An insider’s journey into the word factory
Lexicographer offers a rebuke of the ‘cult of the grammar scolds’
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in America, has turned itself into a social media powerhouse over the past few years. Its editors star in online videos on hot-button topics like the serial comma, gender pronouns and the dreaded “irregardless.” Its Twitter feed has become a viral sensation, offering witty — and sometimes pointedly political — commentary on the news of the day.
Kory Stamper, a lexicographer here, is very much part of the vanguard of word-nerd celebrities. Her witty Ask the Editor video contributions, like a classic on the plural of octopus, and personal blog, Harmless Drudgery, have inspired a Kory Stamper Fan Club on Facebook. One online admirer has carefully tracked minute changes in her hair (which, for one thing, is purple).
But the company remains very much a brick-and-mortar operation, still based in this small New England city where the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Noah Webster’s dictionary in the 1840s and carried on his idea of a distinctly American language. And this month, Stamper, the author of the new book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, was more than happy to offer a tour.
She walked me through a hallway that seemed to double as a museum of superannuated filing cabinet technology.
Craziness is a bit of a leitmotif in Word by Word. The book, published last week by Pantheon, mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries. The Atlantic called it “an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the English language” that’s also “a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.”
Stamper, 42, grew up in Colorado and majored in medieval studies at Smith College. When she interviewed at MerriamWebster in 1998, she was puzzled to learn the job involved writing definitions. “I just thought, ‘Why would you need to do that?’ ” she recalled. “Hasn’t the dictionary already been written?”
Word by Word describes her own initiation into the art of lexicography, which involves wrestling with the continuous evolution of language. She walks the reader, chapter by chapter, through different aspects of a definition.
There are only about 50 lexicographers working at dictionary companies in the United States today, Stamper estimated. But their work, she believes, remains as vital as it was in Noah Webster’s day.
“There’s something to having a bunch of nerds sitting in an office dispassionately reading lots of material and distilling the meaning of a word,” she said. “It really is this weird democratic process.”