Posts Tagged ‘lexicography’
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”*…
In an piece adapted/updated from his recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, Stefan Fatsis explores process(es) that determine our “Word[s] of the Year”…
Thirty-five years ago, the late English professor Allan Metcalf [see here] had an idea. “I was thinking that Time magazine has its Person of the Year,” he told me, “and why can’t we do for words what Time did for people?”
Metcalf assumed that the language pros at the American Dialect Society, which held the first WOTY vote in 1990, would nominate words “headed straight for our everyday vocabulary and secure places in the dictionaries.” But he misjudged human behavior. Lexicography is sober research committed quietly and alone. Word of the Year is a key party: You can’t be sure who you’ll go home with. The inaugural winner, bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” barely lasted a news cycle.
After some eye-rolling, criteria were established: Was the word completely new? Had it been used before in other contexts? Was it “a major focus of human activity or behavior” in the previous year? Did it have staying potential? WOTY could be brand-new or newly popular. But it had to have been used widely and reflect the zeitgeist of the annum gone by.
Today there are around a dozen Words of the Year (Word of the Years?) in English, and WOTY season runs from late fall to early January. Dictionaries duke it out for attention, some touting their scientific methodology for picking a winner, others offering a nebulous alchemy of number-crunching and feel. The dialect society, the WOTY OG, conducts a live popular vote in a hotel ballroom at a language conference, the outcome based more often than not on vibes alone.
No matter the formula, selecting one word to define a year is serious business. It’s about the sharp lines of language and usage, how society adopts and spreads new terminology, and, increasingly, the dramatic ways that social media influence the way we write, talk, and interact. As a culture we’re forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. WOTY neatly boxes up 365 days in a single, simple word (technically a “vocabulary item”; phrases, compounds, and affixes also are eligible). It’s media catnip and hot-take gold.
“It gives people this sense of ownership,” says New York Times Wordplay columnist Sam Corbin, who’s writing a book about what she calls the WOTY-verse. “We have always been exploring new ways to fill gaps in vocabulary but also respond to culture with words. It’s delicious.”
For the dialect society, which crowns a champ last, the job is so weighty that it takes two days to pick a winner—nominations one night, balloting the next. I’ve participated in around a decade’s worth of votes. I check my journalistic objectivity at the door and do my linguistic duty. Every year, a pattern emerges. A few words totally surprise, some a product of Gen Z (or Gen Alpha) or gamer culture that’s bypassed middle-aged me (hello, skibidi, a 2023 nominee). Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language. So is observer bias, with crowd approval often directly proportional to shock value (the suffix -ussy winning in 2022; rawdog in 2024).
Looking at the victorious words from a distance, you might nod in recognition of a specific event (chad, 2000; bailout, 2008), cringe at terminology that dates you (World Wide Web, 1995), or wonder what the hell people were thinking (to pluto, a verb meaning to demote, as in what happened to Pluto when it was reclassified from full-fledged to dwarf planet, 2006). But that’s the genius of Word of the Year. We’re suckers for media-driven argument engines. It’s a short walk from “LeBron is better than Jordan!” to “They should have picked rizz!”
Since around 2010, when the newsy app defeated the funner nom—as in the onomatopoetic nomnomnom, to connote eating—younger voters (mostly grad students and junior faculty) have tilted the conversation away from dictionary-type words toward social media and online slang. “It’s generally who makes the best argument in the room, and you can’t predict that,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee.
A couple of votes stand out for me, for linguistic and cultural reasons. One was in Austin, Texas, in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and nearly half of the WOTY nominees were related to him: post-truth, basket of deplorables, unpresidented, alt-right, fake news, locker-room banter, yuuuge. But the mood was ominous, not apocalyptic. It was, after all, pre-inauguration, pre-Charlottesville, pre-impeachments, pre-pandemic, pre-2020 election, pre-January 6, pre-felony indictments, pre-felony convictions, pre-assassination attempts, pre-2024 election, pre-ICE raids: pre-everything.
WOTY promised closure, and everyone was down for that. In the middle of the room, Dan Villareal, a linguistics postdoc, stood up. “Okay,” he said. “It’s 2016. Dumpster fire?” Earlier in the evening, the fire emoji, and also the trashcan and fire emojis used together to represent dumpster fire, won the emoji category. One of the older attendees had asked what dumpster fire meant. “It is used to describe an incredibly catastrophic situation,” Zimmer explained. “Like some people think 2016 was one long dumpster fire.”
Normalize, post-truth, and the fire emoji also got WOTY nominations—the first time an emoji had made the final group. So did woke. “Granted it’s been around a while,” cherubic Stanford linguist John Rickford, a titan in the field, said. “But only if you stay woke can you put out the dumpster fire.” The house was brought down, and I figured it was game over. But then another postdoc, Nicole Holliday, lobbied against the word—“because it was appropriated from the Black solidarity movement in the 1960s and I think that we are so late to this game and last year was anything but woke,” she said. Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.
The journey of the two words since then demonstrates WOTY’s unpredictability and its historical value. Dumpster fire was relatively new and the WOTY early-warning system worked; Merriam-Webster added it just 14 months later. Woke, by contrast, would take a far more disturbing linguistic ride. The dialect society voters who (literally) snapped their fingers in approval for woke would watch it get twisted by political commentators and a demagogic right-wing into what was tantamount to a slur.
The dialect society’s last two votes also feel, in hindsight, like markers. When the group gathered in New York to pick the 2023 winner, Joe Biden was president and Trump was a long shot to return to power. The Israel-Hamas war drew a nomination of ceasefire, but the Barbie movie, AI, and online slang dominated the discourse. The most spirited debate was over a word that didn’t appear in Sam Corbin’s Times write-up of the event: cunty, “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or attitude.”
The winner straddled the line between serious and fun: enshittification, meaning a gradual deterioration in the quality of internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords. The 2024 vote, in Philadelphia, also was relatively apolitical; maybe we were all terrified about Trump’s impending inauguration. Rawdog was subversive and fun. The runner-up, sanewashing, was doomy, but more of a criticism of how the media handled Trump than of Trump himself.
Kicking off the 2025 WOTY campaign, Dictionary.com eschewed the perilous state of the union and opted for the ubiquitous (and annoying, to adults) Gen Alpha nonsense catchphrase 67 (also written 6-7 or six seven). The British dictionary Collins went with the AI term vibe coding, which it said “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.” Other dictionaries are likely to lean into our quick descent into competitive authoritarianism and choose an existing word that was of the moment and looked up a lot: totalitarian, fascism (for which former Dictionary.com editor John Kelly made the case), deportation, crackdown, tariff, shutdown. (Surreal and unprecedented, fyi, have already had a turn; chaos is available.)
For the American Dialect Society voters, current-events words need to capture the seriousness of the political moment, possess some cultural stickiness, and be lexically dynamic. Language writer Nancy Friedman, who tracks potential WOTYs on her Substack, Fritinancy, flagged DOGE as a verb meaning to fire or purge and as a “combining form,” as in DOGEboys or DOGEbags. Various tariff spinoffs—such as tariffied, which has appeared in lots of headlines—also show promise. Other candidates unite the sober and the clever: Kavanaugh stop, broligarchy, trolligarchy, sadopopulism.
Brianne Hughes, a linguist and writer, maintains a running list of 2025 WOTY hopefuls on the alt-dictionary site Wordnik—around 250 of them so far, including #NoKings, Coldplayed, clanker, aura farming, Straw Hat Pirates, Gen Z stare, and chopped unc, a combo of the internet slang chopped and unc. (Some late additions: Young Republicans, in the wake of a Politico story revealing racist banter in a GOP group chat; Trumpstein files; and Gestapo Barbie, a derogative nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.)
“Choosing the Word of the Year is No Easy Feat“- the history of who and how, from @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @literaryhub.bsky.social
See also Fatsis on the precarious status of the dictionary: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
* Lewis Carroll (Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass)
###
As we contemplate coinage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Animals recorded “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which had been first recorded by Nina Simone earlier that year. It was the first single released from their album Animal Tracks (followed by “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”).
“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
“Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer useful”… Stefan Fatsis on the challenges faced by the purveyors of today’s dictionaries…
In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favorite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”) Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.
Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.
Call it the paradox of the modern dictionary. We’re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words—a time of “meta awareness” of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone. More people use them than ever, and dictionary publishers now possess the digital wherewithal to closely track that use. Podcasts, newsletters, and Words of the Year have popularized neologisms, etymologies, and usage trends. Meanwhile, analytical software has revolutionized linguistic inquiry, enabling greater understanding of the ways language works—when, how, and why words break out; the specific contexts for expressions and idioms. And all of that was true long before the rise of AI.
But these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary. Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don’t care or can’t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. Before he left Merriam, Morse told me that legacy dictionaries face the same growing popular distrust of traditional authorities that media and government have encountered…
[Fatsis recounts the recent troubled commercial history of lexicography: Merriam, Dictionary.com, et al…]
It’s hard to know what future business model might save the industry. Getting swallowed by a tech giant expecting hockey-stick growth has proved untenable. A billionaire willing to let the dictionary just be the dictionary—a self-sustaining company with a modest staff performing an outsize cultural job that might not always be profitable—looks less likely after Dan Gilbert’s foray. A grand national dictionary project—some collaboration among government, private, nonprofit, and academic institutions—feels like the Platonic ideal. But with universities and intellectual inquiry under assault in 2025, I’m not holding my breath.
At Merriam-Webster, the standard capitalist model is working, at least for now, as is its hybrid print-digital approach. The publisher has rebounded from its mid-2010s struggles. It was a social-media darling during the first Trump administration, racking up likes and retweets for its smart-alecky and politically subversive social-media persona. (When Donald Trump tweeted “unpresidented” instead of “unprecedented,” the Merriam account responded: “Good morning! The #WordOfTheDay is … not ‘unpresidented’. We don’t enter that word. That’s a new one.”) Britannica invested in software, hardware, and humans to enable Merriam to better navigate Google’s algorithms. Merriam added a phalanx of games, including Wordle knockoffs and a dictionary-based crossword, to attract and retain visitors.
Merriam has outlasted a long line of American dictionaries. But plenty of household media names have been humbled by the shifting habits of digital consumers. Even before Google’s AI Overview began taking clicks from definitions written by flesh-and-bone lexicographers, the trajectory of the industry was clear.
After Merriam shut down its online unabridged revision, I stuck around the company’s 85-year-old brick headquarters, reporting and defining. I eventually drafted about 90 definitions. Most of them didn’t make the cut. But a handful are enshrined online, including politically charged terms such as microaggression and alt-right, and whimsicalones such as sheeple and, yes, dogpile.
While I’m proud of these small contributions to lexicography, my wanderings through dictionary culture convinced me of something far more important: the urgent need to save this slowly fading business. Twenty years ago, an estimated 200 full-time commercial lexicographers were working in the United States; today the number is probably less than a quarter of that. At a time when contentious words dominate our conversations—think insurrection and fascism and fake news and woke—the need for dictionaries to chronicle and explain language, and serve as its watchdog, has never been greater…
Adapted from Fatsis” new book, Unabridged- The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary: “Is This the End of the Dictionary?” @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com.
* Steven Wright
###
As we look it up, we might we might send carefully-chosen words of birthday greeting to William Cuthbert Faulkner; he was born on this date in 1897. A writer of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, screenplays, and one play, Faulkner is best remembered for his novels (e.g., The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August) and stories set in “Yoknapatawpha County,” a setting largely based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. They earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Faulkner inadvertently expressed (what would pass in the context on the piece above for) confidence in the longevity of Ernest Hemingway’s work: in 1951 he observed that “he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
On the other hand…
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
From Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III, by William Faulkner
“This place is weird as f*ck”*…
In an excerpt from his book, The F-Word, Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower on the f-bomb, its origins and development, and its illimitable uses…
In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating…
… How has this word, which has been around for many hundreds of years, maintained both its intense interest and its uncommon power?
There is no simple answer to this question; too many factors come into play. Sex is certainly one factor. The vast majority of uses of fuck in modern English are nonsexual, but it has retained its sexual meanings and connotations across many centuries, and sex is something that’s always hovering around our consciousness. The word has amassed a great many other uses, though, and so the reasons for its singular force and appeal are likewise diverse and complex.
Fuck has an enormous range of uses across many parts of speech, as this dictionary details: sexual and nonsexual, positive and negative, literal and figurative, funny and violent. For any situation, there’s probably some sense, some expression or catchphrase, some proverb, some intonation that can be brought to the table.
And it just feels good to say. It feels good in the mouth, giving shape to catharsis; it can also feel good in the brain, satisfying a strong emotional need or a desire for personal expression. It can help us bond with peers, gain or direct attention, persuade listeners, and establish or test intimacy.
Psycholinguistic research shows that using certain kinds of swear words can even improve the body’s physical strength and resistance to pain. (But the more you swear in daily life, the smaller the analgesic effect.)
Words such as fuck are often criticized for being “bad,” or we are told that we should avoid them. But what is appropriate depends on context—and sometimes we want to be inappropriate. This word is an important part of our culture, our vocabulary, and our heritage, and that is always something worth knowing more about…
[Sheidlower explores its etymology (where it’s from), its cultural history (especially its taboo status), and its current status…]
… In its recent reports, older people are more likely to rate the F-word as a strong swear, while middle-aged people consider it moderate, and young people see it as becoming more acceptable in public use. Equivalent research in New Zealand shows “significant declines in unacceptability of fuck– words” even from 2018 to 2022.
While a few publications still refuse to print fuck regardless of the circumstances, most have no such qualms. The more literary magazines have printed the word for some time, and by the early 2000s even Newsweek and Time had started to do so; the publication of the Starr Report in the New York Times, and a notable comment from Vice President Dick Cheney in the Washington Post, has meant that even the proper papers consider fuck fit to print.
Even commercial television, though still subject to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, is becoming more open in its use…
Eminently worth reading in full: “A Brief History of the Most Famous Swear Word in the World,” from @jessesheidlower in @lithub.
Vaguely related (but interesting in any case): “Ouch! Study investigates pain vocalizations and interjections across 131 languages.”
* Margaret Atwood
###
As we ponder profanity, we might spare a thought for Albert Francis Blakeslee; he died on this date in 1954. A botanist, he is best remembered for his discovery (while still a graduate student) that Mucors (bread molds), thought at the time to be homothallic (that’s to say, had a single “mating type” that replicated asexually) actually had two mating types and reproduced sexually. His findings revolutionized the understanding of the sexual reproduction of the lower plants. In fact, his discovery was so influential that the fungi Phycomyces blakesleeanus and Blakeslea trispora were named after him.
“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all”*…
Jack Shepherd, in praise of phrases that persevere…
I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a distant past living tourist lives in the host homes they have somehow carved out of our alien present. These are the “fossil words,” obsolete and active all at once; common as dirt, but strange to the touch. If you saw one out alone at night, you’d recognize it as an interloper right away — they often wear their unbelonging openly — words like “wend,” “knell,” “druthers,” “eke,” and “dudgeon.” But they are adept at hiding in plain sight: “Wend your way.” “Death knell.” “If I had my druthers.” “Eke out a living.” “A state of high dudgeon.” And some are even better hidden, revealing their antediluvian sensibility only on close inspection — “point” in “in point of fact;” “needs” in “must needs;” “the” in “nonetheless,” “step” in “stepson.”
A rather marvelous but mostly forgotten 1901 book called Words & Their Ways in English Speech by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge is (as far as I can tell) the earliest text to describe these remarkable anachronisms as “fossils”…
Some of the fossils the authors single out (such as “whilom”) have themselves mostly vanished from the language since the book was published, but many more are still with us: “Umbrage,” for instance, which is never seen outside of the phrase “to take umbrage at,” is a word that literally means “shade” or “shadow” (as in umbrella), and someone takes umbrage at something (presumably) because it has cast a shadow on them (a converse of the more contemporary “throwing shade.”) “Dudgeon,” similarly, can’t walk on its own two feet outside of the phrase “High dudgeon.” Greenough and Kittredge speculate that it could be related to an earlier dudgeon that referred to the wood used to make knife handles, but most other sources are skeptical of this. In fact, it may have its roots in the Italian aduggiare, “to overshadow,” which would make it, rather satisfyingly, a cousin to umbrage.
Armed with the concept of “fossil words,” you can start to see them everywhere: The “Pale” that only exists in “Beyond the Pale” is unrelated to the “Pale” that means “colorless” — it’s an otherwise obsolete word from the Latin palus, meaning “stake” and, by extension, “boundary.” The “Dint” that can nevermore escape from the phrase “By dint of” was once a mighty sword strike — the Old English dynt means “a blow from a weapon.” “Offing,” a nautical term for the open sea as it’s seen from the shore, now survives only in “In the offing,” which itself probably only survives because it was a favorite phrase of Bertie Wooster…
Unlike the “Step” that means “moving a foot forward” and comes from the Old English steppan, the “Step-” in “Stepchild” is the last remaining vestige in English of a word that meant “bereaved.” As Greenough and Kittredge explain:
“The step- in stepson and the like is the adjective stēop, ‘destitute,’ ‘bereaved,’ so that stepson or stepchild is the same as orphan, which comes from the Greek for ‘bereaved.’ Stepfather and stepmother are therefore terms which could only have arisen after the step- had lost its proper sense. A stepmother is not a ‘bereaved mother,’ but one who takes the place of a mother to the bereaved children. This illustrates the tendency of language to form groups, and to make new words to fill out any gaps that may be observed in any group.”
Which is to say that not only have these charming little time travelers made homes of their own in the language, some of them are starting families…
More examples of long-lived lexicography: “These Lovely “Fossil Words” Are Hiding in Plain Sight,” from @expresident.
* Winston Churchill
###
As we honor our elders, we might note that the work that went far to popularize the word “bohemian,” Giacomo Puccini‘s La bohème, premiered in Turin at the Teatro Regio on this date in 1896. It was conducted by the then 28 year old Arturo Toscanini. While it was dismissed by some critics at the time as simple and unchallenging, it has become a central part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.
“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution”*…
Roddy Howland Jackson (himself a setter of puzzles) considers the origins of, and reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada’s seminal puzzles, the original cryptic crosswords…
Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew…
T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, Torquemada, and the Modernist crossword: “Beastly Clues,” from @roddyhj in @PublicDomainRev.
See also “Topic: Surprise, Drowsy Cows RIP, as Corrected (2,5,7,10)“
* Stephen Sondheim (who helped introduce Americans to British-style cryptic crosswords)
###
As we contemplate circuitous clues, we might note that today is National Thesaurus Day, celebrated each year on this date in honor of physician, natural theologian, and lexicographer Peter Mark Roget, who was born on this date in 1779. In 1852 Roget published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (or, as we know it, Roget’s Thesaurus), a pioneering collection of related words.
Modern thesauri tend to be collections of synonyms and antonyms. Roget’s Thesaurus was…
… essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user start with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it. The organization of the book reflects the unique intelligence of the polymath that created it…
Roget’s was a two-for-one: it put both a book of synonyms and a topic dictionary (a compendium of thematically arranged concepts) under one cover.
source
You must be logged in to post a comment.