Assembling the Treasury, Wordhoard, Synonymicon, Thesaurus

All lexicographers, regardless of where on the prescriptivist/descriptivist spectrum they fall, like to tell you they are totally objective when writing their dictionaries. They get worked up into a veritable froth if you suggest otherwise, maybe even raising their voices to conversational levels and daring to make eye contact when they tell you that you are utterly wrong. Lexicography’s underlying tenet is complete objectivity! Get thee behind me, John Dryden!

Notice how they conveniently fail to talk about thesauruses when objectivity comes up.

Unlike dictionaries, there is no one approach to compiling a thesaurus, no Unified Theory of Synonyms. The main goal that all of them have is to present an entry word and a group of words related to that entry word, but how those words are specifically related to the entry–and how they are presented–is varied, to say the least.

I grew up using a Roget’s Thesaurus (and I use the indefinite article advisedly, as “Roget’s” is not a trademarked name in my part of the world). Like other dorks of my genus, I spent many a Sunday afternoon sprawled out on the couch, paging through a reference book. The dictionary and encyclopedia were hauled out any old time, but the Roget’s was reserved for dim, snow-muffled days, when it was too cold to go sledding and I was feeling as pensive and thoughtful as a nine-year-old can possibly feel. Roget’s had an elevating effect on me, and I’d be so moved by its profundity that I’d read it aloud to our dog. “Section one,” I’d intone solemnly to Buffy, our crabby Airedale, whose spot on the couch I was bogarting. “Existence. Being, subsistence, entity, essence. Ens. ” She’d huff and I’d sigh, and we’d stare out the window at the whiteout, feeling deeply for a few seconds about dog treats and life, respectively.

Roget’s is brim-full of existential gravitas because of how it was compiled. In the early 1800s, one Peter Mark Roget thought that a collection of words arranged by semantically related clusters within larger, epistemological categories would be a useful tool for the discerning scholar, and fifty years later, Roget’s Thesaurus was released to the public. Roget’s focused–and continues to focus, under a slew of different names and publishers–on grouping terms within larger semantic ideas and divisions. “Existence,” the first subcategory, includes nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, formal philosophical terms, slang, and a wide variety of words that have something to do with the idea of existence, including “fact,” “sloth,” and–so cheery!– “grim reality.”

A brilliant system, though perhaps a little too much for the average teenager looking for another synonym of “desire” to use in this frickin’ essay on Wuthering Heights. But without it, teachers would no longer be regaled with fabulously inane and overly thesaurized essay sentences like, “Heathcliff dementated because of his propensity for Catherine,” or “Linton was Heathcliff’s foeman in wanting to pay one’s court to Catherine.” Dr. Peter Mark Roget, we salute you.

Dr. Roget’s categorization system isn’t to everyone’s taste, however. Discerning gentleman-scholars may have had the time to take the measure of each of the given synonyms, but the college student running on caffeine and youth, scrambling for an impressive synonym of “admonition” at 4:00am, may not. Some folks prefer a dictionary-like presentation of terms, and Roget’s is intentionally not dictionary-like. Enter the competitors (Merriam-Webster) and the losers who get to try to one-up Dr. Roget (me).

Where Roget’s revels in its epistemological abstractness, the thesaurus I was tapped to write was going to revel in its solidity. Unlike Roget’s, M-W thesauri deal entirely in listing related groups of lexical synonyms and antonyms. Instead of rambling chunks of loosely related words and an index that was half the size of the book, we’d present a list of words that mean exactly the same thing as the headword.  Words that were close would be called “related words” or “near synonyms,” and near synonyms would be grouped together by similarity of meaning. Same deal with antonyms. Very tidy.

And because we like tidy things, two groups of words that are commonly perceived as synonyms and antonyms would not be entered, because they were not lexically tidy: members of a genus and complementary pairs. This meant no “sofa” and “furniture,” nor any “black” and “white.” “Sofa” is not a lexical synonym of “furniture” because the word “sofa” does not mean “furniture.” Rather, a sofa is a type of furniture–it’s a member of a genus. And “black” is not the lexical antonym of “white.” If you look up “black” in the dictionary, its definition isn’t “not white.” “Black” and “white” are a complementary pair, like “knife” and “fork,” and “lexicographer” and “boring.” Not lexical, not eligible for entry. I nodded: yes, this is what we are good at, the lexical thing. This will be easy.

And it wasn’t.

Before you can find synonyms, you need to figure out what the meaning core of your headword will be. You must begin with a meaning that is broad enough to encompass most of the synonyms a person will want, but narrow enough that there’s some significant difference between it and another headword.

That seems like common sense until you begin writing and realize that you may need to have a bunch of synonyms in mind before you start actually looking for that bunch of synonyms. I worked backwards: I’d doodle out a list of possible synonyms for “general” and then begin looking for the common meaning they shared. When drafting that meaning, I also had to learn to avoid a common device used in dictionary defining: the synonymous cross-reference. Single-word cross-references in dictionary definitions are synonyms, and why waste a synonym in a meaning core when you can put it in the synonym list? (Because it is easy and I am lazy, that’s why.)

Once the meaning core is in place, you begin the hunt. The first M-W thesaurus was compiled, yes, by hand, with editors flipping through the Third and trying to keep track of all the possible synonyms for “love.” It was an overwhelming task, one sure to induce some strong hallucinations and psychotic breaks, and perhaps that explains why “chatty” was not listed as a synonym of “glib” in the first edition of the Collegiate Thesaurus but “well-hung” was. I had it easier, but even with a computer and a searchable dictionary database, finding and ordering synonyms and near synonyms was tricky. My nature was working against me: I am a splitter–a definer who likes detailing every possible denotative nook and connotative cranny of a word’s meaning–and so perhaps not the best person in the world to write a thesaurus. ‘Togs,’ I reasoned, means ‘clothing’, but it also refers to clothing worn for a specific purpose. Is that enough lexical synonymy to include ‘togs’ as a synonym? Or is it a near synonym? A vacuum whirred downstairs. It was 6:00pm, and I was going to be locked in the building overnight with nothing to eat and a bunch of boring, pedantic ghosts if I didn’t leave pronto. Synonym it is.

I began to rearrange lists of words by register, then by connotation, then for no other reason than they looked right next to each other. “Gear” and “rig” seemed to fit together–they are more technical words, referring to specific types of clothes used in particular activities, like mountaineering. And “costume” and “garb” sat well next to each other–they refer to dress-up, fanciful, special-occasion clothes. But those two groups are distinct: “costume” and “rig” didn’t work together, and that seemed right to me. It’s just like assembling a puzzle, I reassured myself. A puzzle with blank pieces you color in as you place them, and in the end you hope you have come up with a convincing representation of the Mona Lisa.

This sort of derangement is both de facto and de rigueur in the lexicography biz, but I was unprepared for one thing: that what seems right to me may not be what seems right to other editors. My thesaurus batches were returned; my carefully constructed near synonym groups had been scattered and re-formed. “Rig,” “outfit,” and “costume” ended up together, with “gear” left out. Other near synonyms were dropped; some were promoted to true synonyms. I was so thrown by this that it took me a while notice the crowing glory of the revision: my managing editor added two true synonyms I had, in all my shuffling, missed: “clothes” (with the comment “!!!”) and “habiliment(s).” “Clothes” is exactly the sort of obvious synonym it’s easy to overlook when you are slogging through a dictionary, trying to find every last possible synonym or antonym of a word. I had fallen prey to Well-Hung Syndrome. As for “habiliments,” I had never seen the word before in my life. Assuming the Drudge’s Hunch, I stared at my reconfigured entry. I rubbed my face, and then rubbed it some more, until it began to look like a flatiron steak. The revisions made me feel a bit dumb and defensive.

Defensive, yes, because isn’t lexicography coolly objective? And isn’t my very objective read of “gear” and “outfit” perfectly fine the way it is, since I’m totally and completely objective? But if we’re both objective and we disagree, then how objective are we being? One of us, I tutted to myself, was not being objective.

In truth, neither of us was being 100% objective. The very nature of grouping, ranking, and sorting near synonyms means that a certain amount of subjectivity will inevitably be a part of the process. I stuff my word sausage differently that the managing editor stuffs his.

Nonetheless, my turd-stirring nature won out. I padded over to the managing editor’s cubicle and interrupted his reading and marking with my concerns regarding objectivity. He listened patiently to my concerns about the order of near synonyms, but when I brought up “habiliments,” his brows beetled. “Kory,” he sighed, “that sort of catch is exactly why we do this as a group. ‘Habiliments’ is a synonym for ‘clothing,’ even if you don’t know the word. And if you really think that ‘outfit’ doesn’t belong with ‘gear’ and ‘costume,’ then write your reasons down on a pink and I’ll consider it.”

“Really?”

He shook his newspaper in irritation. “Last I checked, my title was not ‘Dictator.’ This is a group effort.”

Lexicographers get defensive about objectivity because we know that, no matter how much training we have, we cannot be truly objective because we experience language subjectively. (We are, contrary to popular belief, fully human and not at all robots.) Sometimes our own personal experience with the language is invaluable: that subjective sprachgefühl helps guide a lexicographer when defining, when editing, when rubbing a jumble of synonyms between your hands to discover their relative heft and shape.

Sprachgefühl isn’t just weighed against written evidence–it is put against other sprachgefühlen. Every citation we take, every rewording of a definition, every example sentence penned is a subjective use of language. But when considered together, subjectivity fades into a picture of patterned, communal–and objective–use. Language is a human group effort, and so should lexicography be.

A Letter to a Prospective Lexicographer

We regularly receive letters from people who want an editorial job at M-W and ask for more information on lexicography. It’s my job to answer those letters. Here is the response I wish I could send.

Thank you for your interest in becoming an editor at Merriam-Webster.  I am happy to share some information on the field of lexicography with you.

There are only three formal requirements for becoming a Merriam-Webster editor. First, we respectfully ask that you be a native speaker of English. I think I should break this to you now, before you begin shopping for tweeds and practicing your “tally ho what”: we focus primarily on American English. It’s not that we don’t like British English and its speakers. Indeed, we have an instinctual, deep love for any people who, upon encountering a steamed pudding with currants in it for the first time, thought, “The name of this shall be ‘Spotted Dick’.” But since we are the oldest American dictionary company around, and we are located in a particularly American part of the world, we feel it’s best to play to our strengths.

Second, we ask that you have a degree from an accredited college or university. It needn’t be an advanced degree, nor does it need to be a linguistics degree. Dare I say it? I dare: most of us got degrees in things other than linguistics. While you are gasping in outrage, incredulity, and a little bit of disdain, allow me to say that all Merriam-Webster lexicographers end up dealing with words from a wide variety of fields–economics, business, physics, math, cooking, music, law, ancient hair-care techniques, and so on–and it helps to have a cadre of trained experts in those fields who will look up at you dolefully from their own defining batch when you too-nonchalantly wander over to their cubicle and ask them for their opinions on “EBITDA.”

If you feel that this information on degrees is so broad as to be unhelpful, know that we seem to collect medievalists for some reason. Our costume parties are awkward, rare, and yet entirely historically accurate.

Third, you must be possessed of sprachgefühl. This is an innate sense of the rhythm of language, as well as one of those delicious German words you’ll hear thrown around the office a bit (but not as often as you’ll hear “weltschmerz”). How do you know if you have sprachgefühl? You don’t know. Even if you think you might have it, you won’t really know if you are possessed of it until you’re here, letting the sentence “It’s time to plant out the lettuce” pad around inside your head, paying careful attention to how it rubs up against the language centers of your brain. Sprachgefühl is also evidently one of those things, like eyesight and hearing, that can dull with overuse: after several decades of working here, you will find that occasionally you go a little deaf as regards the natural rhythm of English, and you’ll trudge to your car at the end of a very long Thursday convinced that you are actually a native speaker of some weird Low German dialect and not English.

It’s okay if sprachgefühl eludes you; once you make this life-changing discovery, you are free to quit and pursue a career where your average weekly wage will not be a buck-fifty and as many Necco wafers as you can nick from the receptionist’s candy bowl at the end of every work day.

Those are the formal requirements for a job here. I would add these caveats regarding the lexicographical lifestyle:

1. In addition to sprachgefühl, it is also a good idea to be possessed of what the late lexicographer Fred Cassidy called “sitzfleisch.” Lexicography is so sedentary a calling that it makes load-bearing walls look busy by comparison.

2. It is not a good idea to come in thinking that you are All That as regards grammar and usage. You will have to set aside your grammatical prejudices in light of evidence, and if you are nothing but swagger and self-aggrandizement, then you will fall particularly hard the first time the Director of Defining tells you it’s totally idiomatic to use “nauseous” to mean “feeling sick.” Swagger and self-aggrandizement are not part of the lexicographer’s idiom. Fidgeting, social awkwardness, and a penchant for bad puns are.

3. “I knew that the work in which I engaged is generally considered as drudgery for the blind, as the proper toil of artless industry; a task that requires neither the light of learning, nor the activity of genius, but may be successfully performed without any higher quality than that of bearing burdens with dull patience, and beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution.”

Heed the words of His Cantankerousness Samuel Johnson, the patron saint of the lexicographer. This passage is excerpted from his 1747 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield in which Johnson proposes writing a new dictionary of the English language. “Bearing burdens with dull patience,” “beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution”–and that’s what he thought before he started writing his dictionary.

It may well be that none of this dissuades you. That’s fine: slight derangement is not grounds for disqualification from a career in lexicography.

You should know, however, as you move forward in your search that jobs in lexicography are few and far between. Our late Editor in Chief used to tell people it was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. This is so vague as to be maddening, so I am happy to clarify: it is a matter of being in one of the offices of a dictionary company just as the Editor in Chief says, “I think we may need to hire some more lexicographers.”

Take heart: one of my coworkers wrote once every three months for over a year about editorial jobs until finally our Director of Defining hired her. She’s a fabulous editor and we are lucky to have her. She also has a linguistics degree. All God’s critters got a place in the choir.

It’s worth noting that, though lexicography moves so slowly it is technically a solid, it is nonetheless changing. New online tools mean that you have more information at your fingertips, which means you must engage that sprachgefühl a lot more and know how to use a computer. (You’d be surprised.) Modern lexicographers have the luxury of writing for an online medium, where space is not at a premium and no one has to proofread the dictionary’s end-of-line breaks in 4-point type on blue galleys ever, ever again. When I came on, all new editorial hires were required to read and take extensive notes on the front matter to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. This is no longer required, thanks to the tireless work of Amnesty International. And, of course, we’re allowed to talk inside the building now.

I hope this information, while not particularly encouraging, is helpful. If you are still interested, against all better judgment, in a career in lexicography, do feel free to send us your cover letter and resumé. We will keep it on file for a year, occasionally taking it out to marvel at your enthusiasm and shake our heads in wonder.

Guest Post at Logophilius

If you’ve been hanging out here, waiting for more long-winded musings on the dictionary, I have good news. There are some new long-winded musings on the meditative art/insanity of proofreading dictionaries, but they are not here: instead, you’ll find them in the guest post I wrote for Andy Hollandbeck’s lovely blog, Logophilius. To read more–and learn the secret yoga position called “Drudge’s Hunch”–simply click here.

Many thanks to Andy for inviting me to clutter up his corner of the Internet.

The Impossible Task: Cross-Referencing the Unabridged

As I mentioned on the Twit Machine recently, I have been working on a very exciting project: a new edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.

“About frickin’ time!” fans of the Third hollered in one thunderous voice, and with good reason: the Third was released in 1961. It has been updated by means of an Addenda Section once every seven or so years, but an A-Z revision has been long overdue. We will be the first people to tell you that, longingly, as we peer out from underneath the production schedule.

And so we’ve begun the long, slow work of revising and updating. There is a stately surrealism to stripping down and refurbishing of one of America’s most celebrated and controversial dictionaries, kind of like taking the Pope underwear-shopping. When you get right down to it, you are left there in your small mortality, looking at the boxer-briefs of something that has been revered and hallowed for longer than you’ve been on this earth, and that is unsettling.

Nonetheless, here I am, staring intently at the varicosities of the Third and doing my best to patch them up.

Over the years, I’ve been asked why we don’t just slap some new words into the Third while we’re mucking about with new Collegiate editions. Hell, it’s just data, my dictionary-loving friends would say. It’s just an entry. It’ll only take you two extra minutes.

I have discovered that it’s not just an entry, and it’s not just two extra minutes, because of something called “cross-reference.”

Every dictionary you use has rules about the words entered therein, and one of the basic rules of any decent dictionary is that you cannot use a word in the definitions, usage notes, or example sentences that is not defined somewhere, somehow in that very dictionary. That sounds sensible, but you’d be surprised how many discount dictionaries don’t follow this rule–and what a difficult rule it is to follow, even in this digital age. In order to make sure that this rule is followed, we have a whole group of editors whose job is to beat the track of the alphabet, hoovering up all the information they can about the words in this book, and making everything tidy.

I was recently pulled from doing some subject-specific defining and put on the ever expanding task of making sure new entries are entered properly into the data. Part of this involves some cross-reference work, but “not a lot,” as the Director of Editorial Operations put it. “Just a bit.”

Silly me, I took “just a bit” at face value. In fact, “just a bit” means “there’s quite a lot and you will only find and correct a little bit of it.”

My very first entry gave me trouble. There was a word in a quotation that looked odd. I don’t think that’s supposed to be hyphenated, I thought, and so I went to the Third. No, indeed, it was entered in the Third as a closed compound, and I patted myself on the back for being so observant. Mid-pat, I realized I then had to do something about that.

There are options available to the editor doing cross-reference, but none of them is easy. The simplest choice is to alter the quotation to omit the troublesome word. Of course, as luck would have it, this wasn’t possible in this case, as the word to be omitted was the verb of the sentence, and a verbless example sentence was certainly going to raise a few eyebrows when this new dictionary came out. Well, then, I’d just have to find another quotation to sub in. Off to the citation files, where I found the absolute perfect substitute. Oh, it was gorgeous: short, idiomatic, completely covering the contextual meaning and connotation of the word in question, and the author’s name made me giggle (last name: Butters). This was it. After running it through the cross-reference gauntlet, I discovered it used two words not entered in this dictionary.

The next option is to see if the compounding style of this word is going to change at all in the new edition. We base this on citational information, so a quick search of the database showed be that the hyphenated and closed compounds had roughly the same amount of use. I shoot an e-mail to the Director of Defining and ask him if he has any advice. His response is, “Look through the revision files. Quickly.” Because like all dictionaries, this one has a deadline and we will make many, many people (not least of whom, the Publisher) sad if we push it back.

The revision files yield many surprises, chief of which is that some of the entries in it are from editors who came and went 20 years ago–the Third has, let’s remember, been in need of revision for a long time–and their notes have been appended by successive generations of editors who are correcting or reiterating their point. (“Style was once open; now determinedly hyphenated. A. Editor, 1982.” “Style now closed; ignore previous note. B. Editor, 1986.” “Word is open compound. Ignore A. & B., they are morons. C. Editor, 1992.”) I open one notes file. It is several hundred pages long.

After some searching, I find a note for this entry that leads me to believe that the hyphenated compound will not be entered. I make an assortment of irritated editorial noises and, after opening the cit files again, start looking for a third replacement sentence. An hour has gone by and I have spent it on one quotation at one entry. The word I am agonizing over is not even the word I’m entering: it is peripheral, incidental. But when you are doing cross-reference, nothing is peripheral or incidental.

Some variation of this continues for the rest of the letter, then progressive batches, and the number of annoying e-mails I send to my colleagues skyrockets. I can almost hear the server groan when I hit “New Message” and begin my fourteenth e-mail of the day to one of the science editors. “Me again. What are you going to do with ‘thumb drive’? I’m sure you haven’t even given it a thought, but can you give it one for me in, say, the next ten minutes?” I send more e-mails to the Director of Defining. “Howdy. Do you have any thoughts on how to handle the expansion of ‘HIPAA’?” And again, later: “One more: can I edit ‘douche-canoe’ down to ‘douche …’ in this quotation for ‘bromantic,’ or will I have to enter a new sense of ‘canoe’? If I’m doing that, should I just enter ‘douche-canoe’?”

It’s not just a matter of hunting down compounding styles. There are the new entries that require other new entries, each of those requiring two new entries, one of which will require substantial revision to another four entries, two of which will require new etymologies. One medical entry requires that I re-open 9 letters for revision and ask our Pronunciation Editor for six new prons in letters he’d already done. It takes me four hours to enter all this into the file.

At one point, I spend time trying to find a better quotation for a word to avoid the dread hyphenated-but-not-entered-as-such compound, only to discover 30 minutes into my search that the hyphen in question is actually an end-of-line break, and so not a real hyphen at all. The only upside to this is that the quotation I can now retain was written by someone with another chortle-inducing name. We take joy where we can find it.

Every inquiry leads me down a garden path of more inquiry, until I am lost in the weeds and just want to lie down in the grass and sleep for many years. I’m in so many different letters at once, I can’t tell you where I am in the project. (Here the Publisher frowns.) And here is the most perverse thing of all: even with all the time I’m putting in making sure that all these entries are tidy, there is no way I will catch every cross-reference error. Words that I assume are entered are not; styles that I assume are fine will be changed; words will be dropped or modified during copyediting, setting off another string of cross-reference changes. When I try to explain what the cross-reference work is like to another general definer, I sum it up by saying, “Google ‘ping-pong balls, mousetraps, and nuclear chain reaction.’” The ping-pong balls are the entries. All those sprung, upended mousetraps are me.

That is why we have Cross-Reference, the stalwart department who does this for every damn book we publish. Cross-Reference consists of the sweetest people on the editorial floor, but make no mistake: they are brilliant in ways that blabbering dilettantes like me cannot possibly comprehend. Consider: I have only done cross-reference work digitally, but there are people in our Cross-Ref department who remember the days when they did this by hand–when checking on the proposed styling of a new entry involved a silent plod across the editorial floor, a short aerobics routine that involved carefully lifting and stacking galleys, and tens of thousands of index cards. At one point, I asked one of the Cross-Ref editors how they knew that a styling change would be made later in the alphabet. “Oh,” she said, “you just keep track. Most of it just sticks in there, in all those nooks and crannies in your mind.”

I considered, not for the first time, that I must I have a very smooth brain.

They not only catch mistakes, but are lightning fast. They have to be: by the time they get a finished dictionary, they usually only have a few weeks to do their work before the book is due at the printer’s, and the printer gets very cranky if we are late. When the defining work is done, everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief and we celebrate with doughnuts, but no one gives a thought to the tireless drudges who are still–quietly, cheerfully–making sure that we haven’t used “douche-canoe” in an entry without defining it. There is very little glory in lexicography, and where there is glory, definers and etymologists get it all. But Cross-Ref are the ones who actually deserve it.

So when you read a dictionary entry in the new unabridged and have to look up another word in said book, raise a glass to the masterful editors of Cross-Reference, and be very glad that I am not one of them.

In the Flesh: Philadelphia, PA

For all of its problems, I love Philly. It has a good grit-to-culture ratio, excellent restaurants, one of the largest urban parks in America, Ben Franklin impersonators, panhandlers who compliment a girl on her relative fineness before hitting her up for change, the Flyers, and the word “jawn.”

It also happens to be hosting the national TESOL conference next week, and I will be in attendance. If you’re there, do stop by the M-W booth and say, as others have said before you, “Wow, you are so much more [unintentionally unflattering adjective] than I thought!”

New post Monday morning.

The Art of Conversation and Falling in Love: A Lexicographer’s Journey into Talking

The stool was a bit too high, the headphones were a bit too big, and the volume was a bit too loud. The host turned to me and said, “Okay, on in 30. We’ll have about three minutes. Are you ready?”

“You bet.”

“Just be yourself, this’ll be great.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, mentally reviewing some of the noteworthy words we had just entered into that year’s update of the Collegiate Dictionary– “SARS,” “convergence,” “gastric bypass,” “blog,” “pop-up,” “psyops.”

When the radio station came back from commercial, the host turned to his mic, introduced me as an editor from Merriam-Webster, and began our conversation on important new words with, “I’m looking at your list of new entries for this edition, and the one that really caught my eye was ‘bikini wax’!”

The co-hostess piped up. “Did you have to do field research on this? I mean, did you all go out and get bikini waxes?!”

“Now THAT is job dedication!” the host hee-hawed.

In the microsecond before my brain cobbled together a vaguely coherent reply and sent it down the answer-chute, where it would fall out of my already-open mouth, I thought, “No wonder no one else volunteers to talk to the public.”

Language is a marker of our culture, our thoughts, our predilections. Its use is highlighted in articles and interviews, and sometimes quoting a dictionary isn’t enough: sometimes you want to talk to the people behind the dictionary, the ones who can shed light on language trends. This–conversation on a topic of shared interest–is a natural, human exchange. Therefore, it is scary as hell to the Merriam-Webster lexicographer.

It’s not that we’re patently afraid of personal interaction; it’s just that we’ve forgotten how to do it–an occupational hazard that comes with all that solitude and deep concentration. You sit in your cubicle reading the citations for “run” for days, weeks, epochs, and when you finally push back from your desk for a good stretch, you find that your vocal cords have atrophied and trilobites rule the earth (again).

Even if you escape the Big 8, there comes a point in your career when you realize that the idea of lexicography is infinitely sexier than the reality of lexicography. This happens at different times for each of us. Maybe it’s the 8,000th time you have to answer the question “So, how does a word get into a dictionary?” Perhaps it comes when you get home from work and even your dog looks at you with eyes that plead, “Please do not tell me about your day.” Or maybe it happens while you are trying to impress someone into sleeping with you, and the only way you can think to woo them back to your place is to talk about your sexy, sexy job–which is not sexy at all, as will be revealed (along with your pallor and flab) in the milky light of morning over an awkward coffee. It’s wonder-fatigue. My boss sums it up thus: “I’ve done this long enough that I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

In short, the people you think are the absolute best people in the world to discuss words and lexicography with are the ones who are least enthusiastic about doing so.

When I came to Merriam-Webster, I was enchanted with everything, up to and including the silence. I had just left a job that featured non-stop phone calls from angry people and an office environment that reeked of the bone-shaking, helpless terror you feel when riding a poorly maintained wooden roller-coaster operated by a teenager on meth. Upon realizing my new cubicle at M-W didn’t even have a phone jack, I almost wept for joy. The quiet subhum of pencils and erasers on paper, the soft click of keyboards, the shushing stride of the editorial secretary as she walked the floor, and the quiet, the eggshell-colored, cocooning quiet of it all! It was heaven. I got right down to not talking to anyone ever, ever again.

There were warning signs of what this would lead to–signs I blithely ignored. One colleague thought a good way to start a conversation was to point to a picture from the 1950s that hung in our office and say, “He used to be an editor here, and then one day, he went home and shot himself!” Another dropped off a card at my desk. A coworker had had a baby, and I needed to find another way to say “Congratulations!” that hadn’t already been said. The deliverer intoned, “You need to find something to say, because we can’t send this card half-empty. I, frankly, was at a loss. The baby was born neither on Patriot’s Day nor on the observance of Patriot’s Day, so really, there is nothing you can say.” He nodded, returned to his desk, and didn’t speak to me again for seven months.

Years passed. I had limited interaction with the public through the editorial correspondence, but generally remained in my little box, staring at citations and weighing my use of “directional” in this particular definition, slowly losing bits of my humanity. When someone would stop by my desk, I’d startle and freeze like a mouse watching the owl soar in, fascinated by its pinions. My conversations grew stilted; they now mostly involved me staring at my fellow conversationalists like they were speaking Esperanto backwards. During a dinner out with friends, one of them commented that I was pretty quiet, and the only thing that popped to mind as a response was, “Did you know there was once this editor at our company who went home and shot himself?” Instead of blurting it out, I excused myself to the cool, gurgling dank of the ladies’ room. Oh God, I thought, when will the trilobites come and end this?

Meanwhile, in the office, I retreated so far into my blanket-fort of words that I began to feel stifled. My 8,000th “ZOMG enter my new word!!!” e-mail came in and I couldn’t even be bothered to “meh” about it. Instead of flipping through a new batch with a salacious sort of eagerness, I glanced at the first few words and wrote it off. “You again,” I muttered to “blue-plate special.” “Whoop. Ee.” The list of potential words I had lined up for future Word History of the Day features read like the index of the DSM-IV: “ennui,” “malaise,” “weltschmerz.”

Wonder-fatigue. I was falling out of love with lexicography. I had to take a class to learn how to love it again.

A friend of mine asked me to come in to his high-school English class to talk about lexicography, and I (dutifully, awkwardly) said yes. There is nothing like standing in front of a few dozen tan, polished teenagers while wearing ill-fitting clothes and talking about Samuel Johnson to make you wonder if you should have just called in sick with smallpox. I went through my (boring, dead) presentation on how a word got into the dictionary, then asked for questions.

One hand shot up in the back of the room. “So, there’s ‘cactus’ and ‘cacti,’ right? Why isn’t it ‘penis’ and ‘peni’?”

Shocked snorting and giggling filled the room. This was not going according to plan. The teacher was about to tell this kid to head to the office when I said, “No, fair question. That’s a fair question.”

All eyes were on me. The air was thick with expectation. An adult was going to say the word “penis” repeatedly in class.

“Basically,” I began, “there was a movement in the 17th and 18th centuries to make English more like Latin, because a group of grammarians thought Latin was this beautiful ideal of a language and English was a mess. So they began imposing Latin rules on English. One of the things they did was correct the plurals of words that end in ‘-us,’ because those words were from Latin and needed a Latin plural. ‘Cactus’ got a Latinate plural because it ended in ‘-us,’ but ‘penis’ obviously doesn’t end in ‘-us,’ so no overcorrection was made.”

Titters. She said “penis”!

The teacher put in. “These changes were made to help correct mistakes that were made earlier.” And as he nodded in satisfaction, something odd happened: I got strangely, irrationally angry.

“No,” I said firmly, “these changes didn’t correct anything! They changed things that were not wrong. See, ‘cactuses’ is fine because it follows the rule for how to pluralize a noun ending in -s.” While my friend tried to find a way to spin this–ignore the grammarian behind the curtain, kids!–I went on. “They all loved Latin because it was tidy and lovely, but they ended up missing the loveliness of English.” The kids shifted uneasily. “Don’t you think English is lovely?”

Desks squeaked, shoes rubbed on linoleum, pencils tapped. This is why I should not be allowed out to talk to the people, I thought. Then I had a deeply harebrained idea. “What are you guys reading in class?” I asked my friend.

“Macbeth.”

“Right,” I announced to the bored masses, “I will give ten dollars to the first student who stands up and gives me a good reading of the ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’ speech.”

The electric potential of capitalism stole over the room. They all grabbed their Shakespeares and began flipping. I upped the ante. “Twenty if you can do it from memory.”

Gasps. First she said “penis” and now she’s offering us money! My friend leaned in and muttered, “I am never asking you back.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, “that’s probably wise.”

One of the kids began. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow–”

“No, there’s rhythm here. Look over the speech–all the way until the messenger enters–and do it again.”

He did, then started in a monotone so flat it made pancakes jealous. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.” He paused for a big breath and I jumped in. “Do you hear it? ‘Day to day,’ ‘yesterdays,’ ‘way to dusty death’?” He stared hard at the page.

“Okay, twenty dollars for you to rap it.”

“What?”

“Can you rap? Rap it.”

The class murmured excitedly. This woman was totally off her nut. The shit-stirrer had managed to find the speech and stood. “Yo, yo, boyyyyyz–”

My mom-brain took over, and without thinking, I blurted out, “Nope, I’m not going to pay you to be an ass. Do it right.”

Chastened, he began again, haltingly. And within two lines, he got it–he hit the rhythm, felt the sonorities line up. He made Macbeth’s despair into a tight wad of anger. When he finished, someone hooted.

“Isn’t that powerful?” I gushed. “Do you think that needs fixing? Because one of the chief grammarians of the 17th century would have gone back and red-penned that to death if he had had a chance. All because Shakespeare’s poetry didn’t match what he thought was a better, higher form of poetry.” I paused, trying to bring this all back to how a word gets into the dictionary, but then gave up. “I’m just saying that English may be a mess, but it’s a lovely, powerful mess.”

On my drive back to the office, I was squirmy. There was an odd feeling in my chest, like I had swallowed a cup of warm tea, but instead of feeling sleepy and soothed (because this is what tea does to me), I was jumpy. When I sat in my cubicle, I was excited and breathless, and then it hit me: infatuation. I spent so much time dissecting words in silence that they had lost their proper context. It took talking to other people about this crazy, messy language to redevelop my crush on it.

Suddenly, lexicography was interesting again because it was no longer the end, but a means. The dictionary communicates meaning of words, but it takes talking to people to communicate the story of the language that’s made up of those words. Give me silence when I’m defining, but give me conversation to keep me falling in love.

Of course, just like English, people are unpredictable. My first radio interview, ostensibly about Serious Words like “SARS” and “psyops” began with a disquisition on “bikini wax.” Messy in more ways than one, but it’s all a part of making people fall in love with English.

I had learned a few things, though, in how to keep on topic by that point. By the time the host had stopped chortling over his “job dedication” crack, I had recovered enough to say, “Well, you know, the mark of a good interviewer is that he’s done his homework, so tell me: did your Brazilian hurt?” The co-hostess shrieked in laughter. The host blanched, then grinned, then moved right on to “SARS.”

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.