PORTLAND, Oregon — Lexicographers Steve Kleinedler of American Heritage Dictionary and Webster’s New World College Dictionary and Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster entertained “questions and quibbles” from ACES conference attendees about all things words, definitions and usage.
As reliant as editors are on stylebook and manuals, dictionaries are just as much if not more reliant on editors, said Kleinedler and Stamper, who have a combined 37 years of lexicography experience.
“The Dictionary is not the standard that sets language use,” Stamper said. “All dictionaries follow written use. We record the language as it is used.”
Below are some questions (and quibbles) from the session:
Question: So print dictionaries are inevitably behind (the moment they’re printed, Kleinedler interjects). What about online dictionaries?
Answer: Online dictionaries are more up to date, but again, entries have to be reviewed by multiple editors. We (at American Heritage) do online updates twice a year in large gulps. Content is reviewed, reviewed as a group, and then proofread. It’s more up-to-date, but it’s still not up to the moment.
Q: If you were to recommend online versions of your company’s various dictionaries, what would they be?
A: The American Heritage dictionary is available online at ahdictionary.com. It’s free. Webster’s New World is available with subscription of the AP Online Stylebook. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is online at merriam-webster.com.
Q: What’s your view on the use of the word “like” to mean said?
A: The quotative like goes back to the late 1800s. You discover all of the things that are new and ruining English are actually old. It’s called a discourse particle.
Q: Can you talk about definitions you wrote that were particularly pleasing versus those that you struggled with?
A: For the 11th edition of the Collegiate, I got dust bunny in my batch. I was having a really hard time trying to come up with what’s called the genus term. The genus term is the category that that word fits within. So the genus term for ice cream might be dessert. What’s a dust bunny? Glob doesn’t work because glob implies liquid. Is it a clump? No, that implies solidity. So I went through and settled on aggregate, which just was horrible. The definition is aggregate of dust., which is crap. [Laughs] I don’t think it’s been edited out yet. So that way my experience with dust bunny. I mostly remember definitions that I just had to settle on, because in the midst of all this, we work on deadline, too. The last thing you want is the production editor to come up to you and say, “You’re the bottleneck.” — Kory Stamper
(Stamper to Kleinedler: What did you guys do?) “A mass of fine, dry particles or matter, especially hair and skin particles, that is formed by static electricity.“
Q: What’s your favorite word?
A: They’re all our children, but my favorite word is gardyloo, which is an interjection: used in Edinburgh as a warning cry when it was customary to through slops from the windows into the streets. — Kory Stamper
Tweets from the session can be found by searching #ACES2016 on Twitter.
