My review of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries:
A priceless weapon in the war against linguistic pedantry. (But not much use to a professional linguist: it's mostly 101 and 201.)
Behold:
~ For fun, I'm going to list here all the words and phrases I've learnt from this book:
chaw
board book
scleroderma
cacafuego
kegger
brownnoser
lickspittle
lexophile
colloq
soap (= soap opera)
tweedy
(at) full tilt
blither
flop sweat
want ad
to deadpan
oriel (window)
echoic
fusty
glut
to bung
the heebie-jeebies
taupe
echoey
bugger all
minyan
sprachgefühl
advisedly
flash-fry
whoop it up
swank
a foil (~ contrast)
go/run to seed
finagle
get bent
whip-smart
cri de coeur
shake out
foofaraw
scare quotes
onymous
chancery
level best
a lick of
like gangbusters
transmission error (= scribal error)
issuance
foreignism
the whole (kit and) caboodle
solecism
ne plus ultra
of-the-moment
snoot (= snob)
poniard
dubiosity
complainant
button it, button your mouth/lip
yap (= mouth)
unthaw
no dice
fustigate
potamology, potamologist
Ebonics
uptalk
bête noire
pre-trial deposition
claims adjuster
cromulent
dog whistle
nebbish
down-home
meet (= suitable)
nutbar
ravening
neck and neck
a gas (= a delight)
epistemophilic
edge out
whiffle
sniffy
chisel in
squidgy
bear out
hazing
logophile
youngie
horndog
muckety-muck
spackle
hot rod
drivetrain
ga(c)k
ho-bag
copy (-> copywriter)
hangnail
fustian
give sb the side-eye
strains [of music]
cover one's ass
lightfaced, lightface
megillah
Do you even English?
oenophile
staying power
snollygoster
trot sth out
jugate
remit (~ designated area of activity)
ostensive definition
snickerdoodle
piece (= female sexual partner)
bupkes
futz
chesterfield
davenport
settee
squab
precis
postpositively <-> prepositively
holdover
wheelhouse
fascinator
scuff
pant-hoot
pack in
miserere
gobs of
tromp
rhadamanthine
vecturist
ticker-tape
put sth to bed
sphygmomanometer
unrufflable
whelp
liner notes
mash note
linguistic reclamation (= reappropriation, resignification)
squonk
all wet
hedge (~ dodge)
gussy (up)
rando
beige (= vanilla)
deep waters
originalism
trick sth out
dickishness
when the rubber meets the road
truck in sth
buck against sth
au courant
blench
wend
beyond the pale
squiggly
arrant
imprimatur
passel
double-dome
pearl clutching
make it snow
have it in for sb
shit/turd-stirrer
burn the biscuits
dope slap
read sth into sth
wevs (= whatever)
obvi (= obviously)
noogie
jimmies
cosset
diddly-squat
herd cats
obelus
metathesis (NB stress)
anecdata
bubba
mush mouth
malamute
be cooking (with gas)
put one's oar in
brainpan
retronym
tired: beat, wiped, whipped, laid out, done in, dead
make the big leagues
hootamaganzy
jerkery
encomium
faff (about/around)
borborygmus
dead-cat bounce
rassle
unkenned
cultivative
that's/them's the breaks
like calls unto like, deep calls unto deep
jiggery-pokery
~ In case the above words haven't been fun enough, Stamper smites with sentences as well:
Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid.
~ Brethren and sister...n(?) linguists! Have you ever shed blood and tears in the war of prescriptivism against descriptivism?
Well, even if so, you've shed
nothing. The mighty go straight for the fire and brimstone:
In a letter to his publisher, E. B. White, the second half of the famous Strunk and White responsible for the best-selling writing guide
The Elements of Style, beautifully expresses the modern complaint against descriptivism:
I have been sympathetic all along with your qualms about “The Elements of Style,” but I know that I cannot, and will-shall not, attempt to adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow. Your letter expresses contempt for this fellow, but on the other hand you seem to want his vote. I am against him, temperamentally and because I have seen the work of his disciples, and I say the hell with him.
Descriptivists, those anything-goes hippies: we have seen their work, and right-thinking people everywhere say to hell with them.
Now, as a lexicographer, you are one.
Yes, the wrong-thinking hippie that I am, I find it hilarious that people still look up to The Elements of Style.
~ So, all written languages pass through that, eh?
In the sixteenth century, English was established as a language of record; now it was time to make it a fully literary language.
The problem was that plenty of England’s best writers thought English wasn’t quite up to the task. This wasn’t anything new: complaints about the fitness of English have practically been a national pastime since at least the twelfth century, and if the written record were more complete, I’m sure we’d find scrawled in the corner of some Old English manuscript a complaint that English is horrible and Latin is way better. John Skelton wrote a poem that most likely dates to the early sixteenth century in which he claims that “our naturall tong is rude” and really not up to the task of poetry, and he was the damned poet laureate of England. If English was going to be a literary language, it had a lot of work to do.
And eventually they come to this:
Езикът ни, брато, е адски готин.
Езикът ни направо е трепач.
От кеф чак под небцето си се потим,
затапиме ли някой натегач...
(Да можех сега и да намеря кой го беше писал...)
~ Grammar nazis ain't gonna like this book:
So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.
Take, for example, the rule that we’re not to end sentences with prepositions. It’s one that is drummed into most young writers at some point in their careers, and failing to heed it will result in some teacherly knuckle smacking (literal or figurative). If you ask a modern adherent to this rule why, exactly, you aren’t supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, they merely goggle at you as if you had just asked why you aren’t supposed to lick electrical sockets. Because it’s objectively better not to, that’s why.
The rule itself was first articulated by the seventeenth-century poet and literary critic John Dryden. (...) Dryden was a son of the Renaissance, and as such was a fan of all things classical: a classical liberal arts education, which placed an emphasis on grammar and rhetoric; the classical (and mostly Latin) authors; the elegance, concision, and precision of Latin itself. It wasn’t just a passing fancy: Dryden often translated his sentences into Latin to see how concise and elegant they were, then translated them back into English with Latin’s lovely grammar in mind. This is likely what led Dryden to deplore the terminal preposition—in Latin, prepositions can’t come at the end of sentences, and Latin is the ne plus ultra of elegance, refinement, and—most important—longevity. Dryden’s distaste for the terminal preposition was repeated and reinforced by usage writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until it became a rule.
The problem with this rule is a familiar one: English grammar is not Latin grammar. The languages are cousins, but not close ones, because they come from different branches of the Indo-European language tree. English has a grammatical structure similar to other Germanic languages, and Latin has a grammatical structure similar to other Italic languages. Blending grammatical systems from two languages on different branches of the Indo-European language tree is a bit like mixing orange juice and milk: you can do it, but it’s going to be nasty.
Let me say that again: Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage. Under this mentality, the idea that the best practices of English change with time is anathema. It doesn’t preserve English so much as pickle it. It’s a circle unbroken: in every age, some learned pedant discovers all over again that English is a clunker, and they race to the rooftops to shout it to the unwashed, stupid masses and begin fomenting for a walkback. (...)
We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.
~ My own treatment when I entered high school (and brought along my mutt of a Bulgarian accent) wasn't nearly that bad, but I can definitely sympathize:
As careful as I was, my dialect still betrayed me when I relocated to New England for college. The way I spoke sounded completely normal to my ears, but drop that dialect smack into the middle of Massachusetts and suddenly I was a big ol’ hick. My roommate used to make fun of how flat and wide my vowels were; I spoke so slowly that one classmate assumed I had a speech impediment. I said “howdy” often, and in response one deeply stupid (or cruel) woman asked if I rode a horse to school and had electricity where I grew up.
The snobbery can get real ugly or plain dangerous:
Jeantel is black, and she natively speaks Haitian Creole as well as English. Throughout her testimony, the defense kept asking her if she understood English or if she was having a difficult time understanding the questions put to her. She consistently objected: she understood the questions just fine, and she was answering them honestly and completely. The problem was that she was answering them in AAVE, a dialect whose speakers are often painted as ignorant and uneducated. The white jury interrupted proceedings several times and claimed they could not understand her, and the defense attorney questioned one part of a pretrial deposition she gave concerning what she heard during the struggle. During that interview, she said she heard someone yell, “Get off!” and when she was asked, “Could you tell who it was?” the transcript indicated that she first answered, “I couldn’t know Trayvon,” and later, “I couldn’t hear Trayvon.” But Rickford points out that, even in Haitian Creole, those answers make no sense in context. “When another linguist and I listened to the TV broadcast of the recording played in court we heard, instead, ‘I could, an’ it was Trayvon.’ ” Rickford notes that he’d need to listen to a better recording of the initial interview that was transcribed. “But,” he goes on, “she definitely did not say what the transcript reports her to have said.”
It’s hard to jump to the conclusion that the jury would have decided differently had the interview been transcribed differently. But the “mights” weigh very heavily: had a native speaker of AAVE been on the jury or in the courtroom, Jeantel’s testimony might not have been discredited, and the verdict might have been different. That is, as we say in my native dialect, worth reckoning.
~ The secret life of dictionarists:
You must also excise all potential double entendres from the book; they say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind, and they are right. Editors are, at heart, twelve: if we can construe something as a fart or sex (or a fart and sex) joke, we will. This is a double-edged sword as you write verbal illustrations: the elevation of your adult duty is constantly pulling against the gravity of your native gutter thinking. Duty must prevail because duty ostensibly pays the bills, and so [ I think we should do it ] gets changed to [ I don’t want to do that ]; [ That’s a big one! ] becomes [ That’s a big fish! ]; [ He screwed in the lightbulb ] becomes nothing at all.
~ Recently, I had this concept on the tip of my tongue (which, oddly, is as far from the tip of my fingers as possible):
One part of many identity movements is linguistic reclamation. This is a process by which a maligned group—women, gay men, people of color, the disabled, and so on—take an inflammatory slur that’s been directed at them as a group and begin using it themselves as an identity marker of pride. It’s done to remove power from the oppressor, the linguistic version of catching an arrow shot at you in flight.
~ Another slippery slope gets slipped upon:
(...) we really do love acronyms, and especially acronymic explanations for words. “Constable on patrol,” “to insure promptness,” “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden,” (...) “fornication under consent of the king” (or “for unlawful carnal knowledge,” or “forbidden under charter of the king,” or “file under carnal knowledge”): all of them are the punch line for excellent stories about the supposed origins of those words, and they are all complete “ship high in transit.”
