BOOK: Kory Stamper, "Word by Word"

Kory Stamper: Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. New York: Vintage Books, 2018. 9781101970263. xii + 301 pp.

I probably first heard of the author when her blog, Harmless Drudgery, was linked to from some other language-related blog that I've been following. It is a blog about lexicography (the title, of course, is a reference to Dr. Johnson's famous description of a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”) and I returned to it with interest on several occasions, although it hasn't been very active lately. It was probably there that I first heard of her book, Word by Word, which I have now read.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, as I expected. Stamper works for Merriam-Webster, one of the few remaining dictionary publishers in the U.S., and this book is partly a presentation of various aspects of a lexicographer's work, showing us how dictionaries are made today, partly a history of dictionaries and lexicography, partly a memoir of the author's own career and her lifelong love of words and lexicography. There are many vivid descriptions of the atmosphere at the Merriam-Webster offices and anecdotes illustrating the type of slightly obsessive, nerdish personalities and tend to find themselves drawn to lexicography as a profession (“we're not antisocial, we're just social in our own way”, p. 19).

The parts of the book that deal with the history of dictionary-making (pp. 69–74) were a bit less interesting to me, perhaps because I was already to some extent familiar with some of these things, except for the history of American lexicography, which was new to me; I was fascinated by the description of the 19th-century “dictionary wars” between the Merriam brothers and their chief rival, Joseph Worcester (p. 243).

There's an interesting chapter on the parts of speech, and I was surprised to see how rigidly the lexicographers stick to a small list of eight of them that seems like it was a better fit for Greek or Latin than it is for English — they don't even have the article as a separate part of speech! The author argues that the public would simply get confused by the 28 or more parts of speech that linguists use amongst themselves (p. 31), but surely some reasonable compromise could be found between those two extremes?

*

There is of course also the inevitable discussion on the subject of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism; modern dictionaries are more about the latter, and the author doesn't exactly hide the fact that she prefers it that way. I myself tend towards prescriptivism by nature, and should like nothing better than to see some authority ruthlessly suppress all corruption and innovation in language, but even so I can easily agree that it's better and more useful for dictionaries to simply describe how the words are used. After all, what a thing is like and what it should be like are to a large extent orthogonal questions. Stamper quotes a fine rant by E. B. White against “the modern liberal of the English department, the anything-goes fellow. [. . .] I am against him, temperamentally and because I have seen the work of his disciples, and I say the hell with him.” (P. 37.) :))

It is well known that many prescriptivist shibboleths have little in the way of historical justification, and the author gives many examples which were new to me. For example, apparently the use of “it's” as a possessive actually predates its modern spelling, “its”, and was the predominant form before the 19th century (pp. 45–6); the idea that there's something wrong about ending a sentence with a preposition is famously due to Dryden trying to imitate Latin grammar a little too closely (p. 47); etc. I was also interested to learn that the much-maligned “irregardlesss” has a longer and wider use than is often thought, and that in some areas there seems to actually be a slight difference in meaning between it and plain “regardless” (p. 56–9).

Nevertheless I'm not sure that any of these facts really constitute a good argument against prescriptivism. Stamper writes, in italics even: “Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.” (P. 50.) To which one can only say: yes, and? It's still an ideal worth aspiring towards, even if we fall short of it.

In any case I see no obvious reason why there couldn't be a moderate compromise between prescriptivism and descriptivism; describe the various usages, but point out that some of them are preferable to others. Stamper describes what seems to me a useful effort in that direction: the American Heritage Dictionary (a rival of Merriam-Webster that came into existence as part of the backlash against the (in)famously permissive third edition of Webster's dictionary, which was published in 1961; P. 185–6) maintains a “usage panel”, a group of “writers, editors, and professors”, amongst whom the publishers of the AHD conduct polls to see how acceptable (or not) they find certain dubious usages. The panel appears to be moderate and reasonable in their opinions, and the whole thing struck me as an eminently sensible idea, though Stamper doesn't seem to care much for it (pp. 187–8); but perhaps it would hardly be fair to expect her to praise a commercial rival's idea.

*

I really liked the chapters about the gathering of citations from which the lexicographers then deduce the meaning(s) of a word (this sort of gathering seems to often turn into something of an obsession for them; pp. 87–93), and on the writing of dictionary definitions, which apparently isn't as straightforward as a naive occasional reader of dictionaries like myself might imagine it to be (pp. 94–124). I was amazed by the amount of work that goes into some dictionary entries, especially about short words with many senses: Stamper worked for a month on the entry for “take”, and someone at the OED worked for nine months on “run” (p. 148)! There are also chapters on etymology (pp. 169–72), on dating the earliest known use of a word (I was surprised to learn that the phrase “Boston marriage” doesn't seem to have been used before 1980; p. 192), and on pronunciation (the infamous pronunciation of “nuclear” as “nucular” is apparently much more widespread than I imagined, especially amongst people with a military or government background; pp. 211–213).

*

There's an chapter on the topic of offensive words and how to label them as such when included in dictionaries. This includes an interesting discussion of the evolution of the word “bitch”: “the single-mindedness of a dog in heat is what gave ‘bitch’ its extended meaning: ‘a lewd woman’ ” (p. 152); this new sense later expanded into a more general term of reproach for a woman. The author then spends a good number of pages doing what I can only describe as bitching that the entry for “bitch” in their dictionary was not labelled sufficiently thoroughly as a disparaging word.

She is in fact a little bit too much on board with the modern social justice nonsense for my liking; as another illustration of that, she quotes a discussion on the word “microaggression”: “Her editor had changed the force of the definition so that the word ‘microaggression’ referred to comments that were merely perceived to be offensive. ‘But, no,’ she said, “they're just offensive—but offensive in a way that's not always obvious to the person who is perpetrating the offense.’ ” (P. 165.)

Well, that's just the thing, isn't it — they aren't “just” offensive. Merely because one person, who incidentally has a vested interest in being maximally thin-skinned because she derives power and influence from labelling things as offensive and then controlling what people may or may not say and how they may say it, claims that something is offensive, it does not follow that this thing is actually offensive. Perhaps it's offensive to her, but so what? Sometimes you being offended by a thing doesn't mean that the thing is offensive, but that you're a bloody idiot. There's billions of people in the world, and for any given thing you can always find someone that will be offended by it.

We get a few more adventures in political correctness later in the book. The traditional definition of the adjective “nude” as “having the color of a white person's skin” (p. 221) of course couldn't be allowed to stand in $CURRENT_YEAR, even though it is surely obvious to everyone that this, and not other skin colours, is what this word is most often used for. The author seems to have conducted a merciless hunt for enough instances of it being used for these other skin colours that she could then justify rephrasing the definition (“having a color (such as pale beige or tan) that matches the wearer's skin tones” (p. 228). She tries to downplay it: “it was just another definition at another entry to us. We made it better, and then we moved on” (p. 228). But isn't it interesting how all such changes and ‘improvements’ always point in one direction only?

There's also an interesting chapter on the word “marriage”, whose definition they first expanded by adding a separate sub-sense for gay marriage (p. 234) and then later merged them into a single gender-neutral definition (p. 263). The first of these two changes triggered a letter-writing campaign by religious conservatives, Stamper's e-mail client was crushed under the weight of their hate mail, and she spent three harrowing weeks replying to it (pp. 237–41). Apparently Merriam-Webster has a policy that anyone who bought their dictionary may write to them and is guaranteed to receive a reply — a charming relic of an earlier and more civilised age, but surely an insane one to keep around in the days of internet outrage mobs.

The author makes a very interesting remark that this sort of demands to change something in a dictionary often arise from an exaggerated idea of the authority of a dictionary, an idea that dictionary publishers themselves have been happy to cultivate since at least the 19th century as it helped them sell more books (pp. 241–8).

*

The book ends on a somewhat somber note as we see how the dictionary business is changing; people don't use printed dictionaries nowadays, and expect the on-line ones to be free, so the publishers have to find other way to make money, they waste their lexicographers' time by having them “write content for partner websites” (p. 265), they lay off staff, and many have quit publishing their dictionaries altogether (p. 260). I'm not looking forward to seeing how these trends will continue! :( In my ideal world, each language would have a thorough, exhaustive, freely available dictionary, the development of which would be generously funded by that nation's government. But this is hardly possible anywhere, and especially not in the English-speaking countries, nearly all of which seem to be far too obsessed with the free market to countenance the idea of having the state finance the work of lexicographers properly.

All in all, I really liked this book; it's written in a pleasant, chatty and often humorous tone, and there was something interesting and new on nearly every page. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in dictionaries and in language in general.