“God,” Guns, and Group Defining

When people want to make small talk with me—before they realize that I am terrible at it and not worth the time and effort—they will ask what I do, and then sometimes respond with, “So, you pretty much know everything, right?”

I have just taken to smiling wearily and saying, “Yes, I know everything.” I have teenagers, and often enough they are happy to disabuse those people of this asinine notion.

No one knows everything, and lexicographers are just like the rest of humanity (only slightly quieter and perhaps a little more openly deranged). There you are as a lexicographer, minding your own business with “harpy,” when you scan downscreen to your next word and encounter “harquebus” in all its Francophonic glory. You flip through your mental card catalog of Words I Have Seen, find the one labeled “harquebus,” and find your memory has only written, “from a novel, maybe Count of Monte Cristo? Is that a novel? SEE ALSO: sandwiches I have loved.”

Fortunately, the lexicographer doesn’t have to rely on this mental catalog. The lexicographer relies on citations. But what do you do when the citations are less than helpful? Here, for instance, the citations are all variants on “She pulled a harquebus from her corset/stomacher/stocking and shot him dead,” which gives you nothing besides a genus term for your definition (“a gun”) and a ten-minute respite as you ponder whether a gun would even fit inside a corset—or good Lord, a stocking, wouldn’t stockings fall down or even tear under the weight of a what’s-a-hoozy—harquebus? And why are heroines in these novels always pulling weapons from their underwear, anyway?

You return to the citations with a sigh and a determination to carefully study the cover of the next trashy novel you see, just to observe whether the buxom, swooning lass’s dress has pockets in it or not.

The problem with “harquebus” is not just that the citations are maddeningly vague and all pulled from Harlequin novels. The fact is that the word “harquebus” refers to a very specific thing, and you need to know a bit about the thing “harquebus” in order to define the word “harquebus.” Or, at the very least, you need to know enough about the thing to know whether these particular uses for the thing are valid.

You do not know that. But fortunately, there’s a guy on the editorial floor with a thing for Renaissance-era weaponry, and he will know.

You know he knows because of a précis of wonder and beauty: the Specialized Subjects list. This is a document that tells you everything that every editor on the floor knows. It is full of surprises and is one of the best ways to get to know your co-workers without having to actually talk to them. Of course the senior etymologist “has at least superficial familiarity with most European languages, best within Slavic, Celtic, and Germanic,” but did you know that he also is  a mushroom-picking philatelist? Likewise, our French editor is a weapons enthusiast. The quiet health nut, it turns out, loves cigars. I know about the 9th-century Latin Mass, knitting, and muscle cars.

The list is handy for general definers who are stuck with “hot rod,” but it’s also handy for the Director of Defining, who uses it when a group of words (say, music theory terms) should be defined by someone with superior knowledge of the subject. Welcome to “group defining,” the ever-deepening hole into which you daily and hourly dig yourself by proclaiming that you have any knowledge of any subject whatsoever. For the new Unabridged Dictionary, I have been given, as a group definer, all the religion terms. This is what an interdisciplinary degree and a penchant for reading and marking books like “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” will get you: a batch for revision that is about 10,000 entries long. (I’m one-sixth of the way through and am currently stuck on the entry for “god.” See you in whichever afterlife destination you feel like condemning me to.)

There is something very tricky about group defining, because that is where you find yourself balancing the thing-ness and the word-ness of a definition. A harquebus, as I have learned from the guy with a thing for Renaissance-era weaponry, is a matchlock gun that is heavy enough that it was usually fired from a support. Those characteristics are what distinguish a harquebus from a blunderbuss, which was “probably a better choice for stuffing into a corset,” says my colleague. The distinguishing characteristics of a harquebus therefore belong in the definition for “harquebus,” even if the batch of citations I have at hand don’t mention any of them. The group definer has specialized knowledge, as well as a whole raft of odd books they can plunder for citations so our formal evidence matches up with reality.

But even a good raft of odd books can’t catch everything. I spent about two weeks revising three related theology entries because each of those words was used, for quite a long time, very deliberately incorrectly. They were employed by one side of a theological argument as rhetoric and epithets to discredit the legitimacy of the other side. It’s as if the whole early Christian church was at a hockey game together and someone started a “Monophysites suck” chant that went on for roughly 1,000 years. But if you aren’t someone who knows about the initial theological brouhaha and the way it resonated through the Middle Ages–perhaps because you never had to write a paper on the Nestorian and Eutychean controversies, because you chose a better degree than I did–you wouldn’t know that was the case.

Lexicographers talk with a sort of heavy-breathing fetishism about the corpus, the citations, the data. It will give us all the answers. But every corpus in the world has holes in it, limitations. That’s part of why a good dictionary is compiled by people–living, breathing, awkward people who can look through that corpus, give advice, and do some citational spackling based on the knowledge and experience they gleaned from outside the office. Lexicographers may throw around the size of their corpus, but it’s the people sifting painstakingly through that corpus, like archaeologists weighing potsherds, that make all the difference.

When my children were little, they learned that the word “wedgie” referred to “the condition of having one’s clothing wedged between the buttocks,” as the Collegiate so toffishly puts it. They were absolutely ecstatic: here was a word for this thing that happened to them pretty much constantly! And it was a good word, too, a word that had great screechability and ended in a long-e for maximum sustain. Best of all, it had to do with butts. For about three days, both the six-year-old and the two-year-old hollered the word “wedgie” constantly.

Now, like most parents with young children, my husband and I were desperate for some little veil of ivoried respectability to drape over this big, nekkid waller of parenthood that was so often punctuated (primarily in public spaces, usually with a finger or two up a nostril) with “MAMA! I HAVE A WEDGIE!” So I told my kids not to call it a “wedgie”—I told them to call it “an issue.”

They did, for many years. And while people may have cocked their heads to hear a worried-looking preschooler say, “Mama, I have an issue,” the veil of respectability slid artfully into place. For a while.

The day soon came when both my children learned that when other people use the word “issue,” they are not referring to wedgies. They are referring to vital and unsettled matters that generally require discussion.

“Yes,” I answered, as my eldest explained this to me in tones of deep-purple mistrust, “but isn’t a wedgie basically the same thing in our house? Besides, no one else knew what we were talking about. They thought that you were just deeply interested in the election.”

She frowned so deeply that the tip of her nose met her eyebrows. “But you write dictionaries: you knew it wasn’t like that in the real world.”

It’s a refrain I call to mind every time I read endless citations for “god” that use the word vaguely at best, and it is my mumbled offering of thanks for a team of editors who have wide, varied experiences and specialties I can draw on when the citations leave me hanging. When people come to the dictionary and look up a word like “harquebus” they expect you to give them the definition from the real world: the world where women don’t stuff a gun the size of a musket into their corsets, no matter what the citations tell you; the world where “Monophysite” is not a politicized slur; the world where a wedgie is a wedgie.

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.

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.”