Kory Stamper

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

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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