Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (review)
- Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
About a year ago at a Metrolex meeting, where people within the greater New York City area who are interested in dictionaries get together with the increasingly small number of people who make dictionaries to hear speakers talk about dictionaries, I met a journalist who had been embedded at the Merriam-Webster (M-W) office for a few months as a trainee lexicographer. He’d already written an extensive article for a major online magazine about the company and the state of dictionary publishing more broadly, and it appeared that he hoped to write a book about lexicography from the insider’s point of view. He may still write that book, but his heart must have sunk when Word by Word was published. It’s a book by a practicing lexicographer written with scholarly detail, but despite its ten pages of endnotes, a bibliography, and an index, it doesn’t read like a scholarly work: it’s a trade title, meant for a popular audience, an account of one editor’s career at a storied dictionary publisher that’s one part memoir and one part How It’s Made, with the sort of behind-the-curtain knowledge that only twenty years’ worth of actual embedding can produce.
It’s for good reason this book has garnered strong reviews and is widely popular (my copy is from the fourth reprint): the insider is genuine, and she’s like Willy Wonka, granting access to the chocolate factory. Stamper is witty, engaging, and frank—and deeply knowledgeable. Each of her fifteen chapters treats a different aspect of a lexicographer’s responsibilities, from coming to grips with grammar, to collecting and sorting evidence, to interpreting the evidence and drafting definitions, [End Page 107] etymologies, and pronunciations, to handling tricky correspondence with dictionary users. The chapters are thematically titled with a single, prototypical exemplar of the class of issues the chapter treats: “But: On Grammar”; “Irregardless: On Wrong Words”; “Posh: On Etymology and Linguistic Originalism”; and so on.1 The chapter “It’s: On ‘Grammar’” is a small masterpiece of a concise history of the standardization of English. As the topics progress from the fundamentals to the more specialized, and finally to the role of a dictionary in society, we follow in parallel Stamper’s progression from a new hire being schooled in grammar by E. Ward Gilman (“Gil”) to a seasoned definer confronting her own prejudice against irregardless and taking three weeks to respond to hate mail resulting from a campaign against a revision of the definition of marriage.
The first chapter, “Hrafnkell,” is suitably subtitled “On Falling in Love,” and those of us who found ourselves similarly possessed of the sprachgefühl Stamper describes and similarly amazed that we wound up writing dictionaries for a living will recognize ourselves here. When reading Stamper’s description of her rambling and gushing interview for an editorial job at M-W with Stephen Perrault (the director of defining), I remembered my own interview at Longman dictionaries with Michael Rundell: a screen behind him had a KWIC (Key Word in Context) concordance display of lines from the Longman Lancaster corpus, and I interrupted him to ask, “What’s that, and can I play with it?”
Indeed, a singular delight for me as a fellow lexicographer reading Word by Word is how much it captures of my own experience. The general reader can’t truly discern whether Stamper is telling the truth or making up the details of this odd profession out of whole cloth, but we harmless drudges know; when she reveals that dictionary projects never start with the letter A, we nod in recognition. I have learned in reading this book that I am still capable of being sucked right down a rabbit hole, because I want to argue with the gospel according to Merriam-Webster: Only eight parts of speech? Please. Let’s talk determiners...
