Alphabet snoop

BOOK REVIEW

There are two formal requirements for becoming a Merriam-Webster editor: you must have a university degree and you must be a native speaker of English. The informal requirement is an obsession with words. At her own job interview Stamper burst out, “I just love English. I really, really love it.”

That was a start. “You must also be temperamentally suited to sitting in near silence for eight hours a day and working entirely alone,” Stamper writes. A symbol of the low-tech nature of the enterprise was the presence of two phone booths in the office: there were no telephones on the desks. If you had to make a phone call, the booths were at your disposal. Hardly anyone used them.

But this was not a passionless existence. Controversy roiled about their monastic domain — controversies usually concerned with grammar.

As Stamper points out, grammar has long been a dividing line between social classes. The rude and crude revealed their origins each and every time they said “me and my friend” instead of “my friend and I.” Stamper cites one authority: “Grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which happiness is impossible. Therefore happiness depends at least partly on good grammar.”

Stamper has little patience with such reasoning. We’ve all known people with atrocious grammar who are perfectly well adjusted individuals. There’s no need for the attitude displayed by Lynne Truss, author of the recent manifesto against misuse of punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, who raps the knuckles of her readers with abandon. Stamper is clearly a liberal compared to Truss. “Where do these rules come from, if not from actual use?” she writes. “Most of them are the personal peeves, coded into law, of dead white men of yore.”

This is pushing indulgence a little far, it seems to me. But then I’m the kind of writer who dislikes splitting infinitives, knowing full well that the rule against doing so is a hangover from Latin grammar where you really could not split them. Today upholding this rule in writing just seems to me to be a small grace note. Stamper is on surer ground when she declares that the lexicographer’s job “is to tell the truth about how the language is used.” The lexicographer is not a verbal police officer.

Conservatives, on the other hand, agree with that great lexicographer Samuel Johnson that language has a natural tendency to degenerate. Such people are not upset about getting their itses mixed up so much as the entrance into the language of debased words and phrases. One word that attracts violent hatred, according to Stamper, is “irregardless.” Why it is so loathed is hard to say. Perhaps the word smacks of verbal inflation, the rhetoric of cracker barrel philosophers who instinctively feel, as Stamper puts it, that “the more syllables you slap on to a word the smarter you sound.” Some desperately try to conjure reasons for the word’s bad reputation, such as manufacturing a rule that you should not combine a prefix and a suffix in the same word. Stamper, a self-described “apologist for irregardless,” just tells writers to use ‘irregardless’ if they feel like it.

Overshadowing all of this lies the spectre of that rough beast, the Internet. It’s a handy tool, but there are problems. “Most writing on the Internet is not edited,” Stamper points out. Moreover, “sources can be changed, edited or disappear at will.”

Given the pressures they face, including the imperative to sell goods online, it is not surprising that many dictionaries, including such stalwarts as Funk & Wagnalls and Random House, have recently ceased operations. “Lexicographers need to move faster,” Stamper asserts. “But after a certain point you simply cannot go any faster; to do so compromises the quality of what you’re doing.” Imperatives clash. “The craft of writing a good definition isn’t important in the click economy,” Stamper writes. What is important in that economy “is being agile enough to do what it takes to get to the top of an Internet search results page.”

Even now, being first isn’t always better than being right.