Episódios
-
Continuing last episode's discussion on copyediting dictionaries, Charles Nelson Reilly (played by Steve) and Brett Somers (played by Kory) talk a bit about how online dictionaries are edited and maintained. Steve mentions some of the edits to the new American Heritage online, and then the podcast quickly devolves from there into a discussion of all the "shit" words (and shit words) that Steve and Kory entered into their respective dictionaries this year. There were actual reasons for the additions.
Then to bring Season 1 of Fiat Lex to a close, we return to provide you, dear listeners, with book recommendations for all your loved ones this gift-giving season! Steve gives mad props to Lynne Murphy's The Prodigal Tongue and Jack Lynch's You Could Look It Up, while Kory enthuses about Lindsay Rose Russell's Women and Dictionary-Making and Jez Burrow's Dictionary Stories. We'll list more on our Twitter account during the next month!
BONUS FEATURES:- Intrepid Engineer Josh speaks! Now let him get back to setting levels, please?- Inside baseball about how the new words for those "new words!" stories get chosen. - OCELOTS? OCELOTS. Rabbits. CATS. Welcome to Mutual of Omaha's WILD KINGDOM.- Tired or Wired: Babies not born on Patriot's Day. - Dictionaraoke! Now dead, just like the ca. 1996 website it was modeled on, but still cherished.
SEE YOU IN 2019 FOR SEASON 2!
-
New word updates (like the one that American Heritage just announced!) are super sexy, but the real work that goes into your shiny new dictionary is invisible. Today, Steve and Kory take you down the meandering, Lovecraftian rabbithole of print copyright updates, when we disappear dictionary content that no one loves to make room for "twerk" and "baconnaise." What makes a new dictionary a copyright update versus a new edition? How can you tell? What gets the axe? What utter horrors can you discretely fix while you're in there? What if your discrete fix which saves us that precious, precious space utterly fubars your style sheet? And what happens when one small change in an entry means you have to suddenly fix another 82 entries? You think you still want this job? We will do our level best to dissuade you!
BONUS FEATURES! - Future Kory makes a much-needed appearance! - Steve provides all editors a handy tip should they ever lose their coat-check ticket. - "Demurely" and "kittenish," zomg.- Mispronunciation Index: none that we caught, though I'm sure, gentle listener, you will ferret them out and report them to the appropriate authorities.
-
Estão a faltar episódios?
-
Part two of our excellent interview with lexicographer, language expert, tailor/tinker/soldier and spy, Jesse Sheidlower. We continue our discussion about The F-Word and the f-word; touch on slang dictionaries; talk about verisimilitude in movie or TV dialogue and Jesse's work as a language consultant for the Amazon series "The Man in The High Castle"; geek out about every lexicographer's favorite movie (and gab about the verbing of "meet-cute"), and wrap-up with a segue to "Heathers." Jesse brings us home with some vintage "Mean Girls."
THIS EPISODE CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. I MEAN. THE BOOK IS CALLED "THE F-WORD."
BONUS FEATURES: - Two of the three lexicographers in the room have IMDB pages! - The swearing in "Deadwood" was not historically accurate. COME AT ME, AL SWEARENGEN. - What's the English word for "the jealousy one feels when one learns another person has not shared in a terrible yet common experience"? No, seriously, we're asking, because Steve has never seen "Titanic." - The Great Passage. Just read it. - Mispronunciation Index: Steve biffed "manga" and Kory mangled "Hemingway," but Jesse pronounced everything perfectly. A+ for Jesse.
-
Steve and Kory have a special treat this week: the first half of our interview with lexicographer, author, bon vivant, raconteur, and damn fine human being Jesse Sheidlower. He talks about how he was sucked into the gaping maw of lexicography by Lord Byron's "tool," inadvertently became the hero of a novel set at Random House, wrote this little book called The F Word that resulted in the accidental utterance of said f-word on NPR and the constant-forever debunking of "Fornication Under Consent of the King," and told Steve Martin that all us word nerds adored his "Disgruntled Former Lexicographer" essay in The New Yorker.
This episode features cusswords, in the event that a book called The F Word didn't give that away.
BONUS FEATURES:- Jesse's words to live by: "Anytime someone says to you that something's from an acronym, if you say 'No, it's not,' you'll be right 100% of the time." - NPR voice, now with extra vocal fry! - Why too much grad school is bad for you. (Drop out NOW.) - Kory asks Jesse The Worst Question Ever and is appropriately called out for it. - Mispronunciation Index: NONE, because Jesse and his gorgeous pronunciation of "roman à clef" is here to save us all.
-
all·sorts ('ôl-ˌsôrts) noun plural : a mixture of assorted confections (such as licorice); often used figuratively
Today's episode is an assortment of colorful treats that, like licorice allsorts, stick unpleasantly to your teeth and coat your tongue with a weird film! In a figurative way. Steve and Kory dig into the mailbag and answer YOUR QUESTIONS about crowdsourced dictionaries, reading rooms, raisins, the plum brandies of central Europe, multilingual dictionaries they love, and lung diseases.
BONUS FEATURES:- Steve and Kory went on the tee-vee and you can watch the fruits of their lexicographical labors here.- SPACE GHOST guest appearances (sort of).- Learn how to say "Merry Christmas" in Yiddish! - Mispronunciation Index: none that we caught, but do let us know how very wrong we are!
-
If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that mistakes happen. In the case of this particular podcast, they happen often! And they happen in dictionaries, too. We hope you were sitting down when we told you that. This episode is alllllll about mistakes. Steve and Kory issue corrigenda/errata for earlier episodes (and Kory can't figure out the difference between "corrigenda" and "errata"), then take you through the byzantine processes by which dictionary errors are discovered and corrected. It involves paleography! Kory talks about the biggest boner (sense 2) to appear in a Merriam-Webster dictionary; Steve tells us about the time when he had to find all the lowercase c's which had been mysteriously converted to small capped lowercase c's. And they give you handy tips on how to tell a dictionary company that you found an error without being an absolute unit of jerkery.
BONUS FEATURES!- Steve talks more IPA, and we ain't talkin' beer.- Steve and Kory reminisce about the glories of blue proofs.- "Banks and banks and banks and banks" is the new "stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks." - Stamper Mispronunciation Index: "corrigenda," but she's blaming FIVE YEARS OF LATIN on that one. Also, Steve says "a error" completely naturally and it is beautiful.
-
What kind of a person writes dictionaries for a living? It helps to have what Steve calls "an early awareness of language." It's Old Home Fortnight at Fiat Lex, where Steve and Kory talk about growing up around other languages, studying German and Czech during the fall of Communism, which dictionaries they grew up with (Random House '66 REPRESENT), and why it took Steve decades to learn the English word for "wooden spoon." While wandering through the highways and byways of language, we also touch on the minutiae of preparing for a career in lexicography, then promptly crush the dreams of hopeful lexicographers everywhere.
BONUS FEATURES:- "Whom! WHOOOMMM!"- "Máte ústřední topění!"- Steve and Kory talk about what horribly inappropriate things they read as tender and impressionable youth, which explains a lot of this podcast. - Stamper Mispronunciation Index: none, though Kory makes a "much" for "many" mistake, so don't bother writing in to tell her. And yeah, she knows her Finnish is terrible.
-
Think you might be good at this lexicography racket? This episode will change your mind--or, at least, it should if you had any sense whatsoever. A good chunk of the job is mastering some of the most mundane publishing details imaginable, and that includes the subject of today's episode: the dots in the mid·dle of the head·words in your dic·tion·ary (or dic·tion·ar·y, depending on which of the damned things you're using). Steve and Kory discuss what those dots are and why they matter; Steve goes full nerdcore while dropping some head-smackingly obvious etymology; and Kory shares a major discovery which will alter the very fabric of lexicography as we know it!1
1 Not really, but it sure is fun to think such a thing is both possible and interesting enough to merit an exclamation point.
BONUS FEATURES:
- What the hell is that weird logo we use on Twitter? Steve has all the answers and they involve the word "fricative."- Kory pretends to sing and it only sounds a little bit like a kazoo rendition of Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.- Sick of political arguments? Here's a point-counterpoint you can invest in.- Mispronunciation Index: NONE, ABSOLUTELY NONE. Not even the one that Kory assumed was an error.
-
Lexicographers have a tweaked view of the language, and that includes hard words. No, not those hard words, like “koinonia” and “marocain” (Spelling Bee shoutout!). It's the small words are the ones that make lexicographers weep. Steve and Kory take a look back at some of the hard words they've defined, and along the way, Steve talks parts of speech and forks up the conversation in the best possible way. Kory drops some nerd history about Latin and dictionaries, as she is wont to do. Colors are invoked (with an assist by Steve Martin), as are the Muppets, and God shows up as well. And we learn that Steve should have been a cartographer while Kory freaks out about directions.
BONUS FEATURES:
- P45! Multiple appearances thereof and the dirty secret behind it.
- Goofus calls us “lower-class slobs”; Gallant says we “had humble beginnings.”
- Mispronunciation Index: one. Just the one.
-
Lots of people use dictionaries not for the definitions--who cares about those?--but for the pronunciations. Steve and Kory talk about how those pronunciations came to be, and why the pronunciation editor gets to watch TV all day instead of getting a REAL JOB. They explain what that stupid bananapants alphabet that American dictionaries use for pronunciations is, drop some hot history on how pronunciations got into dictionaries, and go very inside-baseball on how editors figure out which pronunciations to include when they get stuck. Kory talks about Walter Cronkite and lingerie; Steve talks about flaps. And if that wasn't enough, did you know that dictionaries enter the "noo-KYOO-lur" pronunciation of "nuclear"? They sure as shootin' do!
BONUS FEATURES:
- Arthur the Rat! - Tattoos! (Steve's, not Kory's)- The dankest of nerd memes- Stamper Mispronunciation Index: 1 intentional, 1 unintentional, 1 disputed
-
If "irregardless" isn't a real word, then why the hell is it in my dictionary?!? It's a matter of philosophy. Steve and Kory give a primer on descriptivism and prescriptivism, two approaches to describing language, and how modern dictionaries are descriptivist (which is exactly the opposite of what everyone believes). They recap the culture wars of the 1960s, which gave rise to the American Heritage Dictionary; discuss the AHD Usage Panel and what it does; lament the state of modern dictionary marketing; and gab extensively about where people can get themselves some of that sweet, sweet prescriptivism they long for.
BONUS FEATURES:- Kory and Steve offer to stage-fight at your conference; - Steve introduces you to the best dictionary marketing video known to humanity (and YOU ARE MOST WELCOME); - Steve amazes Kory w/r/t Romanian; - Stamper Mispronunciation Rundown: "biases"
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
----more----
Kory: Hi, I'm Kory Stamper
Steve: and I'm Steve Kleinedler.
Kory: and welcome to Fiat Lex,
Steve: a podcast about dictionaries by people who write them.
Kory: That would be us. So last episode, we talked a little bit about how words get into dictionaries and how dictionaries are written, but we wanted to sort of backtrack and give you an underlying philosophical basis for how modern dictionaries are written.
Steve: Right. And one of those perceptions that are held by the public who pay attention to the brand of dictionary, which we-- admittedly is a small subset of people who actually use reference works. Is this distinction, this dichotomy that doesn't really exist between, for example, the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's.
Kory: Mm-hmm. So lots of people assume that we are mortal enemies. That American Heritage and Merriam Webster, we are competitors. We have always been set up mostly by our marketing departments and other people as direct competitors. But, in fact, we are not really direct competitors of each other. That's just been something that has been sort of formulated because of this philosophical difference that we're going to talk about.
Steve: And also, the editors at the different companies -- we're all colleagues, most of us belong to the same learned societies such as the Dictionary Society of North America, where we meet together with much conviviality -- we're friends, Kory's my friend.
Kory: And Steve is my friend.
Steve: And even though we keep threatening to attend conferences and stage fake duels, with the weaponry that Kory has assembled, we have not yet done this. We may do it someday.
Kory: Let us know. Let us know if you want us to come to your conferences, stage a fight
Steve: We'll stage a fight or we'll just do a normal q and a section. And with this, this, this, this frame of reference that there is somehow this distinction is borne out of a concept of prescriptivism versus descriptivism.
Kory: Right? So let's just define terms very loosely. Prescriptivism and descriptivism are these two approaches to language that are common in modern linguistics.
Steve: A prescriptive approach is one that claims there is a right and wrong. There are rules that prescribe how one should use English or any language properly.
Kory: Right. And descriptivism is the idea that all languages, all varieties of a language are an equal footing, and it's really, you're just describing usage, not passing judgment on usage. So, so if you, if you say ain't and that's native to your dialect, then that's a matter of context and not a matter of right and wrong.
Steve: And truthfully, this is how most modern dictionaries in the United States are in fact produced. They're very descriptive. However, due to incidents that happened in the 1960s, in the public consciousness, there's this idea that the American Heritage Dictionary is this prescriptive dictionary and Merriam Webster is descriptive. There's this -- this argument raises its head from time to time.The New Yorker about five or six years ago, had this string of essays, followed by letters to the editor about this dichotomy that it's -- it seemed to be that the journalists were still thinking that this is the case. There's a really good article by Steven Pinker called the activist tours that you can find in the New Yorker that describes that kerfuffle in some detail. But! The original kerfuffle, how this all got steeped in the consciousness, goes back to 1961.
Kory: 1961. At that point, Merriam Webster, which was one of the main dictionary companies in America, released its Third New International Unabridged Dictionary. Now, this was a dictionary that had been eagerly awaited by the public. It was 12 years in the making, over a hundred editors, over 200 outside consultants helped with it, and people assumed it was going to be in the style of all of the 19th century dictionaries we wrote where we had sort of given this idea that the dictionary is the sum of all human knowledge, and therefore is sort of this intellectual tool. 1961 comes around, and the book is released. Now the book was informed by modern linguistic thinking, and so it took more descriptivist stances on things than most people thought it should. For instance, instead of saying that something was uneducated or illiterate, we would say it's substandard or nonstandard. Those are linguistic terms, but the general public knows that linguistic terms don't really matter in the real world. So when the book was released, it was kind of roundly panned by the general press as being way too anything goes, way too, you know, just throwing aside its role as the guardian of the language--
Steve: Often revolving around one word in particular--
Kory: That would be the word ain't.
Steve: Ain't.
Steve: Oy. So in fact, there is a great book about this controversy that is called The Story of Ain't by David Skinner -- it's a great book if you want to know more about this. It gets into a lot of the culture wars that were going on at the time too, which I think is frankly more interesting than dictionary history, but it all ties together. So, 1961, The third comes out. It has panned in the general press and then,
Steve: and then in these pre internet days, publishing companies could make a lot of money off dictionaries and as such, the fact that Merriam Webster was being excoriated in the press for its inclusion of ain't and other, kind of these liberal approaches, other editors thought, hey, we can write a dictionary that is in response to this and take a more prescriptive approach. One editor at American Heritage named -- affiliated with American Heritage -- named James Parton, came up with a plan to create a competing dictionary, that would be in response to Merriam Webster, and it is in the early sixties when he is going forth with this plan that, this, this, this concept of prescriptive versus descriptive approaches was really embedded in the consciousness of people who are paying attention. The interesting thing though, is as the dictionary -- as the American Heritage Dictionary was compiled in the sixties, the editors who were working on it, and even members of the Usage Panel who were brought into service to give their opinion on style issues, came -- well, they didn't come to the conclusion most of them had this conclusion -- is, well, no, a dictionary in fact, does to a large degree describe how words are being used. And in, in the earlier podcast we talked about corpus -- corpora material, that, that the editors were using to make definitions, craft definitions, the, the evidence is there in print as to, well, this word is used this way, this word is used this way. It's our duty to report that. So even though the genesis of the American Heritage Dictionary was thought of to be this prescriptive approach, it ended up being fairly descriptive almost as much as Merriam Webster
Kory: It was. And you know, Steve and I -- we have a party trick that we like to do when we speak together. And that is we put together a slide with the American Heritage Definition of irregardless, and the Merriam Webster definition of irregardless, side by side, and you will see that they treat the word almost identically.
Steve: The note covers the same amount of material. And you can find a lot of information about the word irregardless in Kory's book Word By Word, The Secret Life of Dictionaries. She has a whole chapter devoted to irregardless.
Steve: Thank you for that plug, Steve.
Steve: Well, you're welcome. On one hand, dictionaries do serve the purpose of pointing out style issues so that, for example, even though people might think inflammable means not flammable, it actually means flammable, which is an important thing if you were the manufacturer of cushions or children's pajamas, you don't want that mistake coming up because in this, you know, it can be fatal. So there are certain style issues where there -- all dictionaries will point out, use this word, not this word, but then nowadays you know, something like whether or not to split infinitive or use a singular they. And we will get into these in later podcasts in greater detail, what dictionary say nowadays might surprise you.
Kory: So I want to talk a little bit about the Usage Panel that Steve mentioned about the American Heritage Dictionary. So that was the American Heritage Dictionary's big hook was Parton, who Steve had mentioned earlier, Parton originally actually wanted to buy Merriam Webster and his plan was to pulp the Third and reprint the Second which was released in 1934, and just move straight onto the Fourth, and the Fourth was not going to be this sort of hippie Commie, pinko, anything goes dictionary. It was going to be a right proper dictionary, and he couldn't buy out the company. So he started his own dictionary and the Usage Panel was the hook. This was a group of editors, writers, journalists, linguists --
Steve: -- linguists, poets. In later days we added crossword puzzle makers, basically people who made their living off using language in, in, in some fashion. I mean we all use language but as you know, as part of, as part of their life's work.
Kory: And this usage panel is queried pretty regularly to -- basically American Heritage will send them questionnaires and say, how would you use, or is this particular example of decimate, let's say, correct or incorrect, or in what context would you consider this incorrect?
Steve: And these ballots are tabulated and these percentages where relevant, find their way into Usage Notes at various words throughout the dictionary. I'm sure there's a note at various, which I probably just used incorrectly, but check out the Note and see. So, if you go to a word that you think has a styler usage issue, if you go to ahdictionary.com, look up that word, you'll probably see a Usage Note, you know, and you might see the Usage Panels' responses, and with some words like impact or contact where we have looked at these repeatedly over the years, you can see what the percentages were like in the sixties versus, you know, three years ago, if it was, you know, depending on whenever the last time it was balloted. And through this you can see how perceptions about languages change. If I could give a brief anecdote.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely.
Steve: So for example, tracking whether you pronounced the word HAIR-US or huh-RASS, 20, 30 years ago, the predominant form was HAIR-US.
Steve: Huh!
Steve: And then in the late nineties it was very split. And then the last time that we balloted it, huh-RASS was by far the preferred term. And you can see--
Kory: It was split as late as the late nineties?
Steve: Yes.
Steve: Well, I'm a hick, so I grew up saying huh-RASS--
Steve: Well, I'm a hick too. I was -- there will be a podcast where Kory and I talk about our variety of English we used growing up--
Kory: [laughter] About how they let hicks write dictionaries, too. So one of the interesting things though, I thought this was fascinating about the Usage Panel, is most people, and it was actually kind of advertised this way early on, most assumed that the Usage Panel's advice changed how the word was actually defined in the dictionary. And --
Steve: And that is so not the case.
Steve: [[laughter]
Steve: Uh, the Usage Panel had very little to not at all effect on the definition. Usually the definition within the Usage Note comes from the definition -- the Usage Note will repeat that definition and then talk about what the Usage Panel thinks about it. Sometimes the Panel results, when there's change over time, might cause the editors to look how a word is being defined and cause the editors to consider revising it or revising it, but that is one piece of the evidence and the definition isn't being rewritten on the basis of a judgment from the Panel alone. Also, the Panel is not deciding what words go in, what words are taken out. They are basically, there's maybe 400 words or so, 500 words, where they have weighed in on over the course of the past 50 years, and that information is included in the Notes, but this Panel is not responsible for the editorial decisions that are made.
Kory: And I as a lexicographer did not actually realize that until I started learning more about the history of the American Heritage Dictionary. Because the perception is that Usage Panel is there to be prescriptive and that makes the dictionary itself prescriptive. Which my mind, I thought, well, that means that every part of that dictionary from, you know, the front matter to the back matter must be prescriptive. And in fact, it's not. The way that we define at Merriam Webster and the way that they define it American Heritage is pretty -- I mean, it's almost identical. We were all trained by the same people,
Steve: Right? And, or the people who trained us, were trained. I mean there's this very small tradition, and we're not the only dictionary company that has these types of -- I mean we're the only one that calls them a Usage Panel, but the New Oxford American dictionary back when it was called that had an advisory panel that they got this type of information from. So we're certainly not the only dictionary to do it either. And by the same token, Oxford editors, were defining and they weren't being dictated how to define definitions based on what NOAD's advisory panel said.
Kory: Right? So, so long story short, American Heritage / Merriam Webster actually very similar in spite of all of the marketing that would tell you otherwise.
Steve: Speaking of marketing--
Steve: Oh, you're going to talk about one of my favorite things.
Steve: So, about eight or nine years ago, when we were moving floors between the building that we were in, someone in marketing uncovered this footage from an ad campaign that was undertaken in the early seventies at the American Heritage Dictionary. It's like a 15 minute clip and it's done in the style of Laugh-In [[Kory laughs]], marketing the dictionary. It's ridiculous. Oh, there's a link on Youtube which we'll include it on our podcast twitter page. We encourage you to check it out because it is a lot of fun. And I think part of the reason it was made was to in part combat this image that the dictionary was stodgy and you know, finger wagging. It's a lot of lighthearted, ridiculous fun, and it's very seventies.
Kory: It is so 70. So Steve and I will, when we're working, we usually have a chat window open and every once in a while we just send each other random links and usually it's to like eighties new wave or drag parodies of eighties new wave--
Steve: --or pharmaceutical ads.
Steve: Oh, gosh, lots of those.
Steve: One of the things I do for the American Heritage Dictionary is the pronunciations, and one way to find out how, various generic names of drugs are pronounced is by going to the pharmaceutical company's website and seeing their, their promos about them, but they're ridiculous. So we'll share these links back and forth.
Kory: But so Steve, you know, chat window is open and I'm working and I get a random link from Steve and I look at it and then I get a text from him that says, did you get that link? You have to watch the link. And I watched the link and I, I watched it twice, all the way through and I was shrieking through it, which caused great -- my dog came running in and wanted to know what was wrong. It is phenomenal. So if you do nothing else but watch that video after this podcast, then Steve and I can both die happy people. So, okay, so if that's how dictionaries are written and everyone assumes that dictionaries are prescriptive, then the question is why don't dictionary companies give the people what they want and write a prescriptive dictionary?
Steve: Um, I think in part the audience would be far smaller than most people realize [[Kory laughs]] and dictionary companies have essentially done that with various style guides that have come out, which focus on the do this, not that. The problem is, and the author and linguist and educator Steve Pinker discusses this in A Sense of Style, is that there are some rules that, well, where do you draw the line? For some people, you know, they will never split infinitives for other people, it's totally cool because this is a part of what you do. Uh, so there, there's this, every style guide becomes this where the line is drawn, we accept this but not this, and you can say this, but you can't say this. And it comes down basically to that editorial board or single author's opinion.
Kory: Right? And you know, modern dictionaries are staff written and they're staff written specifically so that there is not any individual person's bias present, either with regard to cultural mores or with regard to language. And we all have these biases -- biaSEES? biaSIS? I've suddenly gone British, we all have them, anyway, even lexicographers. So, the idea of a prescriptive dictionary not only goes against all of the training that modern lexicographers have, but you know, really that's not what a dictionary should do. If you want prescriptivism, get a style guide, get a usage dictionary, get a bunch of usage dictionaries, and compare them. That's the best way really.
Steve: In my book, in the book that I wrote Is English changing -- there's a chapter about style guides and usage books and other reference sources. And in there I distinguish between the types of rules. A rule of grammar is one that you don't have to be taught if you're the native speaker of a language, you just know it. You know, as a native speaker of English that the proper sentence structure is "The cat is on the mat" and not "The the on mat cat," for example. That--
Steve: Wow, you did that so naturally.
Steve: --is no one really, no one has ever taught you that that is the rule.
Steve: Right.
Steve: But if you were learning Romanian, as an English speaker, you would learn that words like "the" go after the noun and not before.
Kory: They do?
Steve: Yes.
Kory: I didn't know that.
Steve: Yes.
Kory: Dang Romanian.
Steve: Yeah.
Steve: Oof. Yeah. You also, the other thing that is so fascinating about dictionaries is that a lot of people, when they want prescriptivism, Steve, has alluded to this, but they don't actually want word level prescriptivism. They want sentence level prescriptivism. They want us at the entry for "infinitive" to include a thing saying don't split them or at "preposition" a note saying don't end sentences with them, and that's actually -- dictionaries only work on the word level. We do not talk about these broader style issues. We don't even talk about whether you should hyphenate "terracotta" or not. Decisions go into that.
Steve: Actually, the two examples you mentioned are the two exceptions [[Laughter.] to that. At American Heritage, we do have a note at "split infinitive" and one at "preposition" about that just because--
Kory: Editorial notes not Usage Notes?
Steve: Oh no, Usage Notes.
Kory: Oh, Usage Notes I think are different. I mean, like when people, you know, people go buy a paperback dictionary for a dollar and they want this in there. Yeah. They and they want that kind of advice. They want someone to say don't split infinitives. They want someone to explain the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. They, and that's not, I mean, dictionaries really have never done that. That's always been the province of grammar books and what we now call usage dictionaries. So, so what we're saying is just buy more dictionaries.
Steve: Right? And to further to the point, for example, where I grew up, I did not distinguish well between "lie" and "lay."
Kory: Right.
Steve: And when it comes to the past tenses, I still have to look them up every time. This is an example of a type of speech that people expect you to use in certain contexts. And for that, there are style guides, or in the case of verbs where you actually show inflections in the dictionary matter, that is kind of their point. The part of Michigan where I grew up in, your past participle form of "buy" is "boughten" and I, and I speak not only of store boughten bread, but I will utter, "I have boughten blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" if I'm not thinking about it, because that is a quote unquote rule I had to unlearn.
Kory: Right, and dictionaries don't, I mean, you're a general dictionary, you are trying to cover as much of the language as generally as possible, and if you start squeezing in on the prescriptive ideas of what language is, yes, you, you alienate a bunch of people, most of whom do not speak standard English, because standard English is actually a written form and we can have a whole podcast about that, too. But you know, you want to be broad and that means that you can't get into style guide issues because those change constantly.
Steve: And, and they do change constantly. I think the Chicago manual style is just up to its 17th printing. The Associated Press Style Book is updated every single year. And there are so many different style guides and usage dictionaries. And, you're right, why pick one? You should get a variety of opinion there, see what different people are saying. There are a few issues pretty much everyone agrees on. Try to get everyone to agree on an Oxford Comma and you'll start a fight. You know, everyone has an opinion about that. So part of it is if you work for a place that has a communication staff, chances are they either have an internal style guide or they say follow the AP or the Chicago Manual or what have you, and refer to those to arbitrate decisions. And not every style guide is absolute. You can say you're going to follow the AP, and the AP editors say this all the time: "We're a guide, you know, for our AP editors, if you follow AP, but you're in-house style has a different thing, fine. Use It, use it. Just be consistent. Right?
Kory: Right. So to sum up dictionaries, descriptive, we're sorry, that upsets you. We will actually tweet a bunch of links to some of these usage dictionaries and style guides we've been talking about. We will tweet links to Pinker's book and to David Skinner's book.
Steve: And to this wonderful ad from the seventies.
Steve: Oh my gosh. It really, guys, really is the most amazing ad. It really -- oh, it's so good. See you next time!
Steve: Thank you! Bye!
-
Welcome to Fiat Lex, a podcast about dictionaries by people who write them! Yes, really.
Meet Kory and Steve, your intrepid and nerdy lexicographer-hosts who will give you the drudge's-eye view of English and dictionaries in all their weirdness. In our first episode, we:
- blow your minds by telling you that "the dictionary" doesn't exist;- talk about how new words get into dictionaries (not by petition, so STOP ASKING) and how that's not as straightforward a process as you would think; - explain how lexicographers find new words, which sometimes involves beer and diapers;- touch on how words get taken out of dictionaries, and how that's not as straightforward a process as you would think, either. Assuming you think about such things. (Who are we kidding here?)
BONUS FEATURES!- Kory spells a word aloud correctly, which will probs never happen again;- Steve channels Chumley the Walrus and then goes right into fancy linguist talk about velars and coronals;- Tennessee represents!
TRANSCRIPT BELOW
----more----
Steve: Hi, I'm Steve Kleinedler
Kory: and I'm Kory Stamper.
Steve: Welcome to Fiat Lex,
Kory: a podcast about dictionaries by people who write dictionaries.
Steve: We're so glad you're here listening to us talk about this. So we've been thinking about doing this for while.
Kory: Yeah, and we just want to give you a little intro. What's the whole point of doing a podcast about dictionaries? Well, dictionaries have lots of interesting information in them and everyone uses them.
Steve: And who are we, you might be wondering? Why should you be listening to us as opposed to anyone who has a concrete thought about anything under the sun? Kory and I have both worked on a dictionaries for several years. I was on staff with the American Heritage Dictionary for over 20 years,
Kory: and I was on the staff of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries for over 20 years. Gosh, we've probably got 50 years of editing experience between us.
Steve: Yeah. Especially if you count all the stuff we did beforehand. I worked on a lot of dictionaries for a company that was called National Textbook Company that has since had been eaten and subsumed by other media conglomerates. They might be part of Tronc now for all I know.
Kory: TRONNNC
Steve: The Tribune group. And my background is I have a degree in linguistics. I took a lexicography course at Northwestern and I started getting freelance work from my professor after I graduated, and one thing led to another, as they say.
Kory: And I have no degree in linguistics. I have a degree in medieval studies and I fell into this job-- literally, almost tripped on a newspaper which had the want-ad for the Merriam Webster position.
Steve: Well, medieval studies though, are hugely important in this field from the standpoint of etymology or just understanding how words work.
Kory: Yeah, that's true. There are a lot of medievalists in dictionary companies. We could run our own Ren Faire.
Steve: Yes. And that ties in also--we have both written books. I have written a English textbook called "Is English changing?" published by Routledge and the Linguistic Society of America,
Kory: And I have written a not-textbook, regular-book, called "Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries," which is out in paperback this year.
Steve: And in that book you can find out how Kory literally tripped over a newspaper and ended up in the position that she did.
Kory: So to speak. All right, so again, dictionaries. What are they? Why are they? Who uses them? Who cares?
Steve: Everyone uses them to some extent, whether-- Even though people may not use print ones as much as people used to, certainly people look up words all the time, whether they enter terminology into a search bar or look it up in print. That content comes from somewhere.
Kory: And we are the people who write that content. One of the questions we get all the time and we thought would be a great question to address today in our inaugural podcast, is how words get into the dictionaries that you use
Steve: and how they get out of them.
Kory: Yes. Yeah. Let's talk about--let's talk about how words move in and out.
Steve: Well, it's important to note that some people-- you hear people refer to "The Dictionary" as if there were only one in one authority, kind of like the Bible--which is also laughable because there's multiple versions of the Bible as well. Dictionaries are still in the process of being written, compiled, dictionary entries are being drafted, edited, written, and existing ones change over time.
Kory: Yeah. And not only do they change, but different dictionaries serve different purposes. So different definitions are going to look different depending on who the audience is, who's--which companies writing those dictionaries. You know, Steve and I wrote for different dictionary companies though everyone assumes that we wrote "The Dictionary."
Steve: Everyone also assumes that we're constantly at war.
Kory: We're not, we're buddies.
Steve: We are. We're friends.
Kory: Yay, friends forever!
Steve: And as Kory mentioned, there are different audiences for dictionaries, not just different companies. So you could, for example--there are several different legal dictionaries out there and they are going to take a more ingrained approach to the legal defining than a general purpose dictionary will. And you will find all sorts of dictionaries. Slang dictionaries, for example.
Kory: Yep. So, so with that in mind, we'll just talk about general dictionaries, which are dictionaries that we've both worked on. So how do words get into the dictionary?
Steve: The answer is not whimsy.
Kory: Sadly. So quit asking me to put your damn word in the dictionary
Steve: Oh, actually: we're talking about how words don't get put in dictionaries, but a good way to not get a word included in a dictionary is to write to a dictionary company and say, "Hey, I invented this word," or "I think we should add this word." Even if you are a third grader who writes a very cute, plaintive letter. Sorry, but that's not how it works.
Kory: Those are the worst letters, too, because we have to write back and say "no,: which is, you know...I mean.
Steve: Who wants to to shatter the dreams of a third grader?
Kory: Yeah. We are basically just autonomous thesauruses, but we still do have feelings. We don't like hurting other people's feelings. The way that words get in generally is through usage. Not usage as in, like, "I'm writing a dictionary and I've used the word now in print once, and so, enter it," but sort of sustained and widespread usage. And, generally, written usage, which is kind of a bugbear, but that's what we got.
Steve: It also depends on the kind of word: you know, what realm it is, what category it falls into. Some words--and these are in the vast minority--have a very easy path. So if you are a scientist who has a synthesized a new chemical element, you and your team get to name that, and as long as the governing board approves it, that's the name. And you know what? In it goes, because the people in charge said so. So tennessine, for example, which was synthesized by researchers in several universities in the state of Tennessee, [they] named element 117 that. And uh, there you go. That's all you need.
Kory: Tennessine?
Steve: Tennessine.
Kory: T-e-n-n-e-s-s-i-n-e? How do you spell it?
Steve: [Chumley the Walrus voice] That's right, Charlie.
Kory: [laughter] The amazing thing is that I just spelled that aloud, and I can't actually spell aloud.
Steve: And that was a Chumley the Walrus imitation. I'm dating myself there. [Chumley the Walrus voice] Sorry, Tennessee.
Kory: Alright, so usage. I said "written usage" and this is a bugbear. But the reason that we use written usage is it's a standard way that we can do it. So why don't we take spoken usage? Because that's actually that's how words get created first, is usually in speech. They usually don't get written down first.
Steve: The words that are used in the spoken vernacular are completely 100 percent valid. And there are outfits out there that track this type of thing. Corpuses, which are large collections of words. There's some corpuses that compile a written documentation and other ones that compile samples of recorded speech. Dictionaries, however, tend to focus on words that have been written. Generally, but not always, and more so in the past than now. Not just written, but from edited sources.
Kory: Yeah. Edited, prose sources. So poetry doesn't really count, because you can use a word with a really nonstandard meaning in poetry--or with no meaning in poetry, you can just use it for sound. But the part of the reason that's difficult is because we now have access to more transcripts of spoken English, and the problem with that as a lexicographer is, it's really actually hard to transcribe a word you've never heard before from speech into print. You can misspell it, you can mishear it. You can not understand the context. So. That's one of the reasons why we focus on written, edited English. Though the "edited," even that's kind of going away these days.
Steve: More and more, you will see references to things in blog posts which aren't always edited, or even, you know, the comment section, or that kind of thing. And as to the spoken ones, you can phonological determine the phonemes that are used. But if you were transcribing-- it's the same problem that newspaper journalists have in quoting people. Usually the quoted English in newspaper articles is written out in standard English. Even though when you speak informally, you're changing the velar "-ng" at the ends of words like "going" to the coronal "-n," like "going" to "goin'", and you're probably not going to write "g-o-i-n-apostrophe" in most examples of written transcriptions. However, that is what is being said. So, would you include that? Would you not? In the past when you had the finite print page, that limited what you could put into a book. Especially when there's a regular phonological change like that velar to coronal nasal pattern that I mentioned.
Kory: Right. So the other thing that's interesting about this is, this is how all words get in, and the way that you find new words to put into the dictionary has also--I think it's changed over even the last 10 years.
Steve: Absolutely. In the past, when I first started, you had boxes and boxes of note cards on which someone had dutifully typed or printed out and pasted onto that note card, a usage of that word, also known as a "citation." But even in the nineties when I started, that shoe box of cards was already supplemented with returns from what we call a KWIC concordance. This program that overlays on top of a large corpus. You can search on a specific word and it will show you every instance of that word with five or 10 or 12 words, whatever you decide on either side of it, to get some context by it. So even in the nineties--and before then, I just wasn't working before then-- you're juggling these cards and these citations in your concordance.
Kory: But even the way that we got citations I think has changed. It used to be--so at Merriam Webster, it used to be that all of the editors read for at least an hour, maybe two hours a day. We had a source list that was a list of magazines, journals, books--not just journals and magazines, but trade journals, specialty journals. And we would go through as an editorial floor and divvy stuff up and say, "You're going to be the one who's reading _National Review_ and _The Nation_, and you would read-- I mean, ideally you read every issue that got delivered to you, and you read looking specifically for words that caught your eye, which were generally new words or new uses of old words. And that's how we used to get citations. This was before these, these big corpora were available. I mean, not just available for purchase, but just available, period.
Steve: The first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary back in the sixties used a corpus called the Brown Corpus, from Brown University. But in addition to these collected citations. So corpus material had always been used. However, editors still read in the manner Kory described and collected citations well into the mid-2000s, by which time, you know, much like every other corporation in the world, outside pressures meant more people were doing more things. And that was one thing that, because information was so much more easily obtainable, reading time for markup decreased over the years. But it wasn't just books or periodicals that you were assigned to. I remember once when we were discussing what the proper plural of "pierogi" is--is "pierogi" a plural? You know, those little Polish potato dumplings? Is the singular "pierog," which is what it would be in various Slavic languages, but not in English? I took a box of Mrs. T's Pierogies and cut the carton and pasted that onto a note card as citational evidence. And you will find in the files, not just handwritten stuff from way back when or, taped or glue- on photocopies. But sometimes you will find like portions of boxes or whatnot appended to these note cards.
Kory: Oh yeah. I used to bring in things. At Merriam Webster, we had a filing cabinet where you put all of your marked materials, and we had a typists room--these poor women, their whole job was to type up citations and put them in our database and put them on cards. And I remember one day coming in--it was really early, early on in my time--coming in and someone had put like a Lean Cuisine box in the marking pile, and I went to go throw it away because I thought it was trash, and I saw someone had marked it. And then I went crazy. I think I've marked beer bottles and left them there. I remember marking diaper boxes when my kids were little. People mark menus, take-out menus--
Steve: What's with the focus on food that we're all marking?
Kory: I'm really hungry. Yeah.
Steve: Speaking of those poor women, we had a poor intern in the early 2000s--for some reason we had our main citation file, but there was also a separate one that had been started for a separate purpose. And it was annoying because you'd always had to check in two places. So over the course of three summers with three different interns, they had to alphabetize this smaller set of cards into the main ones--which, not only putting it in the right place, but then that of course forces everything back.
Kory: Right.
Steve: So it was, for three summers, this is basically what a college student did.
Kory: That's life skills right there. I'm sure that's worth some kind of college credit.
Steve: Yeah. And so through examining these citations, you find evidence of how long a word might have been used, how widespread it is. We generally don't enter terms that are hyper-specific to one, you know, one occupation or one location. It's a general purpose dictionary. So there's usually some type of general frequency. By the time a specialized term has also reached the general public, that's one indication that it's time to go in.
Kory: Yeah. And I think the rate at which some specialized terms sort of become widespread is different. So I remember, both "AIDS" and "SARS" got into Merriam-Webster dictionaries really quickly, because it was, just sort of--all of that evidence was there right away. You knew that these were syndromes and diseases that were not going to go away.
Steve: Ditto with us for "Zika."
Kory: Yep. But the other thing that's really interesting is that, when you've got sort of this big body of words in front of you, you also see these really weird patterns of usage. Like, sometimes you'll have a word show up in print once every couple of years or once every five or 10 years, and then boom. And other times you have a word that shows up and booms right away, and then drops out of use really quickly. And particularly in the old days, when everything was dead-tree publishing, you couldn't justify entering a term that was brand-new unless you could justify that it was going to be around for another 10 years, because that was the lifecycle of a dictionary revision. And I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but in print publishing, you can't afford two or three lines on a page for a word that is just not going to be common in five years.
Steve: It's this test of ephemerality that used to be very important. Of course, nowadays you can just add a term online, and it won't necessarily make it into print. I remember one of the very last words we entered for the fourth edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary was "dotcom," and it was, this was still in the late '90s. It was, I think, right before or during the bubble. It was probably a little sooner than we normally might have, but it was like, "all right, this is now or never. This word is probably going to stick around." In that case, it's like, let's err on the side of caution and put it in. But even at that point, the writing was on the wall, as they say.
Kory: Yeah. And often, I mean, I don't know if it was like this for you, but I often found whenever we did revisions and we started looking through the citational evidence, I would always find more and more and more words to enter. And then you have to do this very weird--you have to get very choosy in weird ways.
Steve: Or, if you're working on a printing--and again, this refers back to the day of... Did I just use "refer back" right? Is someone going to ding me on that?
Kory: Sure, I don't care.
Steve: I don't care either. Ding me if you want.
Kory: Sense two! Sense two of "ding."
Steve: yes. Uh--what were we talking about? Referring back? What am I referring back to?
Kory: To print.
Steve: Oh, right. So if you're doing a new printing and, say, someone has died and you have to "open that page" to fix the death date, then you can go anywhere on that page! It's like, "oh, I can add this, I can add this." So just by the sheer alphabetic accident of where the word falls, it's like, "This page is open, I can insert this word." Whereas if it was spelled slightly different and fell on a different page, you might not have been able to do that.
Kory: Right. And which kind of--so, this underscores something that's really interesting too about dictionaries: that nobody realizes dictionaries are a commercial proposition. Everything is driven by how much will it cost, how much time will it take, will we recoup our expenses? And that's just, you know, that just doesn't happen very much with language.
Steve: Here's an anecdote. The fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary was in full color.
Kory: oh ho ho
Steve: Which of course was expensive, but one thing it did: because the headword was in its own color, it meant that you didn't have to reverse-indent the entry.
Kory: Ooooh.
Steve: And because of that, the entries could be flush on the left margin, which gained us, like, two characters for every line of an entry after the first line. The Savings in space by getting those extra two characters aligned was one of the things that offset the cost of going into color. But of course, then we ate it up by just cramming that much more into it. The amount of space--I mean, when people...And this ties into our next bit about how do words come out of a dictionary (and the short answer is, not often), when we talked about all the new words that were added to the Fifth Edition that weren't in the Fourth Edition, and people said, "Where'd the space come from, it's the same length?" A lot of it was interesting design choices. Oh-- I'm sorry, that was between the Third and the Fourth. The fact that you didn't have to take up that space for the indent saved us, you know, allowed us to keep thousands of words. I mean, when you, look at two characters per line, over 2000 pages, that really adds up.
Kory: And you know, when people ask about getting a word into the dictionary, one of the other parts of the commercial bit that no one realizes is that, you know, we are _never going to be caught up_ with getting words into the dictionary. We are always, always, always behind, always having to make these weird editorial choices that are half-based on, is this page going to be open? Or if you're going online, even, how many people can we get on staff who are going to be able to do this kind of defining quickly? And then we need to have someone proofread it, and we have to have someone copy edit it, and then the pronunciation editor needs to go through it, and then the etymologist need to go through it. It's not just me farting around at my laptop saying, "I'm going to enter the word 'CRISPR' today!" That doesn't happen. It still needs to go through, you know, anywhere from five to 10 other sets of eyes before it makes it online.
Steve: "CRISPR" the gene editing?
Kory: Oh yeah. Naturally.
Steve: Shout out to Carl Zimmer. We can tweet at him after this podcast now.
Kory: So, so that's how words get in. It's through written usage. That's not historically always been how it is. The earliest English dictionary, the word lists were just sort of... In the 1600s and early 1700s, they were mostly just words that the single author thought of. So whatever they thought was worth entering, whatever they thought was worth studying. So early dictionaries were hard-word dictionaries mostly, and they were written mostly by wealthy white dudes.
Steve: And then, we're, of course, talking about living languages. If you are writing a dictionary of a dead language, it is possible to include every word. Because, you know, again, I always go back to Tocharian B. We know what words were used and unless there's another archaeological find where they find more inscriptions, the words that we have are the words that are there. And so you can have that finite list. Kory, how do words come out of a dictionary?
Kory: With difficulty. So I don't know what the criteria at American Heritage is, but generally speaking, once a ,word gets into the dictionary, people keep using that word or people feel like they now have license to use that word more. They feel like the word has been made official even though that is not at all what the dictionary does.
Steve: And like you said earlier, just that test for ephemerality. Because we're not adding words until we think they're going to stick around, there's, there's less chance of a word having to come out because it hasn't stuck. And you never know when it's going to come back to life.
Kory: Oh God. "Snollygoster"!
Steve: Oh yeah--you do "snollygoster" and then I'll do mine.
Kory: "Snollygoster!" So very quickly, the way that we determine whether a word is eligible to be removed from the dictionary at Merriam-Webster is, you need to prove that it has had no significant historical written usage, and that it has no current written usage. And that's within a timeframe of, it really depends, but I think when we were doing the Collegiate, we were aiming for 50 years of no written use. Which, that's actually impossible to find now that everything is digitized. Now you can go on Google Books and you can find one dude in 1956 who has used this word consistently in every article he's written and...so now it breaks it. So, actually, we enter far more words than we end up taking out. And when we do take words out, it has to be well considered. Enter "snollygoster." So "snollygoster" is a word that's a noun, it refers to a shrewd or unprincipled person. And it was removed from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate dictionary for the 10th edition, I believe. So that would have been '93. And at that point, you know, they reviewed the evidence and said, eh, has a lot of use back in the forties and fifties, but not really much since. And we need the space. You always need the space. So they pulled it out and then it turns out that William Safire _really_ loved the word "snollygoster" and began using it in his columns. And then Bill O'Reilly_really, really_ loved "snollygoster" and began using it on his TV shows. And so for the 11th edition, pretty recently, we had to put "snollygoster" back in, because now people are using it again.
Steve: And the example I like to use about the danger of removing words: in the late nineties when we were finishing up work on the Fifth Edition and we needed space on this one page, we talked about dropping the sense of "chad" associated with punch cards. Because usually when we do drop things for space, they tend to be geographical entries that are suburbs of Los Angeles or Chicago or something that's encyclopedic information. The space is much better used for a vocabulary word. But obsolescent technology is--
Kory: Oh yeah, that's a big one--
Steve: It's a fertile ground for possible deletions. And we almost deleted "chad." And then I remembered when it was going back and forth among the editors, I remembered that there were still some states that used punch cards for voting, and we're like, oh, well we should keep it in then. And lo and behold, one year later, right after the book came out, uh, _Florida_. And it's good that we kept it in, because suddenly "chad" was on everyone's lips.
Kory: Yeah. Hanging chads, pregnant chads--
Steve: all those chads. Oh Chad.
Kory: _Chad._
Steve: So, it's about that time. We hope that you have found this entertaining.
Kory: Yeah. And if you want to tweet at us, you can tweet at us. We are @FiatLexPodcast, F-I-A-T-L-E-X podcast. One of us will answer you. If you have things you want to hear on the podcast, let us know. Actually,both of these questions, how do words get in and how do words get taken out, were suggested by faithful Twitter followers.
Steve: Don't tweet at us that "FiatLex" is combining Greek and Latin. We know that and we'll talk about that in a later podcast.
Kory: Yeah, you'll have to get over that. So thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.
Steve: Bye.
