Dear Reader,
Long-time friend and author, Marshall Cook, sent an email, inviting me to listen to his upcoming radio show featuring Kory Stamper, the author of Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. It was the subtitle of Ms. Stamper's book that immediately caught my attention. I was intrigued. A secret life of dictionaries? Hmm, what do dictionaries do when they're not helping us with spellings and definitions? Do they have special superhero powers? Are printed dictionaries picketing, protesting the online versions? And come to think of it, just who assembles the words and definitions in a dictionary? I can't imagine. But in her book Word By Word, 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 every-changing word usage."
Marshall Cook is our guest author today and he's going to tell us more about lexicographer Kory Stamper, but I couldn't resist asking Marshall what his favorite word is and does he have a favorite dictionary.
Marshall said, "My favorite word. That changes day by day. 'Lackawanna' is always close at hand (A county and a railroad line in Pennsylvania and the primary reason why we procrastinate), and my current favorite is probably 'Antetokounmpo' (because I can pronounce it--after much practice--and he's a great basketball player).
My Favorite dictionary--book form--my father's old Webster's that he won in a spelling contest in 8th grade in Paterson, New Jersey. For day to day use I go to dictionary.com.--many times a day."
Be sure to say hello to today's guest author Marshall Cook...
Meet Kory Stamper--Word Nerd Extraordinaire
What do you do if you don't know the meaning of a word or how to spell it? You look it up in a dictionary, of course, either on paper or online.
The dictionary (from Greek dict, word) offers our language at our finger tips--correct spelling, pronunciation, part(s) of speech, multiple meanings, in order of most common usage, and even where the word came from originally.
But who decides what a word means, how to say or spell it correctly--or whether a word even belongs in the language at all? The folks who write the dictionaries are called lexicographers, and thanks to one of them, Kory Stamper and her marvelous book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, we now have the answer. It's us. We decide. Usage drives acceptance, which makes English a living, evolving entity.
That's how a made up-word like "Hacktivism" ("illegal computer activity done to promote political ends") can earn a place in the dictionary.
"All words are made up," Stamper notes. "They make it into the dictionary through constant use. They spread and endure"--and the language flourishes.
Lexicographers have to track and verify that usage--no easy task. Turns out there are 645 potential meanings of the simple word "run," for example. That's a lot of tracking.
To be a lexicographer, you must be a native speaker of English and have a college degree in any field. That's it. Word sleuths have to be intelligent, well educated generalists
But it also helps to have "Sprachgefühl," a word we stole from German meaning "an intuitive feeling for language." Stamper had that in abundance even as a precocious child who "clawed my way through board books, hoarded catalogs, and decimated the two monthly magazines we subscribed to (National Geographic and Reader's Digest) by reading them over and over until they fell into tatters."
She became, as she says, "a capital-n Nerd."
A delightfully funny word nerd at that, one who leads us into topics like "dialect shaming" and "code switching" and illustrates why lexicographers sometimes get death threats (as happened to Stamper when Merriam-Webster included the term "gay marriage").
If you love words, you'd love Word by Word. You can also check out Stamper at her website, korystamper.wordpress.com and see how we're using--and shaping--our language every day.
--Marshall Cook
I love to hear from all my fellow Dear Readers: [email protected]
About Author Marshall Cook:
I'm up to all kinds of stuff these days: teaching in the Odyssey Project, writing for and editing my newsletter, Extra Innings, writing and scripting a twice monthly radio show called Writer's and Their Words. Click on the links below for more information.
www.Odyssey.wisc.edu
www.continuingstudies.wisc.edu/writing/extra-innings
www.sunprairiemediacenter.com
And I've got a new novel coming out next month. It's called Glorious, the name of a west central town in Wisconsin I made up and that gets rocked when a first year high school student named Norah decides to try out for the men's baseball team--as narrated (mostly) by "the Voice of Glorious," Kenny Koffee, on WCOW, the mighty six-ninety.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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