I Wrote A Book

About eight years ago, my husband and I redid the kitchen in our apartment. Our apartment is not the biggest, and our kitchen is similarly minuscule, and you’d think that this would make a renovation manageable but it did not. If anything, it just served to emphasize how much work needed to be done. Every nail in the floor that needed to be pulled; every warped layer of drywall to saw through; every floorboard that needed to be repaired was a gargantuan undertaking, because there was literally no room for it to be lost in. We spent Saturdays and late nights on our knees with nail-pulls, and then on ladders with sanders, and then on our knees again with sanders, then getting exuberant with sledgehammers. We became experts at microwave cooking; I had vivid, yearning dreams about washing dishes in a sink.

We finished and began moving back into the kitchen the dishes, the food, the microwave, the old coffeemaker which was on its last legs, the new coffee grinder because we killed the old one making deathwish-strength espresso to power through late nights. And once it was all put back together, we were so exhausted and sick of being in the kitchen that we ordered pizza and ate it on the couch. Then we did it again. We had a new kitchen and were absolutely done with kitchens.

But one morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to make my morning cup of deathwish and was literally stopped short, because for the first time in months, I really noticed how much we had done on the kitchen, and it was all great. It all struck me at once, and I wandered in a (very tight) circle, admiring drawer pulls, the counter, the double-sink, the sink sprayer. When my husband came in to get some coffee, he found his very happy and slightly deranged wife standing in the middle of the room, beaming. “I love this kitchen!” I chirped. “Look at it! Look at everything we did!”

Guys: look! Look at it! Look at everything I did:

This is my book: now called Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, it’s available for (frickin’) preorder (YOU GUYS) at several different places, even! Order it from Penguin Random House here, or, if you’d prefer, get it at Amazon, B&N, IndieBound, or iBooks. Word by Word will be released on March 14, 2017, and that is still the most surreal sentence I will ever write in my tiny, narrow life.

I’m sure you have questions. For instance, now that I am an authoress, will I abandon the blog and go hang out with Raymond Carver’s ghost instead? No. I find, after a long break, that I still have words and thoughts on words left over. You can expect me to blather in your general direction with more regularity.

What about book signings? Will I autograph copies? Where am I reading? Is there a launch party and will you be invited? IS YOUR NAME IN THE BOOK, OMG OMG OMG? Those are all excellent questions, but I am not going to answer them here on my blog. Let’s be honest: you come here for the witty commentary on what a gorgeous bastard English is, not for me to go over all Jonathan Franzen on you. So I have started up a newsletter, where you can get information about my book: where I’ll be reading from it, where I’ll be signing it, which bookstores I’ve left vandalized secretly autographed copies of that dumb book in, and all the public places you may accost me for a selfie or signed copy of the book. My newsletter will include all the best words, I guarantee it. Please sign up! Yes, even you, Kevin.

Thank you all for hanging in there through the radio silence. This is going to be fun.

 

 

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A Special Announcement

O dear and long-suffering readers, I am happy to announce that I finally have an editor.

Sadly, he will not be editing the drivel that appears here; he will only be editing my book.

Merriam-Webster lexicographer & blogger Kory Stamper’s HARMLESS DRUDGERY: How We Define The Words That Define Us, a look inside a lexicographer’s world as we follow the journey words take on their way both in and out of the dictionary, to Andrew Miller at Pantheon….

Yes: I’m writing a book! It’ll be written in the style of harm•less drudg•ery, and it will definitely contain fewer typos. This book has been in the works for a long while now, but the fact that it has left the realm of possibility and moved into, if not immediate reality, then a few blocks down from immediate reality, is pretty damned exciting and surreal. Forgive me if I am gobsmacked. The smack will eventually wear off my gob, I promise.

Don’t fret: I will do my best to keep up the rigorous (<snort>) publishing schedule here at harm•less drudg•ery. After all, those delightful pieces of correspondence are not going to post themselves to this blog. You can also occasionally catch me at Strong Language, a blog that sings my heart’s filthy, degenerate song.

Wish me luck, and send your condolences directly to my editor.

 

Repossession: Reclaimed Slurs and Lexicography

[Ed. note: this post contains language that is considered extremely inflammatory. Caveat lector.]

People forward language articles to me all the time–usually the same article multiple times, until my inbox is nothing but language links and plaintive requests from Wine.com to buy more booze, please. But no one forwarded me Talib Kweli’s recent Medium post on language, probably because it was about the history and uses of the word “nigger.” I asked one of my frequent-forwarders if he had seen the post. “I had,” he wrote, “but I figured you’d have already seen it. I was not going to be the one to forward you a post on the n-word.”

The n-word. I think about slurs on a regular basis, in part because I have to explain to people why they’re entered in some of their dictionaries. It’s not unusual for me to open my email in the morning and see a message with the subject “NIGGER”; after a decade of answering these emails, I still wince when I see the subject line, stark in black and white.

The Times, They Are A-Changing (And So Should Your Dictionary)

I was on an airplane heading to Georgia for a conference when I got into my usual “take my mind off the possibility this plane will suddenly plummet from the sky” conversation with my seatmate. Talk turned to dictionaries, and my seatmate began heaping praise on her old one. She had, she told me proudly, a Webster’s Second, and there was no way in heaven or on earth she was going to give it up for one of those silly modern dictionaries. “My son keeps trying to get me to use a dictionary on my phone, but I tell him, ‘Those new dictionaries aren’t the same quality as the one I have at home.'”

I opened my mouth to say that, nice though the definitions in the Second are, they are almost 80 years out of date, when the supercell we were flying past let out a little meteorological burp and the plane flew right through it. I am not entirely sure, but I believe we may have flipped over several times, and I am certain that the sound that came out of my mouth was not a spirited defense of the modern dictionary (though it was certainly “spirited” in the “possessed by banshees” sense). Our bounce through North Carolina airspace lasted only ten seconds, and afterwards my seatmate excused herself to the lavatory, so our conversation was over.

Had the conversation continued, I would have said this: old dictionaries are nostalgia bombs in more ways than one. The heft of the Second and the Third are glorious: tooled leather and gold-leaf embossing, that powdery vanilla smell of old paper as you smooth the pages back. Then you see this:

“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.

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.

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.”

An Introduction to Harmless Drudgery

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

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

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