A Great Book by a Dictionary Editor

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

There is a book out right now that is making me wish I was still a dictionary editor.

Oh, I know what it is.

I still think of myself as a dictionary editor, but I haven’t done full-time dictionary editing for, I think, a little more than 10 years.

This book is Word by Word by Corey Stamper, published by Pantheon Books.

And she is an editor at Merriam-Webster, one of the finest dictionary makers in the English-speaking world.

And she talks at length in this book, chapter by chapter, not only about her own relationship to dictionary editing and to the language in general, but the inside story of what it’s like to work there and what it’s like to become that person that people look to for language guidance and language advice.

The reason this makes me feel like I want to go back to becoming a full-time lexicographer is that she writes about it with such gusto.

She seems to really enjoy the work, even though in places she’s peevish and in places she’s profane.

But she’s also self-effacing.

She’s academic.

She’s witty.

She’s erudite.

She brings her own life into it.

She talks about mother-daughter interactions.

She talks about friends at work.

She talks about people who no longer work for the dictionary but have left their imprint on it.

There’s a sense of love that she has for her co-workers and the institution of the dictionary.

And Merriam-Webster is a company that’s existed for a long time.

But I think overall, I think it’s her love of English that really pulled me in here.

She really appreciates it.

She talks about revising entries that personally offended her and gives her opinion on what it’s like to go in and realize, oh, this is a sexist dictionary entry.

We must fix this.

And I am the person who is here right now who can do this job.

It’s really nice.

The other thing is she talks about, which I did not have when I was a dictionary editor.

I worked for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press and some other publishers.

She talks about the unbreakable rule, which is there must be silence on the editing room floor at all times.

You really have to leave the floor to go have a conversation in another room.

Like you don’t speak on your phone at your desk.

Right. That’s a big no-no, right?

It’s a big no-no.

So there’s like this tomb-like silence.

It’s not a tomb. No, it’s not a tomb.

It’s working together alone.

It’s the glory and the joy of working together alone because you know that all these people that you can see in their cubicles are doing what you’re doing or some version of it.

And together you’re making these dictionary products that will guide the way people speak and work in the real world.

There should be a word for that.

For what?

Working together alone in silence.

Working together alone in silence, yeah.

Maybe it’s Merriam-Webstering.

It’s kind of like the monks, though, who’ve taken an oath of silence, who are all sitting there carefully, you know, doing their scribe work on parchment, right?

I want to share one part from the book that really, to me, demonstrates the tone that she takes with the whole book.

And this part is about one of the dictionary editor’s tasks, which is finding sample sentences.

And she calls them verbal illustrations.

And she writes,

They say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind.

And they are right.

Editors are, at heart, 12.

If we can construe something as a fart or sex or a fart and sex joke, we will.

This is a double-edged sword as you write verbal illustrations.

The elevation of your adult duty, it’s constantly pulling against the gravity of your native gutter thinking.

Duty must prevail because duty ostensibly pays the bills.

And so she talks about this frank approach to language.

It’s like if you’ve ever had a family friend and in their family they’re all comfortable with nudity and your family isn’t,

The dictionary editors that I know, all of them, have this really frank relationship with the language where all of the things are exposed and all of the undercarriage is visible in a way that it isn’t to anyone else except maybe some linguists.

But very honest approach and accepting it for all of its failings and all of the broken parts of it and just writing it down saying, yep, that’s how English is.

It is actually broken in that way.

That’s how it is, right?

That’s how it is.

Nothing’s off limits.

Nothing’s off limits.

In any case, this book is Word by Word by Corey Stamper, published by Pantheon Books.

I highly recommend that this is, out of all the books that I have about dictionaries and dictionary making,

This is the only one that really made me feel excited about the trade.

And the other thing that it’s going to do, besides making me feel like I should go back to full-time dictionary editing,

To full-time lexicography, it’s going to make you feel like you should become a lexicographer.

But the sad news is that it is a shrinking business,

And there may be more members of Congress than there are full-time English lexicographers in the entire world.

It’s just not that open anymore.

Oh, no.

So what do those of us with sharp eyes and dirty minds do?

You know what you do?

You make your own folk dictionary.

Make them.

We love them.

Lexicographers love it when the amateurs do their own individual work.

And then it’s recorded in history.

And then we can cite it.

And you become a part of the language because you made a dictionary, too.

Okay.

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