"I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language"

March 17, 2017 10:18 AM

Longreads has “Hrafnkell,” the first chapter of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper. (Previously)
posted by gladly (12 comments total)

Sitting in near silence for eight hours a day, no phones, little to no communication with co-workers, tons of reading? This is my dream job. (Going to check job openings.)
posted by ElleElle at 12:00 PM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Great essay/chapter! Here's some context for the post title:

From that point on, I was a woman obsessed: I traced words across the rough sword and buckler of Old English, over the sibilant seesaw of Middle English, through the bawdy wink-wink-nudge-nudge of Shakespeare; I picked and chipped at words like “supercilious” until I found the cool, slow-voweled Latin and Greek under them. I discovered that “nice” used to mean “lewd” and “stew” used to mean “whorehouse.” I hadn’t just fallen down this rabbit hole: I saw that hole in the distance and ran full tilt at it, throwing myself headlong into it. The more I learned, the more I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language.

Thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 12:05 PM on March 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

I always thought I was a lexiphile, but it turns out that this is not a word. Lexicophilia is, sort of. Logophile is a word, but an ugly one, and too broad to allude to my love of dictionaries, not just words, willy-nilly. Can't you people at Merriam-Webster's crawl out of your sea of self-abnegation and properly define yourselves?
posted by kozad at 12:57 PM on March 17, 2017

> Steve pointed out that there were no phones at most desks; if you needed to make or take a phone call, for whatever horrible reason...

Gosh, I like the author even more. Her book is already on order at "my" astonishing library, and it already has a queue of readers waiting for it.

About that article that Longreads is going to show you at the bottom of the chapter, about McPhee's writing machine: the first link in the Appendix is broken. You can get that dictionary at Gutenberg.org.
posted by the Real Dan at 1:02 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've heard Kory Stamper speak, at the American Copy Editors Society national conference. She's terrific. You can also follow her on Twitter, https://twitter.com/KoryStamper

When I was growing up, I thought I wanted to be a librarian because that seemed to be the only job I could think of that would let me read books all day. The calling to love of language comes early.
posted by etaoin at 3:34 PM on March 17, 2017

Kory is awesome and I second following her on Twitter.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:06 PM on March 17, 2017

M-W sounds moribund. My four years amongst lexicographers and editors nearly 20 years ago was quite the opposite: improbably social, with the lexis being (mostly) spectacularly computer-literate. E-mail was used heavily, and we had delivery groups for every official purpose and hundreds more for every other unofficial one. We all handled cits electronically — except for the outside research team who used paper slips and were derided as dinosaurs. We ran what were then giant text corpora to pull out collocations and usage notes, and we could track new senses within a couple of months of publication. We weren't even as technologically advanced as Oxford (they were busy inventing XML at the time, and had access to research money we could only dream of). Chambers' smaller shop could beat us for whimsy, though our tech made defectors from Edinburgh gasp.

There were characters, sure. The impossibly well-spoken senior editor whose single known exclamation of “Fuck!” was so perfectly timed and apt at a time of crisis that it became part of office legend. Another editor who was a thesaurus, spitting out Roget heading numbers with ease (along with eye-watering obscenities and tips on finding and consuming magic mushrooms). An editor who could solve crosswords as fast as he could write. Another very shy one who composed sonnets in Latin with sly modern cultural references. But everyone was in love with words, and it was a fantastic place to work.
posted by scruss at 5:01 PM on March 17, 2017 [9 favorites]

I loved everything about that piece and immediately got the book, so thanks for the post or I might not have.
posted by old_growler at 6:22 PM on March 17, 2017

The Great Passage (舟を編む Fune o Amu) is a best-selling novel by Japanese novelist Shion Miura, about the decade+ effort to compile and publish a Japanese language dictionary. One reason it takes so long is budget cuts, as the publisher considers dictionaries to be money-losers. Nevertheless the people in the dictionary department persist, driven by their love of words.

The novel was adapted to both a live action film and a TV anime series. For the anime adaptation, 11 dictionary publishers participated in a tie-in, each episode opening featuring a dictionary from a different publisher. Sanrio also created "jisho-tan" mascots for the anime.
posted by needled at 7:11 PM on March 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

I always thought I was a lexiphile, but it turns out that this is not a word.

Lexiphile: En êtes vous certain?
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:24 AM on March 18, 2017

Oh my goodness, that office sounds like heaven.
posted by Lexica at 2:32 PM on March 20, 2017

Sitting in near silence for eight hours a day, no phones, little to no communication with co-workers, tons of reading? This is my dream job. (Going to check job openings.)

I occasionally tweet at Merriam-Webster and a couple of their employees asking if they're hiring. Last time I tried it, the response was hysterical laughter.
posted by WizardOfDocs at 2:23 PM on March 24, 2017