Lexicographers are researchers who pay intense and obsessive attention not just to the rise of new words, but also to the new shadings of old ones. ( Merriam-Webster’s version happens to be produced not, as one might assume, within a Gothic library, dank with stuffy history, but rather in a beige-toned office, its cubicles outfitted in typical corporate chic, that is located in the post-industrial city of Springfield, Massachusetts.) English, like any other language, is a geopolitical phenomenon that evolves by way of individual genius.ĭictionaries, Stamper argues, are the result of art and craft and, above all, dull and dutiful labor. Dictionaries are human-written documents, with all the subjectivity and fallibility that such production-side origins will entail. Under this view of things, Stamper writes, the dictionary operates as “some great guardian of the English language,” a book that ensures, in its very bookishness, that “the language is thus protected, kept right, pure, good.” There’s a common assumption, Stamper notes, that such reference volumes-whether they exist in print or online, whether they’re branded Merriam-Webster or American Heritage or Oxford English-operate with grand, hushed Authority, their bulky contents the final words on our current words. The scolds are offering top-down rebukes about a language that changes from the bottom up.Īnd, so, dictionaries. Contemporary English is what it is, Stamper suggests, not just because the islands of Britain happened, across the distance of history, to have been conquered by speakers of Latin and German and French English is also English because Shakespeare appreciated a good fart joke, and because Lewis Carroll found the words invented by the time his century came along to be lacking, and because, in 2015, a 16-year-old named Peaches Monroee looked at her image in a car mirror and decided that the best way to describe her perfectly styled eyebrows was “on fleek.” English, like any other language, is a geopolitical phenomenon that evolves by way of individual genius. It’s a spirited defense of the messiness and experimentation that allows a language to thrive as a tool for human communication.
So did Abraham Lincoln, those four score and many more years ago.īetween the lines, though, Word by Word is something broader still: It’s a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.
Jane Austen used the possessive “it’s.” So did Thomas Jefferson. Stamper’s excellent new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is, like a dictionary itself, a composite affair: It’s a memoir that is also an explanation of the work that writing a dictionary entails-and, in both of those things, an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the English language. And, more to the point, the senses of disruption here can’t be meaningfully distinguished from each other, when it comes to the underlying Darwinism that guides English diction. Was Wallace wrong, or merely prescient? Was he disrupting the English language, or, you know, disrupting it? As Kory Stamper, a longtime lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, suggests: both. Even David Foster Wallace, master of contemporary English and self-proclaimed linguistic “snoot,” committed the ultimate usage sin of the committed usage snob: He used “literally,” yep, figuratively. So did Abraham Lincoln, those four score and many more years ago. Thomas Jefferson used such an “it’s,” too. Jane Austen, it turns out, employed the possessive “it’s” in her writing, and still managed to die a relatively dignified death. Well, you know what they say about assumptions. It is to assume, on the flip side, that to violate those rules is also to commit a very particular kind of violence against English and, by extension, its many speakers. It is to assume that someone’s adherence to the moment’s current rules of usage is a signifier of that person’s education and worth. (The subtitle of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, one might point out, itself contains a usage error: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation might more properly be written as “ The Zero-Tolerance Approach.”) The irony is broader: To engage in such peevery, playful or otherwise, is also to ignore the long, chaotic, and deeply creative history of the English language. The vitriol is ironic-and, yes, I do mean ironic, Alanis-wise and otherwise-and not merely because it puts the pendants in a precarious place, karmically.
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