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Kory Stamper grew up in Colorado and graduated from Smith College with a degree in medieval studies. She is a lexicographer who was on staff at Merriam-Webster from 1998 to 2018.

Her debut book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries was relased in hardcover in 2017 and is now available in paperback.

Writing in the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphel called Word By Word “Both memoir and exposé, an insider’s tour of the inner circles of the mysterious fortress that is Merriam-Webster,” adding that “Stamper leads us through her own lexicographical bildungsroman, exploring how she fell in love with words and showing us how the dictionary works, and how it interacts with the world that it strives to reflect.”

Kory Stamper has written and appeared in the “Ask the Editor” video series at Merriam-Webster, and she has been a contributor to The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

You can find her blog at harmlessdrudgery.com and follow her on Twitter.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed Word By Word, especially the stories of the individual words and description of the process of lexicography itself. It had not occurred to me that there was an extensive training. What was that training like?

Kory Stamper: You know that scene at the beginning of Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” where Alice and her cat Dinah follow the White Rabbit into a hole in a tree trunk, and as Alice says “Curiosity can lead to trouble,” she falls down the rabbithole into Wonderland? And as she tumbles down, she waves goodbye up at Dinah? That’s what training is like mentally, only fewer cats are involved.

Essentially, the training you get as a lexicographer is designed to make you unlearn everything you have learned about English. You re-learn grammar, you re-learn what meaning is, you even learn how to read differently. It can be very disorienting, but if you’re the right kind of nerd, also really exciting. You come into this work thinking of language as a fixed, almost inviolate thing, and you quickly discover that it’s a living, moving entity with its own will and history and direction. That’s both freeing and terrifying.

EB: Do you remember the first word you got to define? How did that feel?

KS: By the time I was actually put to work on a dictionary, I had written so many practice definitions that I don’t remember what the first word I defined was. I do remember that “body English” was in one of those early batches of real defining, and I was pretty pleased with the definition that I had come up with (which currently reads “bodily motions made in a usually unconscious effort to influence the progress of a propelled object (as a ball)”).

EB: What’s the toughest word you’ve worked on?

KS: “God.” Absolutely, without a doubt. I had to revise the entry for the Unabridged Dictionary, and one of the first things I discovered was that the word “god” was used pretty vaguely in print, which doesn’t give the lexicographer much to work on. So much of the written evidence was stuff like “humanity’s conception of God is inadequate,” which tells me exactly bubkes about what the word “God” means in that sentence.

Lexicographers talk a lot about the difference between lexical defining and real defining. Real defining is the attempt to explain the essential nature of a thing—what is truth, what is beauty. Lexical defining is the attempt to explain what the word which signifies a thing means in particular contexts—what does “beauty” mean in the sentence, “That car’s a real beauty.” We do lexical defining and not real defining. But a word like “god” makes that tightrope even thinner and harder to navigate. Can I say that the word “god” means “a being,” or should I use “a deity”? What about “a spirit”? Can I use the word “omnipotent” in the definition which is meant to cover the Abrahamic religious uses of “god,” or should I fudge it because I have just run across a theological debate about whether or not the Abrahamic God is actually omnipotent? Should I capitalize the word?

In the end, it took me four months of nonstop work to revise the entry, and while I feel like I did as good as job as anyone who is tasked with defining “god” could do, I’m nonetheless sure that there’s something unintentional in that entry that has condemned me to an unpleasant afterlife destination. Occupational hazard!

EB: I was fascinated to many of the backstories of particular bits of lexicography, like the interesting discovery about irregardless. Can you explain that one for our readers?

KS: I came into this job knowing, on a molecular level and like everyone else, that “irregardless” wasn’t a word. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that this nonword was entered into dictionaries! As I researched more about how it ended up in our dictionaries, I found that when it first showed up in writing, it was unremarkable—only later was it tarred and feathered as “uneducated” or “illiterate.” That happened during a point in American history when we were giving more lexical weight to the types of English spoken by affluent city dwellers, and we were condemning the types of English spoken by rural communities. “Irregardless” was one of the words that was caught in the crossfire, though there is evidence of its use among highly educated speakers.

I actually came to have a deep respect for “irregardless”: here’s a word that everyone despises, that everyone says is illogical or ugly or not a word, that has, in spite of everything, hung out on the periphery of English for more than 200 years. It’s a word that no one will cop to using, but which still has enough written historical and current use to merit entry into a dictionary. I don’t use it myself, but I no longer look askance at people who do.

EB: What’s on your radar now, word-wise?

KS: I just wrote a piece on the squishiness of the meaning and use of “intersectionality,” which isn’t a new word but feels new to many people. Today I wondered if “Novichok” was a trademark and if you’d use it as a bare noun (“poisoned with Novichok”) or as an attributive noun (“poisoned with Novichok nerve agent”). And I’ve started noticing the use of “blockchain for” more recently: “blockchain for legal references,” “blockchain for science,” “blockchain for social good.”

EB: How has your work as a lexicographer affected you as a writer? Do you think about using words in novel ways when you write?

KS: Absolutely. This work makes you aware of how flexible and fluid language is, and as a lexicographer, you live inside the language in a different way. You get to see and enter into the vocabularic nooks and crannies of English in a way that most people don’t. I’m sure there are plenty of lexicographers who can maintain a professional distance from the material, but I’m not one of them. So I found, while I was writing Word by Word, that I kept unearthing these little lexical treasures, and I couldn’t help but present them to the reader like a sugared-up toddler on a walk: lookit this! Lookit this! Handing the reader weird rocks and twigs and hollering at them “Isn’t this wonderful and amazing?”

EB: Do you have any advice for young people trying to break in to lexicography?

KS: The field is, honestly, shrinking. We used to have a letter that we’d give to prospective lexicographers that essentially said that getting a job writing dictionaries was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Now I think it’s a matter of being ahead of the right place and the right time, of really thinking about and pressing into what dictionaries could be instead of what they are. For example, Dictionary.com just added a few emoji to their online dictionary, which I think is brilliant. Emoji can be used lexically, just like words; they have register and different connotations depending on context and even which device you’re using; and people are likely to run across them online, in social media, in texts, on Slack—basically, in the new type of public-private writing that has emerged as more of our lives are lived online. Emoji is one new place that the language has gone that traditional lexicographers have pooh-poohed as faddish or nonlexical. Maybe emoji will fade away—but there are plenty of language trends that the traditional lexicographers of the 1700s and 1800s thought would flourish or fade away that haven’t.

EB: I know that from time to time lexicographers are called upon to answer reader mail. What’s the oddest bit of mail you’ve gotten?

KS: My favorite bit of weirdness was a poem or freestyle that had nothing to do with words, but was instead about a character named Mr. Baby Burper and his adventures. I don’t remember the whole email, but it definitely had flow: “I’m Mr. Baby Burper, I burp all the babies in the eternity in harmony with all the ladies, I just pat my hand on my leg and say burpady burpady burpady.” It went on from there. It was the most amazing email I had ever read, and it definitely won me some tchotchkes from Marketing back when we had a National Poetry Month celebration.

EB: I’ve also really enjoyed the Merriam-Webster “Ask the Editor” videos, which I sometimes play for my students to show them that I’m not making things up. How did that idea come about?

KS: Our former Director of Marketing came up with the idea. We already had other formats in which we could share discoveries about words, but they were all written, and she thought that sharing that information via video would be great. I believe that she initially put out a call to all the editors, asking if anyone would be interested, and she got exactly zero replies: you’re asking a bunch of introverts to talk on camera? In the end, she asked three of us that she knew had done publicity for the company, or had outside public speaking experience.

Early on, we were just encouraged to share whatever we thought was noteworthy or winsome about the language. Each of us came up with topics that seemed intriguing, or that answered questions that we each had gotten a number of times. The things that people responded to floored us. Who knew that my pasty face and knowledge of 18th-century grammatical movements would launch a resurgence in the use of the plural “octopodes”? I sure didn’t.

EB: Are you working on another book?

KS: I am! I’m writing a nonfiction book about the historical quest to define color. It touches on art and war and secret identities and dictionaries, and in the process of writing and researching it, I’ve turned back into that sugared-up toddler: lookit! Lookit! This is amazing!

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

KS: Thanks so much for asking!

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Asya Pereltsvaig received a PhD in Linguistics from McGill University in 2002. Specializing in Slavic and Semitic languages, she has taught at Yale, Cornell and Stanford University and is the author of three books: Copular sentences in Russian, published by Springer and Languages of the World: An Introduction and, with Matin Lewis, The Indo-European Controversy, published by Cambridge University Press.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed reading The Indo-European Controversy. What prompted you and your co-author Martin Lewis to write this book?

Asya Pereltsvaig: Thank you for your kind words about the book, Ed. Martin and I were driven to write this book by what we saw as an assault on the entire scientific discipline of historical linguistics, arguably the oldest field of linguistic science. We strongly believe that true scientific progress can be achieved only building upon previous work. Yet, there’s an entire body of work now whose starting point is a wholesale dismissal of what historical linguistics has achieved in the preceding two and a half centuries. Not paradigm change, but dismissal. That trend worried us. Even more so, we were concerned about the popular appeal of said body of work, the popularity it had gained in the media. In the era of “fake news”, this is a prime example of “fake science”. That’s why we wanted to sound an alarm, and why we intended the book to be read not only by specialists in the field, and not even primarily by specialists, but by the general public as well.

EB: You note that the history of IndoEuropean has been steeped in race and ideology since its inception. Could you discuss an example or two?

AP: The prime example is, of course, what happened to the idea of Indo-Europeans, or Aryans, in the twentieth century. This scientific construct was taken out of context, in fact out of the academic environment, misinterpreted and placed as a cornerstone of the racist ideology of Nazism. For Nazi ideologues, Aryans were not just speakers of a long-ago dead language, a scientific construct of sorts, but a race, and a superior one at that. We all know what tragedy that instance of ideologizing a scientific concept led to. But the conflation of race, or blood, and language started long before Nazism. Already in the middle of the nineteenth century, people like Arthur de Gobineau claimed that Aryans were a race, one that founded many civilizations in the Old World, and perhaps a few in the New World as well. According to Gobineau, the Aryan race later mixed with other races and consequently was in danger of losing its purity and, with it, its superiority. It is easy to see how these ideas led to the ideology of Nazism. In the book, we warn time and again against the conflation of language and “blood” (be it construed as race or DNA), echoing Max Müller’s sentiment that “an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar”. But while “race science” pretty much ended (at least in the West) after World War II, the conflation of biological attributes (the “blood”, DNA, or “race”) with cultural attributes such as language or ethnicity continues to this day. It’s become very popular to get tested for one’s genetic ancestry, but I think many people completely misinterpret the results of such tests as showing one’s ethnicity, a cultural rather than biological concept. Similarly, most people who speak an Indo-European language today are not biological descendants of the original Indo-Europeans, but the cultural importance of the latter cannot be underestimated.

EB: Your book also offered a fascinating discussion of different theories of the spread of Indo-European, including one related to cannabis cultivation, which was new to me. What was that about?

AP: I don’t know if I’d call it a “theory”, but there is this idea, originally from the anthropologist blogger Al West, that the spread of Indo-European languages was stimulated by trade or exchange of such intoxicating substances as cannabis or what the Rigveda calls soma. Geographically speaking, West’s idea aligns with what we called the Revised Steppe Theory: that the Indo-European languages originated in western Eurasian steppes (roughly, present-day southern Russia). Most scholars who subscribe to some version of the Steppe theory describe the contacts between the original Indo-Europeans and their non-Indo-European neighbors, who were probably sedentary farmers, as driven either by violent attacks on the part of the Indo-Europeans or by trading horses (presumably, domesticated first by the Indo-Europeans) and other animal products. West suggests that the spread of cannabis, and of other recreational or spiritual drugs, could have been a factor in the contact between the original Indo-Europeans and their neighbors. We mention this idea in the book in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, but the goal is serious: to show that the Steppe theory does not automatically mean that the Indo-Europeans were marauding warriors brandishing blood-drenched swords. Maybe they were much more peaceful pot-smoking proto-hippies.

EB: You mention several misconceptions in the modeling associated with Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, which proposes an Anatolian homeland. What is the biggest flaw, in your view?

AP: The biggest flaw of the Gray-Atkinson school of computational phylogenetics, we think, is exactly what prompted us to write this book in the first place: their wholesale dismissal of foundational facts about language change and language relatedness. As far as we can tell, their work is driven by the idea that a computer can give a better answer than two centuries of research by human scholars ever could. While we are not against computational linguistics in general, or computational methods in historical linguistics in particular, we strongly believe that a computer can give an answer only as good as the algorithm it uses and the data that serves as its input. In our book, we stayed out of discussing the computational algorithms—there’s a separate body of work that deals with that issue—but we discuss in great detail the kinds of data that the Gray-Atkinson school uses, be it linguistic data or geographical data. One of our biggest criticisms is that the Gray-Atkinson research program relies completely on lexical material. While they claim to take into account lexical borrowing, we show that a fair amount of it might have slipped between the cracks of the model anyway: it is exactly those languages that are known to have borrowed many words from other languages that are misanalysed as differentiating earlier than we know from the historical record, from analyzing grammatical changes, or from genetic findings. A prime example of that is Romany, the language of the Roma people. According to the Gray-Atkinson model, it differentiated from other Indo-Aryan languages around 1500 BCE, while other research in linguistics and genetics points out to a much later date, around 1000 CE. That’s a gap of two and a half millennia! The biggest reason for this erroneous dating of the Romani split, we think, is that this language borrowed a great deal of its vocabulary, including basic vocabulary, from other languages: Greek, Armenian, Persian. In other words, it’s distinctive because of extensive horizontal transfer, not early diversification. Other languages that the Gray-Atkinson model erroneously treats as having separated too early include Russian and Romanian, both of which also borrowed heavily from other languages.

EB: With respect to Indo-European studies, what stills needs to be done? What are a few of the key open questions?

AP: It is fascinating that the Indo-European question has been studied for so long and so extensively, and yet so much still has to be figured out. One of the key open questions, I think, is the mid-level organization of the family. Since the late 1700s, it’s become pretty clear that this wide range of languages, extending geographically from Icelandic to Sinhala in Sri Lanka, all belong to one language family. Low-level organization of the family—within the so-called “benchmark groupings” such as Germanic, Celtic, Romance, Slavic and so on—is also pretty well-understood. However, there’s less agreement as to how these benchmark groupings relate to one another: for example, are Slavic languages more closely related to western European groupings like Germanic or to Indo-Iranian languages? How do Greek, Armenian, and Albanian (each of which forms a benchmark grouping of its own) relate to the rest of the Indo-European family? And so on… This is the area of Indo-European phylogenetics where novel approaches are most welcome. However, approaches such as that of Gray and Atkinson, which fail to reproduce the low-level organization of the family, are hardly reliable to give us answers about the mid-level organization.

EB: What else are you working on?

AP: Lately, and partially as a result of working on this book with Martin Lewis, I got interested in language contact. As I mentioned above, contacts between languages cannot be overlooked when one examines language change. And yet, contact linguistics is a relatively new field and there’s still a lot to be done there. Being a syntactician by training, I’m particularly interested in the effects of language contact on grammatical changes. The specific empirical problem that caught my attention is the historical changes in the syntax of Yiddish, a language that my grandparents spoke but which, sadly, got lost somewhere between our generations. Besides this personal connection to the language, my research was driven by the fact that Yiddish is a prime example of language in contact. The specific phenomenon I’m investigating is the extension of the Verb-Second model from embedded to main clauses. Like so much that’s happened in Yiddish once it spread to Slavic-speaking territories in Eastern Europe, this phenomenon was suggested to have originated from contact with Slavic languages. But… Slavic languages do not have the Verb-Second model in either main or embedded clauses, so it seems paradoxical that they would produce such an effect on Yiddish. Also, I was intrigued that this happened only in Yiddish but in no other Germanic variety spoken in Slavic-dominated areas. This research led me to build bridges between historical linguistics and historical, geographical, demographic, anthropological, and genetic research, again linking with the Indo-European book that Martin and I wrote earlier.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

AP: Thank you for inviting me to speak about the book. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.