I love words, I love English, and there is no way I could be a lexicographer. I will never read a dictionary the same way again. This was even more interesting than I hoped it would be.
I call it “craft” and not “art” for connotative reasons. “Art” conjures an image of the lexicographer as medium or conduit— a live wire that merely transmits something unkenned, alien. But “craft” implies care, repetitive work, apprenticeship, and practice. It is something within most people’s reach, but few people devote themselves to it long enough and with enough intensity to do it well. That sort of dedication to words comes across as batty, so we speak in metaphor. Defining is the mental equivalent of free throws in basketball: anyone can stand at the free-throw line and sink one occasionally; everyone gets lucky. But the pro is the person who stands at the free-throw line for hours, months, years, perfecting that one motion until it is as fail-safe as humanly possible, until it looks so much like second nature that an uncoordinated clod like me can watch them lob a rare miss at the net during a game and say, “Are you kidding? How easy is it to shoot a free throw?”
Stray notes ⚭
- The wonky rules of English! (use the open compound “back seat” in the phrase “take a back seat” but the closed “backseat” when referring to the seats behind the driver, etc etc)
- Asimov: “My opinions are strong, but not necessarily authoritative. Please realize that.”
- “Pumpernickel,” traced back to its Germanic origins, means “fart goblin”
- Worcester’s publishers steadfastly refused to bow to the vulgarity of cheap advertising, while the Merriam brothers went bonkers for it. “Get the best!” ads in 1849 proclaimed and never really stopped.
- “She looked world-weary, like a circus clown two shows away from retirement, dolefully waiting for the inevitable pie right in the smacker.”
- They’ll notice errors, but you can’t notice excellence in a dictionary because it consists of a lack of errors.
Pull quotes ⚭
“The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.” p. 48
The history of English is full of messiness and illogic because the English language is a true democracy, built entirely by the people who use and have used it, and people, generally speaking, are messy and illogical. p. 182
Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language changes itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn’t change is a dead language, and as much as etymological fallacists seem to love the purity of Latin, you’ll notice that none of them have abandoned that whore English for it. p. 184
Like everyone else, lexicographers need to move faster. This is, to be frank, nothing new: we have always felt the heavy thumb of business concerns whenever we define. And while defining gets easier with experience, and the easier it is to do something, the faster you can do it, there is a terminal velocity in lexicography. After a certain point, you simply can’t go any faster; to do so compromises the quality of what you’re doing. p. 259