionary includes words in it that describe horrible, despicable things. After all, I get to read the citational evidence for those words and write definitions for them.  But removing an offending word from the dictionary will not make the thing that word describes disappear. If it were that easy, don’t you think we’d already have done it?

Additionally, I learned that sort of language from my mother.

There is something that is a little unsettling about the correspondence. Despite the fact that I am an unabashed language ho, I have never, ever, thought, “Hmm, why do we park on the driveway and drive on the parkway? I think I’ll hunt down the address for the dictionary and ask them!” Nor have I ever thought, “You know, English is terribly sexist! I think I’ll tell the dictionary to fix that!” And I’ve certainly never thought, “The lawyer said that what I did constitutes felony assault, but he’s just a guy with a $100 haircut and a law degree. What does he know? I think I’ll ask the dictionary to tell me if what I did was really a felony or not!” But there are lots of people in the world who think that this is just fine. I don’t get it–and I am, let us remember, not exactly what you’d call “well-adjusted.”

Correspondence is one of those “other duties as assigned” that no lexicographer thinks too much of until they are drafted into it. It doesn’t take many letters to learn that people don’t have a very good grasp on what the dictionary can and can’t do. You learn right away that people are passionate about language. How can a person not be? It’s the primary mode of communication in our world, the thing underpinning society itself, the means by which we express our very souls, and here is some dictionary totally fucking it up.

If you step back from the inbox full of screeching and look at the correspondence that way, it’s almost hopeful. It means that people are thinking about language, which is ultimately what we want people to do. That thought is almost enough to warm the lump of bituminous coal where my heart used to be.

Correctly spelling your angry screed and refraining from calling me “Satan’s housemaid” helps, too.

F-Bombs Away! Obscene Words and Your Dictionary

Ed. note: This post is full of words that may, as we say in the office, “offend the tender sensibilities” of some. Caveat lector.

The first thing you cover in Style and Defining class is that any word that meets the three criteria for entry (widespread edited use, sustained usage over a certain period of time, and lexical value) is eligible for entry. From your first moments as a lexicographer to your last, this is the core rationale for everything you do. It is the rule which underlies the work of any descriptivist lexicographer; the practical extension of our defining philosophy; and the mechanism by which we attend to this noble calling in the service of education, literacy,  language.

That said, you will still be flustered the first time you dip into your defining batch and pull out a handful of citations for “fuckwad.”

Profanity presents the descriptive lexicographer with a few unique challenges.  Obscenities and vulgar terms are a veritable treasure trove–so many! such richness!–but very few of the truly original ones make it into print. Witness the New Yorker‘s recent article on Rick Santorum, which touched briefly on the generic noun “santorum,” coined in 2003 in response to some controversial comments the Senator made on homosexuality. The article says that the definition of “santorum” is unprintable.  This, it’s worth mentioning, is coming from a magazine that routinely prints “fuck” in all its various incarnations. Much of our printed evidence for the lower-case “santorum” sadly reads just like that New Yorker blurb: “blah blah blah santorum (a word so vile that we cannot possibly tell you what it means, but we’re going to use words like “leak” and “backdoor” and “frothy” in the next paragraph in a veiled attempt to euphemize “santorum” and thereby escape an obscenity fine or court injunction).”

Uses like this are lexicographically infuriating. We write our definitions, after all, based on the contextual meaning of a word as it appears in edited prose. All you can definitively eke out of these citations is that “santorum” will probably need a usage note.

Speaking of, usage notes and register labels can also challenge the lexicographer. If you can believe it, cusswords can be incredibly nuanced.  If that sounds like a ludicrous statement, please get up from your computer, find a 13-year-old, and ask them to explain the difference between “fucker,” “motherfucker,” and “mofo” to you. (Here I must tell you that the manifold glories of the F-bomb have been covered by Jesse Sheidlower in his book, The F-word, which any scholar of dirty language or ironic hipster will want to own. Now you, too, can impress a lexicographer or a 13-year-old!)  Lexicographers have different usage labels for the naughty words–my company uses vulgar and obscene–but sussing out which label to give a particular sense comes only with practice. My own, admittedly imperfect, litmus test for picking a word’s label: if I were to use this word in a sentence around my dad’s ironworker buddies and they respond with “fuck yeah!”, it’s vulgar. If I were to use this word in a sentence around my dad’s ironworker buddies and they respond by hollering, “Hey, watch your fucking mouth!”, it’s obscene.  To add to the confusion, there are always–ALWAYS–citations that use naughty words in ways that are neither vulgar nor obscene.  I swear, about 40% of the words in Trainspotting are variations on “fuck,” but only a handful of them are lexically vulgar or obscene: most of them are just used, as we say in the biz, “for intensity.” By page 6, you don’t even notice them anymore.

Once you get past the fact that you have very little evidence for a word and that you have to think long and hard about the nuances of its use, you have other, more mundane, hurdles to clear. First, it is very hard to maintain the proper sense of professional decorum when you are reading citation after citation for “numbnuts.” You may start to snicker, and then your coworkers will begin exhaling sharply and perhaps even sighing audibly–the universal signal for irritation within lexicographical  circles. Don’t worry, though: the giggles will wear off after about the first 15 citations.

Additionally, it can make for awkward watercooler conversation. I learned the hard way to append the phrase “the entry for” to any answer I gave to the question, “What are you working on?” (“Fucking. UH WHOA I MEAN…”)

The sad reality of defining naughty words is this: the definitions will never be as interesting, sparkling, or titillating as the words themselves. I was out with some friends when one of them asked me what I was working on. “Well,” I swaggered, “I just entered the adjective ‘fucking’ into the dictionary!” Everyone’s eyes grew wide with mischief and delight. “Well?” someone asked. “What’s the definition?”

“Um, ‘damned, usually used as an intensive.’” And like that, everyone deflated. It was as if they had gone to a striptease only to find that, when the feather fans were lowered, the dancer was wearing a Victorian-era bathing suit.

While society tends to treat profanity differently than other classes of words, the lexicographer cannot. The goal, remember, is to attempt to concisely and accurately communicate the lexical meaning of a word, and obscene and vulgar words, with all their shades of meaning and many, many, many uses,  need the clearest definitions of them all. In fact, when I buy a new dictionary–something that I’m sure you all do on a regular basis, right?–I judge it on two criteria: treatment of the Big 8 and treatment of profanity. A dictionary written for an adult English speaker should cover profanity. (School dictionaries tend not to include profanity because classroom materials tend not to drop f-bombs. This is because I do not write classroom materials.) If I pick up a dictionary and can’t find a single cussword, I begin to wonder what else the editors decided not to include.

Even in modern society, where previously genteel publications will print the occasional “shithead,” bad words are still stigmatized and stigmatizing. We call them bad words: their very name carries a moral charge. Sometimes, when I am answering another e-mail from a parent who sent their child to the dictionary and later found them looking up filth and smut, what is this world coming to, I wish we had taken the easier way out and just omitted them. After all, we all know these words already. No one learns profanity from the dictionary. (The parent whose child has been soiled by my filth disbelieves this claim of mine.)

Then I think about the afternoon several years ago when a group of international high-school students were piled onto my couch, flipping through one of my dictionaries.  One girl’s casual thumbing evolved into a susurrous cluster of girls, heads together, dictionary at the center. Their whispery knot would occasionally burst open with an “oh!” and a clatter of laughter.  Now, dictionaries do not usually elicit such a response from teenagers, so I asked what they were doing. They all blushed deeply, and then one of the girls spoke up. “Please do not be angry, but we hear these words, like ‘shit,’ but sometimes you don’t understand how to use the word. These words are not in the dictionary in class. So how do you use it? If you use it wrong, the students think you are stupid.”

I did what any compassionate person would have done: I made them cookies, sat in their midst, and taught them how to “give a shit” and not “take shit” from their classmates, who were all, for the record, “full of shit.”

The Contractually Obligated Post of the Year

The beginning of January is one long, exhausted sigh around here.  We’ve endured months of anticipation accompanied by fervent requests and hints; the news outlets just won’t shut up about the season; and it all culminates in one frenzied evening of eating, yelling, and flying paper. In the morning, you feel bloated and vaguely hungover. Looking at the detritus of the night before, you are filled with self-loathing and weltschmerz. You vow not to do this again next year, but even as the thought finishes sludging its way through your aching head (which you are slowly and deeply rubbing, as if physically reconfiguring your gray matter is the only thing that can help you now), you hear the lie of it. This happens every year.  You let this happen every year. You’d cry if you had any dignity left. As it is, all you can do is moan:

“Goddamned Word of the Year.”

As you well know, lots of dictionary companies and other assorted language outfits release a Word of the Year. The American Dialect Society (the only group that sensibly chooses their Word of the Year after the year is actually done) met last week, cast votes, and chose the zeitgeisty “occupy” as their Word of the Year. M-W sifted through the look-up logs and chose “pragmatic.” Oxford chose “squeezed middle,” which is a PHRASE, OMG you guys, and lo, there were complaints on the Internet that a two-word phrase cannot be the Word of the Year. Dictionary.com chose “tergiversate” because it’s an awesome word and why the hell not?

But let’s not recap all the Words of the Year. The press has done a good job of incessantly covering them for the last two months. Truth be told, I’ve got a raging signifier hangover.

It’s not that I think that the Words of the Year aren’t interesting, or that annually highlighting a word that has seen tremendous use or linguistic change isn’t a good idea. It’s that sociological mountains are made of linguistic molehills.

Merriam-Webster generally chooses its Words of the Year by going over the look-up logs and seeing which word had the biggest or most sustained spike in look-ups that year. This is interesting because it tells you what words people associate with certain events. Past years’ words have been “austerity,” “bailout,” and “integrity,” and there have always been opinion pieces that follow the Word of the Year announcement and make grand, sweeping generalizations about the State of This World based on our look-up logs.

In 2007, we decided to mix it up. We put together a list of the most commonly looked-up words and the most popular words submitted to our New Words & Slang forum, and let the website users vote on them. What a stroke of genius–instead of relying on look-ups, which really only track words that people don’t know or aren’t sure of, we could have The Public vote on what the most important word of the year was! What could be more democratic?

Behold democracy in action: the Word of the Year in 2007 was “w00t”–yes, with zeroes. As words go, I think “w00t” (or “woot,” if you are allergic to mixing letters and numbers) is great fun. It’s a harmless word, very creative, and someone clearly had fun organizing a voting campaign for it.

The response to this announcement was amazing. Because “w00t” was suddenly hailed Word of the Year, people felt like it had to have some sort of significance in our modern culture. And so the reaching began. I read article after article about how, with this choice, Merriam-Webster was finally giving legitimacy to the gamer/hacker community; how the choice of this word is representative of a carefree national mood; how it shouldn’t be eligible for Word of the Year because it’s not even a word–words are made up of letters and there are frickin’ ZEROES all up in “w00t”; how this is stupid because “w00t” is soooo 1997, not 2007; how this is further evidence that no one cares about language anymore. There was even a lighthearted backlash campaign which generated about 1,000 e-mails, all of which landed in my inbox, and all of which I personally and cheerfully answered. (I also cheerfully and personally answered the hundreds of not-so-lighthearted e-mails about how we were sending the English language to hell in a l33t-lined handbasket.  Are you still sure you want this job?)

Language is a form of communication and is therefore public, but our interactions with and responses to it are intensely personal. There are, according to the Ethnologue, currently over 328,000,000 English speakers in the world spread out over about 115 countries. No one word will sum up the year for all of them, or for even a fraction of them–nor should it. The vibrancy of English as a living, growing language is due in no small part to the diversity of its speakers. “Occupy” has a very different connotation and tone for someone who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto than it does for me, and if they are unhappy about its sudden ascendance as Signifier of the Zeitgeist, well, I can’t blame them. The personal nuancing of Words of the Year happens even without Nazi war atrocities. In my household, “pragmatic” is not a positive word; it is secret code for “penny-pinching killjoy.” “Squeezed middle” refers alternately to the toothpaste tube after the kids have been at it or me in jeans. My own Word of the Year is not printable in polite company. Or even among you, dear readers.

Linguists and lexicographers may track language and choose a word that has had extensive use in the last year, but those choices are just the opinions and reports of a small subset of very nerdy people (represent!). There’s no reason to blow them out of proportion.

But since the press has to have something to write about, I hope that you will all enjoy the opinion pieces that appear this time next year after I successfully spam the look-up engine and make “amazeballs” the 2012 Word of the Year. (Sorry, ADS.)

Silence and Adverbs: Tips on Defining

Many years ago, I was at a party full of smart and beautiful people–how I got invited to that party is an absolute mystery. In any event, I had tucked myself into a corner, hoping for a quiet evening of stuffing sushi into my piehole as fast as I could, when a group of people approached me and we all began talking about what I do for a living. I trotted out the standard riff on the process of lexicography–reading, marking, citations, defining–but one of the guys in the group stopped me mittelspiel. “So, you spend all day in a cubicle, totally silent, reading index cards and sorting them into little piles? That sounds like hell to me.”

That, ladies and gents, is coming from an adult man who, as it turns out, lives in a high-school dorm and watches over 30-odd teenage boys for a living. Just to give you some perspective.

The Venerable Doc Johnson was not just being a cranky old fart when he defined “lexicographer” as “a harmless drudge.” Listen when I tell you: hunting down, categorizing, and defining words can be a mind-bending slog. But if life teaches us anything, it’s that people don’t listen to a word I say. Since half of you are secretly hoping to become a lexicographer, let me offer some Helpful Tips on Defining. (If you’d rather skip this dog’s breakfast and read an informative–dry, dull, utterly colorless–piece on how a word gets into the dictionary instead, here’s one.)

Tip 1:  Clear off your desk as you’re gonna need the space.
When a defining project begins, your first job is to sign out a batch of defining, which consists of one triple-spaced page of the finished dictionary and a shoebox full of citations that correspond to the entries on that page. Your first job as definer/drudge is to read through every one of those citations and determine whether the meaning conveyed by the marked word is already entered in the dictionary or not, and then create little piles of index cards accordingly. If the contextual meaning of that word is currently entered in the dictionary, it goes in one pile; if it’s not, if goes in a different pile. Each sense, subsense, and sub-subsense gets its own pile, and before too long your desk looks like an all-paper version of Risk or Stratego.

This is a bit unbelievable, but shuffling papers into piles is not as easy as it sounds. What do you do with those three or four citations that might conceivably be covered by sense 4a if you kind of mentally squint at them, but, well, could also be an emerging new sense, too? Separate pile? Throw them in with 4a and hope the senior editor sees what you do and doesn’t just think you’re being a lazy butt? You make the call! Please remember, too, that the citations are not always separated by part of speech, so don’t accidentally put an adjectival use in the adverb pile. Because if you do, we’ll all laugh at you for years. (Not really. Maybe just for the duration of lunch.)

Yes, I hear what you’re thinking: don’t computers make this obsolete? No. Because now the flat spaces you use to organize are mental ones. Even if you have a fabulous marking and sorting program, you still have to concentrate and keep track of all the new senses you’ve run into so far. This mental piling has a deleterious effect on your ability to remember anything except all the new senses of “string” you are tracking.  I get home from a long day of defining, start making dinner, and turn to ask one of the kids to get inside the…big box…oh Lord…you know, with the [frantic pantomiming]…in it…food-thing…box…REFRIGERATOR, YES, GET IN THERE and get me the…oh man [lots of squint-eyed snapping]…drink…white…in the [more pantomiming]….

At least I can leave my desk at work; most nights, I have to take my brain home with me.

Subtip: Don’t sign out a batch that includes any member of the Big 8.
Like all professions, lexicography provides you with some handy benchmarks by which you can measure your sad little existence. One of those benchmarks is the Big 8. These are eight verbs that senior editors tend to work on because they have so many senses and collocative uses, and working on them makes you long to fly into the clouds and be with Jesus.

I’ve defined three of the Big 8 (“get,” “take,” and “do”) for various projects, and I have no desire to see, think about, or be in the same room with the remaining five members of the Big 8. When I defined “take,” I had piles of citations filed in between the keys of my keyboard, on top of my computer monitor, on the arms of my chair, in the pencil drawer, and on the floor. One day I came into the office to discover that the cleaning crew had moved a bunch of piles around, and I cried. Three weeks later–THREE WEEKS–I finished the entry. That was nine years ago, and I still wince when I hear people say “take.”

Tip 2: English grammar is wack and that’s now your fault.
There comes a point during your early career as a lexicographer–usually right after Gil hands back your first batch of marked practice definitions, along with a couple of three-hundred-page tomes on the vagaries of English grammar and a murmured encouragement to “read through these”–when the horrible reality of your situation hits you full in the face: I am the one who must decide what part of speech a word gets.

Please remember that audible sobbing or hyperventilating is a distraction to your coworkers. Thank you.

This may seem very easy, but here is a little inside baseball for you: even though English words are usually filed into one of eight traditional parts of speech, a good chunk of written and spoken English does not fall easily into those eight traditional parts of speech. Nouns can be used like adjectives (I ate apple pie for breakfast because it’s awesome); adjectives are occasionally used like nouns (lexicographers are the damned); verbs can be verbs (I am running)–or adjectives (a running joke) or nouns (He likes soccer and running). The category “adverb” is essentially the junk drawer of the English language.

You are now the one who gets to decide if “apple” as used above has any of the markers of a true adjective or if it’s just attributive. If you are like me, you will probably have to look up “attributive” before you can make that decision. And if you’re not like me–if you are a grammatical dynamo–you will still end up looking at a pile of citations for “but” late one November evening, after everyone else has gone home and the Director of Defining has dropped by to let you know that you are now the bottleneck in this project, and saying, “I don’t know anymore. Screw it, I’m just calling it an adverb. Close enough.”

Tip 3: Be boring.
Lots of people have an idea of lexicography based entirely on the wit and irascibility of Samuel Johnson’s definitions. They think that you casually flip through a bunch of citations for “green,” write a definition like “of man, young and easily wilted like a June lettuce,” and then pop off to the pub for a well-deserved pint. Once there, you share your new definition with the crowd. They roar with laughter, gather round you (you bright spark, you), and buy you more beer.

This is a fantasy. (Mine, in fact.) If you’ve written a definition that people chuckle over, then you’ve missed the mark. The number one rule of lexicography is you never, ever intentionally insert yourself into your defining. Your goal as a lexicographer is to write a definition that accurately and concisely conveys how a word is used without distracting the reader with humor.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a native German speaker and you are learning English. You read the phrase, “a company full of green business developers,” then open your dictionary to the entry for “green.” There you see the above definition and key in on “wilted like a June lettuce.” Now you have to look up “wilted” and possibly “lettuce,” and before too long you are assuming this use of “green” means that all the business developers at that company are hot vegans.

This also applies to any and all example sentences you put in the dictionary. They should only convey the typical use for that particular sense, and, as such, will be as dull as a mud turtle. (That said, I must here confess that two of our dictionaries  feature the illustrations <huge tracts of land> and–in the middle-school dictionary, no less–<cheese cuts easily>.)  Additionally, please do not use the example sentences as a narrative proving ground, nor should you use them as a creative outlet to deal with stress. If I’m editing your batch and see illustrations like <a lot of gore and bludgeoning> or <the editor chainsawed the correspondent into tiny bits>, I will revise them heavily and then call the Employee Assistance Program to get you the help you so clearly need.

Tip 4: Shut up.
No one believes me when I say it, but it’s true: until the mid-1990s, there was a formal rule prohibiting talking on the Editorial Floor. Editors communicated using pink index cards which were delivered in the inter-office mail twice a day. I thought this was quaint in the way that quill pens and hoop skirts are quaint–fun to use once or twice, but really unnecessary in our modern world. Then I started defining.

Since concision and accuracy are vital, you spend a lot of time weighing how, exactly, you are going to define a word. Not necessarily what the word means–denotative meaning is usually pretty easy to pick up from context. No, the meat of defining is communicating register, nuance, overtones, and usage in two lines. You do that by examining every single word you use in a definition. That, as you may imagine, takes some concentration, and there is nothing worse than being about two mental steps away from having written the most brilliant definition of your career only to overhear a conversation about the new coffee filters for the coffee machine, and why does it matter if the coffee filters are bleached or not, I mean, really, it’s not like you can tell the difference. If they wanted to make a difference, they should start buying better coffee! Or using filtered water. I mean, my God, the water here is horrible, it’s no wonder the coffee is undrinkable sludge! And ta da, now all I can think about is coffee filters.

This is the point at which I lose my mind and begin cackling loudly. I cackle because I have discovered it is a more workplace-friendly way of expressing myself than smacking people.

Tip 5: Take care.
Lexicography is a very lonely, quiet job. The concentration required to do it well means that you spend a lot of time hunched over index cards (or, in our brave new world, squinting at a monitor that is six inches from your face), writing and scribbling that out and then writing again, staring very intently at your cubicle wall, hoping that the right word will magically fall out of your forebrain onto the defining card. It’s very, very easy to get stuck there in your tiny little head. Words tumble and tangle together and your job is to plunge into that roiling mess, hands in it up to your elbows for as long as it takes, and grab onto that slippery right word.  When you’ve hauled it up from the depths and thrown it on the paper–and done that over and over and over again, you end up with a beautiful little definition. It’s a little Old Man and The Sea with fewer sharks–undeniably magical, solitary, exhausting, rewarding.  It takes a while to come back to the land of the glib, blabbing living after all that.

But here’s the thing that is easy to lose sight of in the midst of that wrangling: the reason you are doing lexicography is not for your own edification. Good lexicography has other people in view. No one will read your definition and fall at your feet to worship you as the Sun God–and frankly, if you do a good job, no one should. But there may come a point when someone will read the definition of “Monophysite” or “ollie” and say, “Ohhh, so that’s what that means,” and walk away wiser–and that’s why you continue to spend your day knee-deep in silence and adverbs.

Unreading: Citations, Corpora, and Craziness

There comes a point in every career when you realize that your job has changed you irredeemably, for better or for worse.  That point came for me the day I bolted up mid-meal from the dinner table, turned the radio up, and began a scrabbling search for pen and paper. “What are you doing?” my daughter asked.

I shushed her. “Someone on the radio said ‘ho-bag.’ Mama’s taking a citation.”

At Merriam-Webster, every editor spends part of their workday reading a wide variety of print and online sources, looking for words that catch their eye. When you find a word that makes you stop short–could be a new word, could be an old one–you underline it and bracket the context. That chunk of language eventually ends up on a 3×5 index card which is filed alphabetically with others of its kind. BOOM: you have just created a citation.

Allow me to indulge in some lexicographical wiener-measuring for a moment: our citation files are enormous.  The files are split between the old-school paper citations, which go back to the 1800s, and the new citation database. The paper files take up about 40% of the editorial floor and are tended by an  Editorial Librarian who, until she retired, spent almost 30 years on a kick-stool in front of the catalogs, filing away citations, moving citations from one drawer to another, relabeling catalog drawers. Between the two citation sets, we’ve collected well over 100,000,000 indexed words.  Well, so what? Here’s what: each of those 100,000,000+ words in our corpus was read and collected by a living, breathing editor.

I know what you’re thinking, because it was the first thing I thought when I heard about reading and marking: HELL YES SIGN ME UP FOR THAT.  Get paid to read? Not edit, not revise–just read?? Let me give you a couple of well-intentioned warnings (Happy Holidays!).

When I began reading and marking, I would begin reading an article and get halfway through it before realizing that I hadn’t marked a thing. I had made the classic rookie mistake of engaging with the content. If you’re on the hunt for interesting vocabulary–and particularly if you’re reading something that piques your interest–you need to intentionally miss the forest for the trees.  You must focus only on the language used without caring at all about the point made with that language.  But you can’t just skim. No, you need to be able to read closely enough to catch a subtle grammatical or lexical shift in a word, but not so closely that you forget your primary objective (MAKE CITATIONS). It’s not reading, and it’s not not-reading. It’s unreading.

You also don’t always get to read things that you would, well, want to read.  I would rather shove a dull grease pencil into my eye than read political rhetoric. Yet for 6 years, I read and marked both The Nation and National Review (balance!). Everyone wants to read the fun stuff, but someone’s got to read Today’s Chemist at Work or the latest batch of minutes from the UN Human Rights Task Force, and Noah Webster help you if the editor in charge of reading and marking happens to pass your desk and see that your pile is lacking or manageable.

There’s a more insidious and lasting difficulty that comes from reading and marking, though: once you do it, you can’t stop. (This also applies to proofreading, defining, copyediting,  and eating FunYuns.) I attempted to re-read Dracula recently and was pulled up short on page 1, when Stoker used “thirsty” in a way I wasn’t familiar with. “Hmm,” I thought, “do we have this in the files?” I had to–was compelled to–log on to our system and search the corpus until I was sure that we had, in fact, indexed this use of “thirsty.” By then, I had forgotten about Bram and his fear of female sexuality and was mindlessly, reflexively searching for other things to mark.

Here’s a short list of unusual things that I’ve seen marked for the cit files:

• menus
• TV dinner cartons
• beer bottles
• diaper boxes
• napkins
• photos of store signs (seriously, though, how could I not? “Route 66 Dinor”! That’s an amazing and very specific regional spelling of “diner,” you guys!)
• orchestra/ballet/roller derby programs
• VHS and DVD covers
• the Yellow Pages

Allow me to reiterate my point: relating to the printed word like this is not normal. This is not something you should aspire to.

When you spend your day taking words apart and describing their every movement in painful, meticulous detail, you develop a very strange relationship to them. I imagine it’s not much different than being a doctor: an attractive person comes into your office and takes off all their clothes, and you stare at the sphygmomanometer. (That’s a piece of medical equipment, by the way, not the name of an anatomical structure.) Spending eight hours a day in relative isolation with only disembodied, stripped-down words will change you, and not always for the better.

Case in point: William Chester Minor, the famous madman of Simon Winchester’s book The Professor and the Madman. If you’ve read the book, you know that Minor was integral to the production of the Oxford English Dictionary and batshit crazy to boot. But here’s a little tidbit Winchester’s book omits: two years before the battlefield event that precipitated his nervous breakdown, William Minor was a lexicographer at the G. & C. Merriam Co. His name is in the 1864 edition of The American Dictionary of the English Language.  Joshua Kendall, in his excellent Nation article on Minor and the 1864, notes that “mental instability would also plague numerous nineteenth-century American lexicographers, including [Noah] Webster and his sole assistant on the 1828 dictionary, James Gates Percival, as well as Webster’s successor as editor, his son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich.”

What a track record! What a profession! WTF!

There is a little hope, however. Just because you aren’t reading exciting things doesn’t mean you won’t stumble on something that another editor marked that redeems the day. For the last edition of the Collegiate Dictionary, I worked on “heavy.” It was…heavy.  Lots of the citations dealt with dreariness, death, and gloom: I read dozens and dozens of citations for everything from “heavy injuries” to “heavy depression” to “heavy rain.”  And then I flipped over the next citation and read this:

“When it comes to heavy studio-craft, Bon Jovi is no Def Leppard.”

The juxtaposition–the sheer inanity of that statement when read immediately after “troops sustained heavy casualties”–was just the sort of bad-taste-in-a-loud-tie palate cleanser I needed to keep going. I finished the batch and didn’t require a long rest in a mental hospital afterwards. Thanks, editor who had to mark Rolling Stone that year.

An Introduction to Harmless Drudgery

We might as well start this blog off with a confession: I never planned on being a lexicographer.

Until I got my job, wherein I primarily write and edit dictionary definitions for monolingual English dictionaries, I did not give a single thought to where the dictionary came from. (You’ll notice I say “the dictionary”; I wasn’t even aware that there were different dictionaries made by different companies.) The dictionary just was: if pressed, I might have told you that it had spontaneously generated and crawled out from underneath a pile of damp newspapers sometime in the 1800s. Don’t ask me how new words like “computer” and “automobile” made it into the dictionary—they just did, by, I guess, computer magic? The notion that a group of people sat down and spent eight hours a day writing the damn things was preposterous and absurd.

And yet, here we both are. I know what that says about me.

I almost literally fell into lexicography: I tripped over a book and landed on the newspaper which held the “Editorial Assistant” want-ad I eventually answered. I had a (fun and tremendously useless) degree in Medieval Studies and worked a menial job that was slowly and steadily killing my will to live. Publishing was a field that held some appeal—not because it was high-paying, glamorous, or easy to get into. It is none of those things.

You see, I love words. I love all of them, even the nasty bastardized ones—yes, I even have a love/hate thing for “irregardless.” Their histories, who they’ve been with, where they came from, where they are going. Reading is not just an escape or a hobby; it is a compulsion. I am that person you see on the subway who, upon finishing her newspaper or magazine, begins carefully reading all the ads and graffiti on the train and then moves on to the receipts in her pockets.  If I run out of reading material, I start fidgeting like a coke fiend needing a line or ten. Do not come between me and my words.

I interviewed; I got the job. I had no idea what I was in for.

You see, a love of words—even the unloved, unlovely bastard ones—does not guarantee that one will excel at, or even enjoy, lexicography. The two primary requirements for my job are a good grasp on the rules, requirements, and idioms of your target language, and a willingness to throw two-thirds of that out the window in the face of cold, hard facts about usage.

In learning a language, we each gather a neat collection of rules and regulations for that language, like building blocks. The bottom layers are things that we learn before we actually remember learning: syntax, inflections, basic vocabulary. On top of those, we stack increasingly smaller blocks of knowledge: don’t end a sentence with a preposition; “ain’t” is not a word; “comprised of” is wrong and if you use it no one will ever, ever sleep with you. We pile these blocks up and measure ourselves (and others) by them.

On my second day of work, I began my Style and Defining class with E. Ward Gilman, the granddaddy of defining at Merriam-Webster and the man who would make a lexicographer of me. Gil looked like the Skipper from “Gilligan’s Island” gone to seed—I say that affectionately—and he had been writing definitions since my dad was in short pants.  ”GOOD!” he barked. “Is it an adjective or an adverb?”

“Adjective,” I replied dutifully. I HAVE READY ACCESS TO THAT BLOCK, SIR.

Gil shook his head. “What about ‘I’m doing good’? That’s not adjectival, that’s adverbial.”

“Well, yeah, but you’re supposed to use ‘well’ in that instance.”

He peered over his reading glasses at me and sucked his teeth. I was a little afraid that he might fire me on the spot, or perhaps unhinge his jaw and swallow me whole. “I assume you are well-educated. Do you ever say ‘I’m doing good’?”

I paused. I could lie—but I was pretty sure that I had, in fact, said “I’m doing good” just ten minutes earlier, when Gil asked me how I was settling in. “But you’re not supposed to.”

“What does that matter? It is the job of a dictionary to tell  people what a word means and how it’s been used, period. People have been using ‘good’ as an adverb for over 1,000 years. Regardless of what your grammar teacher told you, ‘good’ is used in an adverbial sense and so gets entered as an adverb in our dictionaries.” Then he smiled broadly.

Blocks were falling all over the goddamned place.

I spent the next four months slowly dismantling all my of long-cherished notions of what was “right and proper” and taking a look at how the language was actually used. Terminal preposition? It has been steadily used in English for over 1,000 years. “Ain’t”? It is a word. “Comprised of”? Used by some surprisingly intelligent people who, I have it on good authority, have managed to get laid nonetheless. It’s been 13 years now, and I continue to be disabused of notions left and right.

Dictionaries are not style guides. They are not grammars. They are a painstakingly accurate record of the language as it is used currently and as it has been used historically. That record includes some information on the register of the word (“obscene,” “vulgar,” “informal,” “formal”), and some information on the syntax and grammar of that word (“usually used before another noun”), and often a review of any grammatical brouhaha surrounding that word (“Irregardless is still a long way from general acceptance.”). But that’s it.

Let’s be perfectly clear here: all the glamour and intrigue that most people attach to lexicography is a fiction. Samuel Johnson, in his great dictionary of 1755, defined “lexicographer” as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge,” and he is not lying. My day consists of sifting through citations of words in context and puzzling over how to succinctly describe the glob of dust and crud that makes up a dust bunny. (I settled on “aggregate.”) Lexicographers do not sit in sleek conference rooms and make your language. That’s what you—the reading, writing, speaking public—do. Language is democratic, not oligarchic. That’s where the real glamour is.

There are a number of great people on the Internet who are much smarter than I am, and they will be delighted to give you advice regarding style and usage.  All I can offer is a journeyman lexicographer’s look at the language as it grows and changes.  It’s not always pretty and it’s rarely tidy. But I love it all the same.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to reading these 5,000 citations for the word “get.”