Word by Word

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

It's a book about dictionaries. It contains how dictionaries are made (very nerdy) and how the history of words has been shaped by a multitude of factors. Also, how silent it is at dictionary workshops.

🎨 Impressions

It is fun to learn about language and words. As once said, words have meaning, they matter. So it is fun to read about them in a light and fun way as Kory manages to do. I must say that the lexicographers described in the book feel quite the weird bunch. But that is okay.

There was a recommendation page somewhere that recommended it along with the book [[Science/Evolution/The Triumph of Seeds]]

✍️ My Top Quotes

“nice” used to mean “lewd” and “stew” used to mean “whorehouse.”
At Merriam-Webster, there are only two formal requirements to be a lexicographer: you must have a degree in any field from an accredited four-year college or university, and you must be a native speaker of English.
It is this slog through the fens of English that led Samuel Johnson, the unofficial patron saint of English lexicography, to define “lexicographer” in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”
David Foster Wallace, modern literary titan, described himself in a famous Harper’s essay as a “snoot,” a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.”
The spectrum of hatred against “irregardless” might be unmatched. Everyone claims to hate the word “moist,” but the dislike is general and jokey: ew, gross, “moist,” bleh. People’s hatred of “irregardless” is specific and vehemently serious: it cannot mean “without regard to” but must mean “with regard to,” so it’s nonsensical and shouldn’t exist; it’s a double negative and therefore not allowable
Came of age before the Great Ebonics Controversy, when white people despaired that letting black students speak Ebonics (their native dialect) in the classroom would usher in the end of English and “proper education” as we know it.
The early lexicographers made very deliberate choices to omit sources they felt were not up to snuff. Samuel Johnson got very sniffy about including American sources; Noah Webster thought that some of the giants of British literature were too inflated to include in a sensible language of good English.
Much was made in 2015 of Bryan Henderson, the Wikipedia editor whose personal mission was to delete and revise all appearances of “is comprised of” on the open-source encyclopedia. He has made—by hand—over forty-seven thousand edits to the site, most of them replacing “is comprised of” with “is composed of” or “consists of.”
Exactly 11 percent of your dictionary is made of words that begin with S. One-tenth of your dictionary is made up of one twenty-sixth of the alphabet. I bet the guy in the picture who supposedly went home and shot himself was in the middle of S when he did.
Leave it to Samuel Johnson to break the mold; his 1755 Dictionary is the first to include a definition for the woman-centric sense of “bitch.” It’s a striking entry for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Johnson had made it clear that he wasn’t about to keep track of slang and nonstandard words for his Dictionary. It just so happened that some well-respected Restoration writers (and a handful of nobles, for that matter3) used this sense of “bitch” often enough in their poems and satires that Johnson considered it an established part of English.*
“Cant” refers to a type of slang used by various groups on the seedy outskirts of society: thieves, Gypsies, criminals, scoundrels, loose women, and loud drunkards.
Grose and his assistant, the aptly and delightfully named Tom Cocking, didn’t just sit over a good dinner and concoct vocabulary: they went on midnight strolls through London, collecting slang words from the docks, the streets, the taverns of ill repute, and the slums, then publishing them in Grose’s work.
It makes words literally relatable: “virulent” is just a dumb SAT word that means “malignant” or “intolerably harsh or strong” until you find out that its root word is the Latin virus, “poison,” the same word that gave us “virus” (no surprises there) and that is akin to the root words for “bison,” “weasel,” and “ooze.”
Why do we call them “sideburns”? It’s a play on the name of the Civil War officer who made them popular, General Burnside.
Why do we say that someone’s “worth their salt”? Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commodity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a salary
In the days of steamer travel between England and India, wealthy patrons traveling with the Peninsular and Oriental Company reserved the choicest cabins on the ship, which were the ones that got the morning sun but were shaded in the afternoon—no air-conditioning in the nineteenth century. These cabins were on the left side of the ship on the way out, and the right side on the way home, and so were stamped “P.O.S.H.” to indicate that the ticket holder had a cabin that was port side out, starboard side home. The “posh” ticket, then, was for the moneyed, elegant folk, and it was this association with wealth that gave us the “elegant” and “fashionable” sense of “posh” we know today. This is a fabulous story: it conjures images of women in bustles swooning on deck, canapés, servants in white linen shuffling deck chairs about for the quality. It’s also one of those great historical tidbits that sink into the language and presents a finely sculpted detail to the modern reader. It’s beautiful—and total bullshit.
“RSVP” (répondez s’il vous plaît) and “AWOL” (absent without leave) are the only two that could be considered general vocabulary,
Look at “sandwich.” The name was taken from the title of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich and quite the gambler. He loved gambling so much that he once sat at the gaming tables for a twenty-four-hour stretch, so absorbed that he didn’t stop to take a proper meal but ate cold beef between toast while playing. This bread-and-filling concoction became very much in vogue and came to be called a sandwich.
“There is always the danger that we, the so-called authorities, should become too damned pedantic
“My opinions are strong, but not necessarily authoritative. Please realize that.”
“Boston marriage” (defined in the Unabridged Dictionary as “a long-term loving relationship between two women”
“Safari” was snatched into English from Swahili,
First written use of this particular sense of “American dream” ironically tolls the bell for the American dream itself: Every republic runs its greatest risk not so much from discontented soldiers as from discontented multi-millionaires. They are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality, and the larger the population which is said to be equal with them, the less content they are. Their natural desire is to be a class apart, and if they cannot have titles at home, they wish to be received as equals by titled people abroad. That is exactly our present position, and would be the end of the American dream. All past republics have been overthrown by rich men, or nobles, and we have plenty of Sons of the Revolution ready for the job, and plenty of successful soldiers deriding the Constitution, unrebuked by the Executive or by public opinion. This citation sounds as if it were written last year. It’s from 1900.
The linguist Arnold Zwicky has coined the term “the recency illusion” to refer to the misbegotten assumption that anything that strikes you as new in language is a recent innovation, when, in fact, it’s not.
Or that “OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill.
The letters in a phonetic system represent one sound per letter; the letters in a phonemic system represent a group of sounds per letter, because an individual phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in an utterance, and the thing that our pronunciation alphabets represent) can vary depending on your accent and dialect.
The Merriams didn’t care about the Webster legacy. Market share was at stake, and so they resorted to the marketing tactics of the nineteenth century: hyperbole and smear.