There’s a common assumption, Stamper notes, that such reference volumes-whether they exist in print or online, whether they’re branded Merriam-Webster or American Heritage or Oxford English-operate with grand, hushed Authority, their bulky contents the final words on our current words. The scolds are offering top-down rebukes about a language that changes from the bottom up.Īnd, so, dictionaries. Contemporary English is what it is, Stamper suggests, not just because the islands of Britain happened, across the distance of history, to have been conquered by speakers of Latin and German and French English is also English because Shakespeare appreciated a good fart joke, and because Lewis Carroll found the words invented by the time his century came along to be lacking, and because, in 2015, a 16-year-old named Peaches Monroee looked at her image in a car mirror and decided that the best way to describe her perfectly styled eyebrows was “on fleek.” English, like any other language, is a geopolitical phenomenon that evolves by way of individual genius. It’s a spirited defense of the messiness and experimentation that allows a language to thrive as a tool for human communication. So did Abraham Lincoln, those four score and many more years ago.īetween the lines, though, Word by Word is something broader still: It’s a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds. Jane Austen used the possessive “it’s.” So did Thomas Jefferson. Stamper’s excellent new book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is, like a dictionary itself, a composite affair: It’s a memoir that is also an explanation of the work that writing a dictionary entails-and, in both of those things, an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the English language. And, more to the point, the senses of disruption here can’t be meaningfully distinguished from each other, when it comes to the underlying Darwinism that guides English diction. Was Wallace wrong, or merely prescient? Was he disrupting the English language, or, you know, disrupting it? As Kory Stamper, a longtime lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, suggests: both. Even David Foster Wallace, master of contemporary English and self-proclaimed linguistic “snoot,” committed the ultimate usage sin of the committed usage snob: He used “literally,” yep, figuratively. So did Abraham Lincoln, those four score and many more years ago. Thomas Jefferson used such an “it’s,” too. Jane Austen, it turns out, employed the possessive “it’s” in her writing, and still managed to die a relatively dignified death. Well, you know what they say about assumptions. It is to assume, on the flip side, that to violate those rules is also to commit a very particular kind of violence against English and, by extension, its many speakers. It is to assume that someone’s adherence to the moment’s current rules of usage is a signifier of that person’s education and worth. (The subtitle of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, one might point out, itself contains a usage error: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation might more properly be written as “ The Zero-Tolerance Approach.”) The irony is broader: To engage in such peevery, playful or otherwise, is also to ignore the long, chaotic, and deeply creative history of the English language. The vitriol is ironic-and, yes, I do mean ironic, Alanis-wise and otherwise-and not merely because it puts the pendants in a precarious place, karmically. ![]() When not working on a puzzle, David can be found reading his favorite daily comic strips.The Average Guy Who Spent 6,003 Hours Trying to Be a Professional Golfer Stephen Phillips Additionally, David is a frequent attendee of crossword puzzle conventions and a respected tournament judge. He is the founder and director of the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project, a collaborative effort to build a digitized, searchable database of New York Times crossword puzzles dating back to 1942. David is also the author of two books of crosswords: Chromatics (Puzzazz, 2012) and Juicy Crosswords (Sterling/Puzzlewright Press, 2016). He was most recently the editor of The Puzzle Society Crossword. To date, David has had hundreds of puzzles published in the Times and other markets (Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Daily Celebrity Crossword, The Crosswords Club, The American Values Club Crossword, BuzzFeed and The Jerusalem Post). ![]() ![]() ![]() At the age of 15, David became the crossword editor of the Orange County Register's 24 affiliated newspapers. David Steinberg published his first crossword puzzle in The New York Times when he was just 14 years old, making him the second-youngest constructor to be published under Will Shortz's editorship.
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