Kory Stamper

"While most of us might take dictionaries for granted, the process of writing dictionaries is in fact as lively and dynamic as language itself ... Stamper cracks open the complex, obsessive world of lexicography, from the agonizing decisions about what and how to define, to the knotty questions of usage in an ever-changing language. She explains why the small words are the most difficult to define, how it can take nine months to define a single word, and how our biases about language and pronunciation can have tremendous social influence. Throughout Stamper brings to life the hallowed halls ... of Merriam-Webster, a ... world inhabited by quirky and erudite individuals who quietly shape the way we communicate"--

The Secret Life of Dictionaries

Word by Word

Ben Myers

In the process of learning how to write a dictionary, lexicographers must face the Escheresque logic of English and its speakers. What appears to be a straightforward word ends up being a linguistic funhouse of doors that open into air and staircases that lead to nowhere.

Many of the rules that have been codified into “grammar” uphold an ideal, not a reality. The grammarians of the seventeenth century onward weren’t interested so much in preserving the language as it was used as in perpetuating a reformed idea of what language should be. The first soldiers in the fight to preserve English radically changed English, not according to the best practices of the great writers of the language, but according to their own views of elegance and correctness. What they wanted to preserve and promote didn’t, for the most part, actually exist: it was a convenient fiction that was painted in moral terms, thereby ensuring its own propagation.

Let me say that again: 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. Under this mentality, the idea that the best practices of English change with time is anathema. It doesn't preserve English so much as pickle it.

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