Tainted “Love”: Correspondence from the Heart

One of the top lookups during the second week of February is always the word “love.” People go to the dictionary looking for poetry and romance and a possibly sexy deep insight they can put on a $2.00 greeting card. Alas: they find a very boring and completely unsexy definition instead. In a spirit of generosity, some of them write in to tell us what we’re missing; below you’ll find a few unedited selections from the Merriam-Webster correspondence files on what “love” really means. (For a deeper discussion on the inadequacies of our definitions, I’d encourage you to read the Seen & Heard comments at the bottom of the Online Dictionary’s entry for “love.”)

                         

Love is intelligent, there is more to Love then a Hug and a kiss, love has many acts in life and has many roles. Love is characterful.

                         

you are wrong love is great untill it gets you scared, because you don’t know what to do

                         

The meaning of love in your dictionary is wrong. The meaning of love is the Jonas Brothers.

                         

I disagree with your philosophy and logic. It is Flawed. Love is NOT an Emotion but an action of giving of self for another’s benefit. There are only Two emotions that are within the human existence. I feel Good, I feel Bad. Everything else is an action that is derived from these two feelings.

                         

Love is the Word. The word is not out, the Word is in. Jesus Christ is the Word. The Word is in God’s love. And so am I by the grace of God. I am what I am by the grace of God. You need to put a definition of rimjob on your site.

                         

My wife once told me in the ’90s what love is among human beings. ” The unconditional giving of oneself to another, putting their happiness and fulfillment ahead of oneself” –[name redacted]  I thought, this applied to parents and infants, a soldier in a combat zone, among adults.  I believe this is the simple unified definition of love for all people.

                         

What is love? Devotion? Pleasure? An experience? Passion for an individual?

Some say it just is, as you see Evident! A conclusion! Just like a butterfly! Beautiful, Fragile, Innocent, yet breakable! It’s all upside down! A new beginning to an old end! A sad story for the times to come! Few scenes from my life where moments meant more than mere words! Controlling with moods, just an undeniable feeling you get when you are around someone you take interest in! Just like a burning cigarette with a few moments of misery to go! Affection and tenderness felt by lovers! Intoxicating, Nothing more than a physical and mental attraction based on a strong sense of a sexual desire! Others say it’s just a flaw in our human structure, a mere chemical chain reaction and nothing more! Love comes and love goes, and sometimes can end so abruptly just as the best part starts! A broken heart! That one way dead end road you knew you’d never leave! A passion for every passing second! A gentle kiss! in the calm of a moonlight sky! You see love is many things, but there is only one sure way to describe it! Mysterious! It just is as im sure you’ve seen, emotions, Just as you see anger is loves despair! I’m torn between silence and violent passion! It is nothing more than a fantasy! One wooden stake through the heart! A poinsettia in poison rain! A beautiful world in a nuclear field! Some sort of peace of mind! A beautiful somewhere! A day ill never see! That one thing we all hope to find, And to continue in search of our dreams for a sense of understanding, a sense that we can share! A past reflection! A goodnight kiss! A memory I can’t replace! A common sense betrayed by your eyes! So as it was written in the sands of time, tomorrow who knows where love will be forever more! It was a Warm October night!

P.S.  Will I get paid for this?

The Voice of Authority: Morality and Dictionaries

Last Thursday was a rare treat in our house: one of those nights where the homework was done early, the dinner was cooked by someone else, and snow was in the forecast. The evening stretched out, molasses-lazy. My eldest daughter sauntered into the kitchen where I was spending some meditative time with the pots and a scrub brush.

“So,” she began lightly, “I wanted to talk to you about your pottymouth.”

I hummed. She does not approve of my penchant for cussing.

“When I came into your office today, you said the s-word. Cursing is evidence of a lack of creativity.” It is always a delight to hear your feeble parenting parroted back at you.

“A guy said something stupid on the radio this morning and then defended it by misquoting the dictionary. I was just frustrated, that’s all.”

She whisked a dishtowel off the shelf and began drying pots. “Lance Armstrong?”

“What?”

“Are you talking about Lance Armstrong?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

She put the pot lid away before answering. “So,” she breezed, “maybe don’t watch the Lance Armstrong interview until after I’m in bed, okay?”

————————————

That morning, John Mackey, CEO of grocery chain Whole Foods, told NPR that he had been wrong to call Obama’s new health care plan “socialist,” as he had been doing for years. “It’s more like fascism,” he said, conjuring images of jackbooted Brownshirts roughing up old ladies and forcing flu shots on them. Not surprisingly, lookups of “fascism” spiked.

So did the outcry from the people who generally shop at Whole Foods–people my father would call “crunchy-nuts-and-berries types,” people who talk about sustainably harvested herring and know how to pronounce “quinoa.” John Mackey backpedaled, and twelve hours later was telling another radio host that he made a boo-boo as regards his choice of words:

I was trying to distinguish it between socialism so I took the dictionary definition of fascism, which is when the means of production are still owned privately but the government controls it — that’s a type of fascism.

I was finishing up my shift in the syntax mines with one more lookup tweet. Lookups of “fascism” were off the charts, and as I read the transcript of Mackey’s apology, both my mouth and the door to my office flew open. In popped my eldest daughter, and out popped “Oh, you have got to be shitting me.”

“Mom!” she scolded. Then, “Never mind, I’ll come back when you’re civilized.”

Later, while I washed dishes and waited for snow, Lance Armstrong appeared on everyone’s TV and told Oprah that he didn’t think that doping was cheating, and guess who absolved him of it?

He insisted that given the widespread culture of doping in the sport during those years, it was not possible to win the Tour without doping.

“Did you feel you were cheating?” Winfrey asked.

“At the time, no,” Armstrong said, explaining it with moral relativism. “I looked up cheat in the dictionary and the definition was to gain an advantage on a rival. I viewed it as a level playing field.”

Armstrong’s justification is laughable, of course, as is the reporter’s modifying clause in the final paragraph. We hear it and holler, “C’mon!” We may even check the dictionary, whereupon we leave a Seen & Heard comment at the entry for “cheat” that reads, “Lance Armstrong! C’mon!” But the fact is that appealing to an external authority to justify your position is, like the McRib sandwich and idiocy, an ontological constant: “the scriptures tell us…”; “the Constitution states…”; “my dad says…”. The dictionary is an authority, and so gets dragged into all manner of arguments.

“How come,” countless editorial emails begin, “you say that ‘biannual’ can mean ‘once every two years’ or ‘twice a year’? Stupidest, most useless definition ever! C’mon! Make up your mind! I have a bet riding on this.” When I write and say no one has won the bet, that “biannual” really can–and does–mean “once every two years” and “twice a year,” I often get the reply, “Whatever, tl;dr. Which meaning is right? I have a bet riding on this.” You can hear them grouse at their monitors: “Just pick one, Dictionary, because authorities do not contradict themselves. Once they do, they cease being authoritative, and you’re not doing so hot right now.”

Sometimes the stakes are higher. Ten years ago, we added a second subsense to the noun “marriage” that covered uses of “marriage” that refer to same-sex unions. Someone eventually noticed.

Outrage! screamed about 4,000 emails, all flooding my inbox in the space of a week. How dare you tell us that gay marriage is okay now?

I was not surprised, honestly: I drafted a long, thoughtful reply about how words get into the dictionary, noting that this sense of “marriage” had been used by both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage since at least 1921, and finishing with the caution that the dictionary merely serves to record our language as it is used. I spent the next two weeks doing nothing but sending this reply out to everyone and their mother.

The problem–because when it comes to correspondence on this scale, there’s always a problem–was that I was making assumptions about what sort of authority people took the dictionary for. I realize that I’m sort of biased since I’m on the inside, but I assume we all know the dictionary is only an authority on the meanings and uses of words. These particular correspondents, however, believe that the dictionary is the publishing arm of the New World Order as run by a liberal, elitist cabal who is out to destroy everything a rational person and the annals of history hold dear. To them, the dictionary is a political tool and therefore a back-door authority on life itself, and this entry in particular was evidence of a conspiracy to force us all into SCOTUS-mandated gay marriages with Ellen DeGeneres or Anderson Cooper. They responded accordingly: Noah Webster is turning in his grave knowing that his dictionary, our moral barometer, can no longer tell the difference between right and wrong. Some people were not so sentimental: “Drink a cup of battery acid and eat broken glass, whore of Babylon,” answered one correspondent.

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips into my orbital sockets until I saw explosions, then forwarded the email to our President. “Do I qualify for hazard pay now? And the battery acid comment reminds me that we’re out of coffee upstairs.”

What proof do people have that the dictionary is not merely a record of language? Plenty, my correspondents sputter: everywhere you look, people are citing dictionary definitions as justifications for all sorts of wrong things. “The Supreme Court uses the dictionary in making their decisions!” one of my correspondents warned. “The dictionary is an authority on how we live life, and our morals, and it’s a pretty piss-poor one in my opinion.”

This is true: courts will sometimes use dictionary definitions in their deliberations. But though I am not a lawyer, something tells me they are not basing their judgments solely on the dictionary. As for the dictionary being a moral guide, it never was and it never should be. We enter the words “murder” and “headcheese” into the dictionary, but that shouldn’t be read as advocacy for trying either one of them. 

One of Merriam-Webster’s marketing taglines used to be “The Voice of Authority.” In truth, it’s a tagline that makes me uneasy: it makes the dictionary sound like the fatuously beaming spokesperson for capital-A Authority, and all that a sneaky or powerful person needs to do to validate whatever shenanigans they are up to is align themselves with that mouthpiece, possibly appropriate it and use to their advantage. I’m not pointing fingers at John Mackey or Lance Armstrong: I, too, have gone to the dictionary in the past to defend my own personal and totally non-lexical beefs with someone (pray for us now and in the hour of our peeving). But the people who tend to point to a dictionary definition and defend their moral high-ground based on it remind me of the kids I knew growing up who would close their eyes, open their Bibles, and declare that whatever verse their finger touched was going to be God speaking directly to them. Sometimes they landed on “Be not afraid, for I am with you,” and they’d trot to the playground and tell Angela to “shut up, God told me he was with me and I am going to ask him to make you barf all over your dress because you are stuck-up and dumb.” Other days, those kids were quiet and refused to play double-dutch or Chinese jumprope; that morning, their finger landed on “Now Esau was a hairy man.” For them, the Bible’s primary use was for sticking it to that big idiotface Angela.

So it is with the dictionary: if some people treat the Bible like a holy slot machine that occasionally pays out big, then others treat the dictionary like the defense’s case-clinching surprise witness. People escort the dictionary to the stand and use it to destroy the prosecution: “The Voice of Authority says that government oversight of health care is fascism”; “The Voice of Authority gives/does not give gay marriage validity”; “The Voice of Authority says I didn’t cheat.” We go with this line of reasoning, but only up to a certain point: no one ever says, “The Voice of Authority compels you to eat headcheese.” In that case, we recognize that the dictionary is just a book that tells you what people mean when they use the word “headcheese.” No one in their right mind would think that the dictionary is in bed with Big Deli.

I lampoon “The Voice of Authority” at home– “Hey, the Epiglottis of Authority is telling you to quit farting around and do your homework now.”–but I cringe when I see intelligent people imbue The Voice of Authority with moral weight. In the preface to his very first dictionary, the 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster spends time highlighting the wrongs of lexicographers before him. In the midst of his genteel rant, he notes:

This fact is a remarkable proof of the indolence of authors, of their confidence in the opinions of a great man, and their willingness to live upon the labors of others. It shows us also the extensive mischiefs resulting from the mistakes of an eminent author, and the danger of taking his opinions upon trust.

It’s a passage I reflect on frequently when trying to explain that the dictionary really isn’t an unchanging and infallible dispensary of moral wisdom, nor is it a prop for your personal convictions. It’s a book that tells you how people use words. Noah Webster treated it that way; the Supreme Court treats it that way; we should all treat it that way. The Epiglottis of Authority means it.

_______________

UPDATE: Via this Washington Post article, I find that James Brudley (Fordham U) and Lawrence Baum (Ohio State) recently published a study on how SCOTUS has used the dictionary. The whole paper is available for free download, but the last few sentences of their abstract tell you everything you need to know:

Yet our findings demonstrate that the image of dictionary usage as heuristic and authoritative is a mirage. This contrast between the exalted status ascribed to dictionary definitions and the highly subjective way the Court uses them in practice reflects insufficient attention to the inherent limitations of dictionaries, limitations that have been identified by other scholars and by some appellate judges. Further, the justices’ subjective dictionary culture is likely to mislead lawyers faced with the responsibility to construct arguments for the justices to review. The Article concludes by offering a three-step plan for the Court to develop a healthier approach to its dictionary habit.

Both the article and the paper are worth the read, if only to find that in 2008, one member of the Court decided to cite the definition of “promote” from Webster’s Second New International Dictionary in writing a majority opinion. Webster’s Second, I hasten to remind you, has been arguably out of date since 1935 and inarguably out of print since 1961.

 

No Logic in “Etymological”: A Response I Actually Sent

Today I got an email from someone who watched the “irregardless” video and was appalled (though in the gentlest and kindest manner possible) that I said “irregardless” was a word. It’s not logical! Just look at that sloppy coinage: “ir-” and “regardless.” Why, it should mean “WITH regard to,” not “without regard to”! Who in their right mind is going to use “irrespective” and “regardless”–both perfectly serviceable words–to create a synonym of each word that looks like it should mean the opposite of what it does?

I drafted the reply I wanted to send and saved it to my Nobody Knows The Trouble I Seen folder. Midway through my real response, though, I changed my mind: this guy needed to see the NKTTIS response. Something about the tone of his letter was bothering me. It was not, as these letters usually are, arrogant. It was sad.

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

Everything we’ve done to and for English is for its own good, we tell it (angrily, as it slouches in its chair and writes “irregardless” all over itself in ballpoint pen). This is to help you grow into a language people will respect! Are you listening to me? Why aren’t you listening to me??

Like  well-adjusted children eventually do, English lives its own life. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like one of the Classical languages (I bet Latin doesn’t sneak German in through its bedroom window, does it?). We can threaten, cajole, wheedle, beg, yell, throw tantrums, and start learning French instead. But no matter what we do, we will never really be the boss of it. And that, frankly, is what makes it so beautiful.

Here’s the response for your erudition. (That is a fancy way of saying “for to make you smart”!)

Dear XXXXX:

I’m glad you enjoyed the video, which did indeed generate a lot of email. You raise a number of points, so I hope you’ll forgive the lengthy reply.

You’re right that “irregardless” is an odd blend of “irrespective” and “regardless,” but to jettison it sheerly because people “foolishly and incorrectly” created a blend without any regard to the etymological logic of the word is–to be blunt and etymologically logical–ridiculous. We’d have to get rid of thousands of words if we could only use the etymologically pure ones. I’m not just talking about the “to utterly destroy” sense of “decimate” here: “hangnail,” “apron,” and “pea” would have to go, as they were coined through sloppy misreadings of “angnail,” “napron,” and “pease”; “derring-do” gets the axe (or is it “ax”?) for being a slightly deaf phonetic rendering of Middle English’s dorring don; “airplane” is banned as a needless alteration of the earlier “aeroplane”; and so on.

Further, what do we do about those words like “decimate” that have dared to stray from their etymological moorings? Should we dump them, and if so, where is our chronological line of demarcation? Pedants argue that the “utterly destroy” sense of “decimate” is a modern invention, a festering boil upon the shining face of Proper English, but that particular use is 400 years old. In fact, most uses that people rail against are: shortenings and abbreviations go back to the 12th century, Chaucer created some highly illogical compound words, and Shakespeare verbed nouns.

As someone who spends her workday determining whether “however” is an adverbial conjunction or a conjunctive adverb and quietly cussing to herself, I appreciate that you want English to be a logical and tidy language. You’re not the first person to wish this, and you won’t be the last. Unfortunately, English stopped being logical and tidy about 1500 years ago, give or take, and no amount of correction will fix–or has fixed–this. And if I may go one further, all these horrifying and “wrong” words still have not managed to destroy (or even decimate, in the etymologically correct sense) the English language. It barrels on.

Language expansion, much like a good party, tends to be a bit messy. Happily, the English language is big enough for all of us. And if you take that sentence less as an expression of hope and more as a death knell for a much beloved language, well, there’s always Esperanto.

We’re All Mad Here

Lexicography, as I may have mentioned, is a very solitary job, and as such, it generally draws the type of person who is delighted to work in near isolation for years on end and in silence so deep it makes monks fidgety. The lexicographer requires only the corpora, the pinks, the project. The only triumphant score that accompanies their work is the mouth-breathing drone of the HVAC system punctuated occasionally by a borborygmus rumble from the water cooler. From this quiet, white egg of industriousness hatches a rara avis in pasteboard plumage: a dictionary.

This is a conveniently trumped-up mythology. True, there is an overwhelming amount of isolation and quiet on the second floor of our office. But look closely at the egg: it is riddled with hairline cracks, its sticky insides only held intact by the taut, thin membrane under the shell. It has been slowly, softly battered, beaten with a million question marks: your egg has been done in by answering editorial correspondence.

You sign up for a job in the Scriptorium, and you rejoice: no more dealing with people, praise Samuel Johnson! Then once you are lulled into a sense of security by the HVAC and given your own customized date-stamp, we spring it on you: people will write in with questions, and you, our expert, will spend a little time each day answering them. Upon hearing this, some new hires slump like deflating balloons; some widen their eyes in surprise until you can see nothing but animal-fear sclera; and some blink furiously, as if holding back tears and recriminations.

I was a fool and just nodded. I was doomed.

With correspondence, as in all other parts of dictionary life, we specialize: science queries are handled by our science editors, the pronunciation editor handles pron queries (and by “pron,” I really do just mean “pronunciation”),  and so on. But there is a whole class of correspondence that is not doled out by subject area yet still requires special handling, and very few editors have the training, skill, and experience to handle this type of correspondence. I speak, naturally, of the nutbars.

Every profession has its crazy fringe, but the crazy fringe of lexicography is a blazing corona that overwhelms its dull core of fusion. They shine bright and write often. And sometimes they even have questions about the English language that require response.

The first time I was asked to answer one of these emails, I was so taken aback that I actually got up from my cubicle and bothered my boss. “I just got the email you forwarded,” I murmured. He spun around in his chair and looked at me flatly. I continued, “Do…do you really want me to answer this?” It was a mess of rainbows, numerology, political conspiracies, and religion, all wound tightly around one question: why the alphabet is in the order it’s in.

“Well, answer the alphabet question.” He paused. “You don’t need to address the correspondent’s obvious issues with reality.”

So I did. I wrote a little lecture on the development of the Latin alphabet and sent it off. The reply was immediate. “I was 5 years old.  My family gave me the encyclopedia about Infinity to become immortal.  I call upon Infinity from the book.  I lost the books and seeking info or someone that help me locate information on infinity and call upon it again to become immortal.  Please call me at number below!!”

I rubbed my face and gave silent thanks that I don’t have a phone at my desk. While I was trying to set my brain to right with deep tissue massage, another email came in. It was from my boss, and all it said was, “That was handled very well, Kory.”

I know my doom when I see it.

My own nutbar flavor has turned out to be the angry conspiracy theorists, people who think that the word “left” comes from an Anglo-Saxon word with negative connotations and is therefore offensive to people who are left-handed, or who read the entry for “door” and feel that it is Communist. I am tasked with sending courteous replies:

Dear XXXXX:

Thank you for your e-mail. We are sorry to hear you are offended by the travel ad on our page, but I can assure you that its appearance was truly coincidental. We do not keep track of your IP address, nor do we track your movements on the Internet and force our ad servers (and ad servers on other sites) to show you ads for international travel. We appreciate that you wish to stay without the boundaries of the continental United States for the rest of your “natural-born life,” as you say, but our ads should not be taken as part of a conspiracy to lure you away from our country. They are merely ads, nothing more.

Dear XXXX:

Thanks for your e-mail. I must admit I am confused by your assertion that our definition of the noun “camp” is a lengthy denigration of Elvis Presley. His name does not appear in–or even near–the entry. If you’d be so kind as to give me the full title of the dictionary you are using, I would be grateful.

Dear XXXX:

Thanks for your response. The title of your dictionary will appear on the front cover of the book, or along the spine. If you are not sure what words are part of the title and what words aren’t, it is safest to send me all the words on the front cover of the book or on the spine.

Dear XXXX:

Thanks for your e-mail. The pronunciation we give at the word “croissant” is correct. Though the word is a borrowing from French, the English word “croissant” has its own meaning and pronunciation, as do all words borrowed into English from another language, and the anglicized pronunciation has been in use since the late 1800s. I am not sure where you got the idea that George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress ordered us to change the pronunciation of “croissant,” but it is false.

Dear XXXX:

We do understand that you dislike the word “floor,” but we will not be removing it from our dictionaries as it has widespread, sustained use in current and historical English. I also regret to say that, even if the White House gets involved in the matter, we will still not be removing the word “floor” from our dictionaries.

Dear XXXX:

The dictionary search engine is a small computer program whose sole job is to analyze an input into a field (in this case, the word you are attempting to find an entry for) and search our database for an exact or near match to the inputted word. “Democratic” is given in the suggested entries list when you entered “democrasy” because it is orthographically similar to the word you entered. We can assure you that the dictionary search engine was not written by Bolsheviks, nor is it programmed only to return Socialist or “unAmerican” words, as you suggest.

My boss says I am unflappable–in fact, this adjective has appeared in every one of my annual reviews since I took up my citations and followed Webster. I have my own ways for maintaining the integrity of the mythic egg: I type out the responses that I dearly want to send and save them to a folder on my computer called “Nobody Knows The Trouble I Seen.” I craft marketing taglines out of some of the most offensive or ridiculous emails I receive (my favorite: “Merriam-Webster: ruining Steve Martin’s Christmas since 1843″). I also spend a lot of time silently mouthing “OMG” and “WTF” at my monitor.

If I am unflappable, it is because these emails are a reminder of my own idiocy: my memento morons, if you will. I am an expert on this hot mess of a language, a rara avis in my own right, but even I make dumb mistakes. And even further, I understand the impulse to rage against perceived authoritarianism and injustice. But it’s hard to picket the English language: it doesn’t have an office, it doesn’t have a phone number, and it will not respond to your petitions. Combine those factors, and it’s not that big a leap from “this word describes something I find horrible” to “the dictionary that enters this horrible word is horrible” to “this ivory-tower elitist is defending something horrible and NEEDS TO BE STOPPED.” Who doesn’t want to stick it to The Man, even if he’s made of straw?

We all tend towards our very own kind of crazy. Just a few days ago, my daughter was browsing the Internet and found a store that makes custom wedding-cake toppers. “Some of these are great,” she said, and I peered over her shoulder. One caught my eye: a horse in a tux standing side-by-side with a chimp in a wedding dress. “Oh, nice,” I harumphed. “Make the bride a chimp. Yes, just another fabulous portrayal of women.”

My daughter looked up at me with a face I recognized: the same “WTF?” face I make at my nutbar emails. “Mom,” she said carefully, “neither the bride nor groom is human. The artist is just having fun. She is not saying that men are horses or that women are monkeys. You just need to calm. Down. GEEZ.”

Lexicography is solitary, but humans are social creatures, and sometimes we need a good, hard “WTF is wrong with you” to bring us back to humanity. I blinked at my daughter and mentally tore up the angry letter I was composing. Memento moron, Kory: remember you’re an ass, too.

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.