Lexicographers also labor against the public’s illusion that there is one perfect version of the English language. And sometimes listen as Stamper did one time to NPR after which she recorded “ho-bag.” Really.
And to do that, they have to read those words and the ways we, the great unwashed public, are slinging them around. They merely record what the rest of us are doing with words. Lexicographers aren’t there to determine or decide what words are sanctioned or proper. Is that verb transitive? Deciding is harder than it sounds.Īnother important thing to learn is that dictionaries are “records of the language as it is used” and not as a test of grammar or endorsement of any words.
#BYWORD REVIEW HOW TO#
The more I learned, the more I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language.īut getting a job using this arcane and esoteric knowledge of Old English? That took a while before she could live up to (?) Samuel Johnson’s description of the job as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” Then comes the fun of unlearning how to read (truly), being taught how to mark all the reading they do and how to determine what part of speech a word is.
#BYWORD REVIEW FULL#
I discovered that “nice” used to mean “lewd” and “stew” used to mean “whorehouse.” I hadn’t just fallen down this rabbit hole: I saw that hole in the distance and ran full tilt at it, throwing myself headlong into it. Oooh – voiceless alveolar lateral fricatives. The pronunciation exercises sound hilarious – hawk, hawk, hork, ack. I’m impressed and curious about where you could actually study that in the US. But look, words brought her to medieval Icelandic family saga classes in college. How many people would know the insult lickspittle to hurl at bullies in school? The pull and lure of words overcame her plans for medical school – Organic Chemistry, yeah, it’s a weeder course. And how awesome is it that she gets to work with them for a living? And read all day? Do not mess with women who read a lot and have excellent vocabularies.
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.įilled 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.įrom an early age Kory Stamper was in love with words and reading. 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.” “We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child.
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