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A review by lpm100
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
5.0
Book review
"Word by Word"
5/5 stars
"This (profanity-laced) book is like nothing I've ever read before."
*****
Of the book:
-14 chapters plus one epilogue
-255 pages of prose, average chapter 17 pages.
-Each chapter is just about enough to be read over a lunch break, and the whole book could be read in about 6 hours--although in practice, it took a lot longer because there was much to unpack.
-Chapters have the feel of freestanding essays, and book does not need to be read in order.
*******
It almost certainly could NEVER have been written by an academic linguist, and that is because everything to them is a verbose floating abstraction and not something that is a matter of translating some abstracted knowledge into a technical craft.
Here, it is using linguistics for the nitty gritty of writing a dictionary under time pressure and a profit deadline.
Academic linguist is to lexicographer as senior undergraduate chemistry major is to metallurgist 10 years on the job experience.
*******
There are a lot of fundamental questions right from the beginning of this book.
1. What is grammar? Is it descriptive (just describing the way that a language is used as of a given instant in time) or prescriptive (describing how the language *should* be used)?
2. Where do you draw the line between a pidgin (a hybrid language with no native speakers) and a creole (a hybrid language with native speakers)?
A couple of interesting questions/points from each chapter:
1. Does "grammar" mean "the usage of a language"? Or could it mean "a bunch of speaking conventions that are outside of the logic of the language itself"? Dictionaries commonly have 8 categories of word, but professional linguists may have as many as 28. Some words have to be put into uncomfortable categories because they have to be put....... somewhere.....as a trade off of having a manageable number of categories.
2. How many parts of speech are there? Dictionary writers would prefer 28, but they have to make do with only 8 in order to maintain a usable product. Exposition to the two camps of "prescriptivists" versus "descriptivists."
3. Who knew? "Standard English as it is presented by gramarians and padance is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage." English became the language of the English bureaucracy about 600 years ago, and it was only then and over the next couple of hundred years that people began to try to standardize it. There were 77 ways to spell right before then. (p.39)
4. Are dictionary editors meant to be gatekeepers of the language, or merely people who document the language as it changes.? (Another iteration of the "prescriptive" versus "descriptive" argument.)
Discussion on the history of the word "irregardless." (If so, if enough people use the word "irregardless" then it will end up with its own dictionary citation, academics and prescriptivists be damned!)
5. How does one select the moving target of lexical set of a dictionary (magazines? internet? web articles?) At what point do words become "productive"? (This is in the linguistic sense and not the layman sense.)
The first monolingual English dictionary was in 1604, it became needful as merchants became a force in their own right in england. (Theretofore, dictionaries went Latin to English / vice versa.)
6. What is it technically mean to even "define" a word? Apparently, editors at Merriman Webster go through months of *in-house* training learn the artistry/skill of how to parse grammar and write definitions. And they use techniques such as "formulaic definitions" and "substitutability." Some lexicographers are "lumpers" and others are "splitters."
Dictionaries are also not written in alphabetical order, because stylistics are self-correcting. ("S" is the worst letter to write in the dictionary.)
7. How does one even select maximally pertinent examples to illustrate a word? (That's a surprise you that Stamper concludes that it's actually harder than even writing the definition?) How does one right of verbal illustration that offends, if not no one (impossible!), the fewest number of people possible?
8. Should it surprise you that the words that are the most difficult to define are the smallest and most commonly used ones? (The author takes us through her own month-long personal nightmare of defining the word "take." 107 distinct verbal senses alone.) It probably does surprise you that the entries that take the most time the 50 or 60 most basic English words have been the same since the first dictionary.
9. Just how many ways can the word "bitch" be used, at what point did it become profanity? Was it always profanity? (Swear words have been with us for a long time, but it took several hundred years before it eased its way into dictionaries.) "Linguistic reclamation" is a process, and whether a word is bad only seems to depend on weather/wear some given population of people is in that process.
10. Etymology seems to be a joke, and after you sort through all of the false attributions to the origin of a word, it's really almost not worth your time to think about it. (NO, the word posh is not an acronym of Port out starboard home.)
11. Tracking down the first use and time of a word is also a waste. Even if you think that you can always date the word to some particular day of some particular year, there's always somebody trying to prove that it was dated one day earlier.
12. Does the use of the word "nuclear" pronounced as "nu-KU-ler" just piss you off to the fullest? (It sure does me.) And if so, this is your chapter.
13. The color "nude" corresponds to one thing in a country that is almost entirely white, but as the country gets less so than the meaning changes. This is the best example, but not the only example
14. No, something does not become true just because it is put in the dictionary, in the same way that it does not become false just because it is removed from the dictionary. (The supreme Court makes prodigious use of the dictionary, as if that's enough/relevant to decide legal questions.) Dictionaries lag changes in meaning and not lead them.
Epilogue. Lexicography is a craft, but it is also a business. The fact that the internet makes things too easily available means that nobody can make money off of properly editing dictionaries. (Stamper gives an example of a mass layoff of lexicographers.)
Second order thoughts:
1. The question of whether or not a AAVE is as good as standard English (p.67) is one that an academic can torture him / herself with, but in reality: it is very difficult for a black person to be taken seriously when they say things, and they do not need a dialectical albatross making it EVEN WORSE.
I know that the author thought she was expressing solidarity with black people, but really her trying to legitimize AAVE is extremely unhelpful. (p.67, à la Rachel Jeantel)
(Yiddish is an everyday language for many Hasidim, both in Israel and the United states, but it has its specific place and they don't make any efforts to take up the argument to relexify American English from a Yiddish perspective.)
2. Lots of discussion in this book about PC terms, such as "microaggression" and "mansplaining." The author insists that she is a strict descriptivist, but the way she rights make me believe that that is somewhat disingenuous: Herein, a cautionary tale of the way that politics can poison even language. (p.167: Could you feign even the *slightest* bit of surprise when the author observes that "Lexicography has historically been-- and frankly continues to be-- the province of well off, educated, old white dudes.")
3. (p.158) Linguistic reclamation is not new. (And that's the answer that you can give when white people ask why "a certain word" is so popular among black people.)
4. It is not so hard to imagine what some people pronounce nuclear the way that they do. You have correspondences between that and the word molecular, jugular and vascular. (But only the rare word "cochlear.")
*******
Exceptionally good vocabulary words (and this will have to be a mirror smattering, because in a book on lexicography there are way too many to extract in their entirety):
ouroboros
cromulent
abecedarian
corpus/corpora
genius
definiendum
prepositive
postpositive
impositive
galleys
rhadamanthine
vecturist
phrasal verb
Black Books (Merriman Webster style guides)
over-marking
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue"
linguistic reclamation
obelus
metathesis (two phonemes and a word switch positions)
Good quotes:
(p.136) "Lexicography, like most professions, offers is devotees some benchmarks by which you can measure your sad little existence, and one is the size of the words you are allowed to handle."
(p.226) Fun lexicographal bantering with the author's teenage daughter.
Verdict: Recommended
"Word by Word"
5/5 stars
"This (profanity-laced) book is like nothing I've ever read before."
*****
Of the book:
-14 chapters plus one epilogue
-255 pages of prose, average chapter 17 pages.
-Each chapter is just about enough to be read over a lunch break, and the whole book could be read in about 6 hours--although in practice, it took a lot longer because there was much to unpack.
-Chapters have the feel of freestanding essays, and book does not need to be read in order.
*******
It almost certainly could NEVER have been written by an academic linguist, and that is because everything to them is a verbose floating abstraction and not something that is a matter of translating some abstracted knowledge into a technical craft.
Here, it is using linguistics for the nitty gritty of writing a dictionary under time pressure and a profit deadline.
Academic linguist is to lexicographer as senior undergraduate chemistry major is to metallurgist 10 years on the job experience.
*******
There are a lot of fundamental questions right from the beginning of this book.
1. What is grammar? Is it descriptive (just describing the way that a language is used as of a given instant in time) or prescriptive (describing how the language *should* be used)?
2. Where do you draw the line between a pidgin (a hybrid language with no native speakers) and a creole (a hybrid language with native speakers)?
A couple of interesting questions/points from each chapter:
1. Does "grammar" mean "the usage of a language"? Or could it mean "a bunch of speaking conventions that are outside of the logic of the language itself"? Dictionaries commonly have 8 categories of word, but professional linguists may have as many as 28. Some words have to be put into uncomfortable categories because they have to be put....... somewhere.....as a trade off of having a manageable number of categories.
2. How many parts of speech are there? Dictionary writers would prefer 28, but they have to make do with only 8 in order to maintain a usable product. Exposition to the two camps of "prescriptivists" versus "descriptivists."
3. Who knew? "Standard English as it is presented by gramarians and padance is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage." English became the language of the English bureaucracy about 600 years ago, and it was only then and over the next couple of hundred years that people began to try to standardize it. There were 77 ways to spell right before then. (p.39)
4. Are dictionary editors meant to be gatekeepers of the language, or merely people who document the language as it changes.? (Another iteration of the "prescriptive" versus "descriptive" argument.)
Discussion on the history of the word "irregardless." (If so, if enough people use the word "irregardless" then it will end up with its own dictionary citation, academics and prescriptivists be damned!)
5. How does one select the moving target of lexical set of a dictionary (magazines? internet? web articles?) At what point do words become "productive"? (This is in the linguistic sense and not the layman sense.)
The first monolingual English dictionary was in 1604, it became needful as merchants became a force in their own right in england. (Theretofore, dictionaries went Latin to English / vice versa.)
6. What is it technically mean to even "define" a word? Apparently, editors at Merriman Webster go through months of *in-house* training learn the artistry/skill of how to parse grammar and write definitions. And they use techniques such as "formulaic definitions" and "substitutability." Some lexicographers are "lumpers" and others are "splitters."
Dictionaries are also not written in alphabetical order, because stylistics are self-correcting. ("S" is the worst letter to write in the dictionary.)
7. How does one even select maximally pertinent examples to illustrate a word? (That's a surprise you that Stamper concludes that it's actually harder than even writing the definition?) How does one right of verbal illustration that offends, if not no one (impossible!), the fewest number of people possible?
8. Should it surprise you that the words that are the most difficult to define are the smallest and most commonly used ones? (The author takes us through her own month-long personal nightmare of defining the word "take." 107 distinct verbal senses alone.) It probably does surprise you that the entries that take the most time the 50 or 60 most basic English words have been the same since the first dictionary.
9. Just how many ways can the word "bitch" be used, at what point did it become profanity? Was it always profanity? (Swear words have been with us for a long time, but it took several hundred years before it eased its way into dictionaries.) "Linguistic reclamation" is a process, and whether a word is bad only seems to depend on weather/wear some given population of people is in that process.
10. Etymology seems to be a joke, and after you sort through all of the false attributions to the origin of a word, it's really almost not worth your time to think about it. (NO, the word posh is not an acronym of Port out starboard home.)
11. Tracking down the first use and time of a word is also a waste. Even if you think that you can always date the word to some particular day of some particular year, there's always somebody trying to prove that it was dated one day earlier.
12. Does the use of the word "nuclear" pronounced as "nu-KU-ler" just piss you off to the fullest? (It sure does me.) And if so, this is your chapter.
13. The color "nude" corresponds to one thing in a country that is almost entirely white, but as the country gets less so than the meaning changes. This is the best example, but not the only example
14. No, something does not become true just because it is put in the dictionary, in the same way that it does not become false just because it is removed from the dictionary. (The supreme Court makes prodigious use of the dictionary, as if that's enough/relevant to decide legal questions.) Dictionaries lag changes in meaning and not lead them.
Epilogue. Lexicography is a craft, but it is also a business. The fact that the internet makes things too easily available means that nobody can make money off of properly editing dictionaries. (Stamper gives an example of a mass layoff of lexicographers.)
Second order thoughts:
1. The question of whether or not a AAVE is as good as standard English (p.67) is one that an academic can torture him / herself with, but in reality: it is very difficult for a black person to be taken seriously when they say things, and they do not need a dialectical albatross making it EVEN WORSE.
I know that the author thought she was expressing solidarity with black people, but really her trying to legitimize AAVE is extremely unhelpful. (p.67, à la Rachel Jeantel)
(Yiddish is an everyday language for many Hasidim, both in Israel and the United states, but it has its specific place and they don't make any efforts to take up the argument to relexify American English from a Yiddish perspective.)
2. Lots of discussion in this book about PC terms, such as "microaggression" and "mansplaining." The author insists that she is a strict descriptivist, but the way she rights make me believe that that is somewhat disingenuous: Herein, a cautionary tale of the way that politics can poison even language. (p.167: Could you feign even the *slightest* bit of surprise when the author observes that "Lexicography has historically been-- and frankly continues to be-- the province of well off, educated, old white dudes.")
3. (p.158) Linguistic reclamation is not new. (And that's the answer that you can give when white people ask why "a certain word" is so popular among black people.)
4. It is not so hard to imagine what some people pronounce nuclear the way that they do. You have correspondences between that and the word molecular, jugular and vascular. (But only the rare word "cochlear.")
*******
Exceptionally good vocabulary words (and this will have to be a mirror smattering, because in a book on lexicography there are way too many to extract in their entirety):
ouroboros
cromulent
abecedarian
corpus/corpora
genius
definiendum
prepositive
postpositive
impositive
galleys
rhadamanthine
vecturist
phrasal verb
Black Books (Merriman Webster style guides)
over-marking
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue"
linguistic reclamation
obelus
metathesis (two phonemes and a word switch positions)
Good quotes:
(p.136) "Lexicography, like most professions, offers is devotees some benchmarks by which you can measure your sad little existence, and one is the size of the words you are allowed to handle."
(p.226) Fun lexicographal bantering with the author's teenage daughter.
Verdict: Recommended