My favourite genre of posts decrying the decline of modern society is when they're talking about something that's been around for thirty or forty years that the poster clearly believes is novel because they just found out about it five minutes ago.
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 8 shownotes page.
[Theme music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: and I'm Lauren Gawne. And today we're going to be talking about how dictionaries get made. But first, bonus episodes! We have them. We now have bonus episodes about how to teach yourself even more linguistics with our top recommendations for books, videos, and further resources for self-study, as well as our first bonus episode about swearing.
Gretchen: and this month's bonus on Patreon is about how to sell your awesome linguistic skills to employers. Or you can check out the Patreon at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or just follow the link on lingthusiasm.com to see those bonus episodes, support the show, and help Lingthusiasm keep growing.
[Music]
Lauren: Today we are talking dictionaries, which is a super exciting genre of book for linguists! This topic choice is for a number of reasons. The first of which is that Kory Stamper’s new book ‘Word By Word’ came out a couple of months ago and we both read it and we had the best fun reading it and we wanted to talk about it so much that we ended up just talking about it for this whole episode. The whole episode will kind of be framed around Kory's book and some of the things that we really enjoyed about reading it, but that is not the only reason, is it Gretchen?
Gretchen: Yeah, and we're also going to be talking about other stuff to do with dictionaries because I was recently on a panel about dictionaries at South by Southwest, and I also got to meet Kory and hang out with some other dictionary people -- when she gave a talk in New York City I happen to be going down on that specific day.
Lauren: And so this episode will be another episode in the genre of ‘Gretchen makes Lauren really jealous by telling her about all the cool linguist and lexicography peeps that she got to hang out with’.
Gretchen: You just need to come here and come to a conference and then I can introduce you to everybody and it'll be great!
Lauren: Yeah, but for now we're all going to live vicariously through Gretchen's excellent adventures.
Gretchen: Okay so I got to have drinks with like – this is a great group of people – because I messaged Kory and I was like, hey let's meet up! and she was like, ‘but only if you can come to drinks with these other amazing people’ and I was like, ‘oh I don't know if I could handle that!’
Lauren: Awww tough, so tough!
Gretchen: So I got to have drinks with Ben Zimmer, who we've mentioned many times on this podcast, who I already knew, and does the word column for Wall Street Journal, and Jesse Sheidlower who does the word column for the New Yorker, and Katherine Connor Martin who is the head of U.S. dictionaries for the Oxford English Dictionary, she was very cool. And also the like stealth excited person to be on this list was Lauren Naturale who runs the Merriam-Webster Twitter account.
Lauren: That is so exciting - I mean, another excellent Lauren.
Gretchen: Another excellent Lauren -- all Laurens are excellent! And so in case you're not on Twitter and haven't noticed the Merriam-Webster Twitter account, it has been making waves a lot recently for doing some really cool and funny and topical tweets.
Lauren: I was going to say, it's very on topic.
Gretchen: It's very on the nose, so something will happen in the news or in politics, and they’ll call that out, so they've been really really trenchant these days, and so I was very excited about that. I mean, I was excited about the other people too, but I was like, Lauren is there!
Lauren: Their Twitter account, to give you an idea of just how popular it is, has won a Webby Award - they've won three Webby awards at Merriam-Webster, which are kind of an indication that they have appeal beyond people who may have traditionally been fans of lexicography and dictionaries.
Gretchen: I think my favourite Merriam-Webster tweet, and this is kind of a classic one, this is like the first one I noticed when they were really being topical and being kind of sassy, is when they tweeted “People keep 1) saying they don't know what 'genderqueer' means then 2) asking why we added it to the dictionary”.
Lauren: I always like their very on topic word of the days which often kind of just allude to something that is in the media or is kind of on topic.
Gretchen: Yeah, like when people were talking about alternative facts they tweeted a definition of facts. Not fax machines, F-A-C-T-S. So yeah, there are some great Merriam-Webster tweets and I think they're a fun example of cool things you can do with the dictionary as an authority and yet trying to break down some of the ways that dictionaries are seen as very static and fussy and trying to bring them into the 21st century.
Lauren: And I think that's part of the appeal, as well for why I found Kory's book so appealing - Word By Word is kind of an insider's look at how a dictionary gets made. She's been an editor at Merriam-Webster for 15 years or so and it takes you through the machinations of how dictionaries get made, a kind of an unglamorous sausage factory approach to that process.
Gretchen: But it was really cool because I was really able to picture it and now I feel like, you know, if I went there - hopefully someday maybe I'll go there - to the Merriam-Webster office in Springfield, Massachusetts - and she's describing like the old-school filing cabinets and drawers and drawers and shelves and boxes of citations. So if you're going to find examples for words they read all these magazines and newspapers and all of this stuff to find the words the people are using differently that aren't in the dictionary yet or that should be updated. You know people bring in like cereal boxes and take photos of signs while they're on vacation and use them as examples and stuff as well. Just like figuring out how all of the stuff works, it was really fun.
Lauren: And you got to talk to a whole panel of people who make dictionaries as part of the South by Southwest talk that you went and did a couple of months ago now.
Gretchen: It was in March, yeah. I did a panel with Erin McKean of Wordnik, Jane Solomon of dictionary.com and Ben Zimmer who I've already mentioned, who I saw a lot in March. So we did a panel about dictionaries, tech and the future at South by Southwest and we talked about, you know, how do you construct a dictionary? How do you decide what to let into the dictionary? So Erin’s approach with Wordnik, which kind of reimagines the dictionary away from the tradition of the paper dictionary, which is very limited in how many pages you can have. Erin's approach with Wordnik is if someone has searched for it, we’ll give you a page that has whatever information we have, and if no one has searched for it before and no one has added anything to that page there's nothing on it – but for many words there is stuff on it.
So I asked them, is there any thought of adding emoji to the dictionary? The ‘face with tears of joy emoji’ was Oxford's Word of the Year 2015 I think. I asked them are you going to add emoji in there and Erin said well you can search for emoji on Wordnik - for a lot of them you might not find very much information but you can search for them. You know they've got this kind of crowd-sourced approach to adding stuff about particular words in addition to the base dictionary that they started with, so people can add information.
Lauren: Dictionaries are in an interesting state of flux at the moment, I think it's fair to say very few people are buying or interacting with paper dictionaries. More and more people are using online resources exclusively, and also dictionary makers are moving from using written things to add to the dictionary and searching online corpora instead. So that leads to some interesting ways in which dictionaries will change.
Gretchen: And people who are using dictionaries themselves – not just dictionary makers that are using electronic sources, but people who are searching for words in a dictionary rather than opening up… you know I have a bunch of dictionaries on my shelf, I'm looking over and seeing them right now, I have dictionaries for several languages on my shelf, but when was the last time I pulled one off and opened it and used it for something? It's not very often, because I'm like ‘well I'm already at my computer’. I can just search for the word there.
Lauren: Which I think is really great in terms of usability and accessibility. I think it it makes us feel like the dictionary – it's the same problem that journalism and a lot of other industries have as well – we feel like we're entitled to dictionaries, even more than we have ever felt throughout history. I think again one thing I really loved about Word By Word, is the book shows you that it's a massive labour to write a dictionary and to keep it up to date, and this is real work that has to be done by real humans, computers aren't actually that good at doing that work.
Gretchen: Yeah, we have this perception that there's “a dictionary”, and I trolled my panel because I was moderating them and I said ‘okay which one of you is “the dictionary”? like do we have a fight here?’
Lauren: Did you find out which one is “the dictionary”?
Gretchen: They all claimed it, it was very disappointing! But we have a perception that the dictionary is like a faceless thing that doesn't even have a brand name in some cases, and that all of them are essentially equivalent to each other and it doesn't matter if you're using a 50 year old one, maybe it's better, even though it's going to not have words from the past 50 years and so on. And one of things I liked about Kory’s book is the way she talked about this construction of authority. In fact, dictionaries constructed that authority for themselves, like people didn't come out of nowhere with this idea that the dictionary was a thing you should look to for all your answers, that was in early dictionary ad campaigns. Merriam-Webster and so on were using this to sell dictionaries, to say this is where you should get all your information like they have this ask the editor feature you can write in and get answers on anything and that was a big selling feature and Kory tweets about some of the funny things people ask her.
Lauren: Kory has an excellent blog, I really hoped this book would be as excellent as the blog ‘Harmless Drudgery’, we'll put that in the show notes, she certainly has a good approach to dealing with people's ways of engaging with dictionaries.
Gretchen: Yeah, she's got a really funny voice, she's got a great sense of humour and the book was fun and I was basically positive I was going to like it because I liked her blog and Twitter so much.
Lauren: Yeah, sorry, you thought this was a review episode it's actually just a fangirl episode.
Gretchen: Yeah! It's one of those things where you try to do a balanced review and you're like ‘oh these are the pros and cons’, but there weren’t any cons, because the book did exactly what it should do, which was great, so I have no complaints!
Lauren: So yeah, they have this idea of authority, and you know I personally just thought of dictionaries as dictionaries, and I used whichever one my school gave me. I think the social media presence of dictionaries is actually helping me feel like they have personalities.
Gretchen: Yeah, I think I thought of dictionaries as kind of like the periodic table, you know like everyone has gotten this consensus - or like the phone book. The phone book just is – it's not like someone had to sit down and decide. I guess someone did decide who got each number but that's not something that's very transparent to you when you use the phone book. They're both good if you have a child and they need to be propped up on a seat you can give them a nice thick dictionary or phone book to sit on, so that's useful.
Lauren: They have multiple functions! I feel like there’s a whole bunch of dictionary makers that are like very sad at you right now for that.
Gretchen: No, they sell copies, are you kidding me?! They're all trying to increase their print sales of the unabridged version!
Lauren: I didn't really ever have full respect for lexicographers until I had to make a dictionary as part of my work on Lamjung Yolmo, which is a Tibetan language that I worked on for my PhD. People get really upset in grant proposals and proper linguistic stuff when I talk about it being a dictionary because it is technically a ‘bilingual wordlist of translations’, but the thing is the speakers of the language refer to it as a dictionary, it's as close to a dictionary as anyone is going to write for that language anytime soon.
Gretchen: So is that because you weren't defining the words in Yolmo?
Lauren: Yeah, a dictionary should technically be the word and then it's definition using that language to define it.
Gretchen: I mean, I have a French-English dictionary and a German-English dictionary and they still call themselves dictionaries.
Lauren: Noooo, they would be ‘translation word lists’.
Gretchen: Well, you tell that to Larousse.
Lauren: Yeah exactly. To be honest, it’s not like the forefront of my skill set and there are definitely like eight different entries that just translate as ‘green leafy edible vegetable’, so that gave me a level of respect for lexicography I didn't have before.
Gretchen: When you're writing a dictionary from scratch how do you go about doing that? Do you just start writing down words you know, or do you go systematically, do you go in alphabetical order, how do you make that choice?
Lauren: In terms of the one that I made?
Gretchen: Yeah, because in Kory's books she's talking about how they go through the alphabet, but a lot of what they're doing is they're revising the definitions that already exist. Because English has a several hundred year tradition of dictionary making, that means that our dictionaries don't start from scratch anymore. They start from the previous edition or from some previous thing and they revise it and they update it and so they have this kind of entrenched bureaucracy there already. But I imagine if you're creating a dictionary or word list from scratch like where do you go from there?
Lauren: The thing we made was definitely more ad hoc and opportunistic. If you document a language there are some word lists that people encourage you to use, to get the basic vocabulary, and then a lot of it came from stories and other texts that we collected and some of them just came from, you know... they make a lot of bamboo baskets, so one day I just sat there with one of the women and she was making a basket I was like ‘What's that called? What's that called?’ and I think it's probably like the most irritating day of work she has ever had.
Gretchen: But now all this basket vocabulary is documented.
Lauren: Yep, but it's not comprehensive, I think a lot of especially English dictionaries try and sell themselves on their comprehensiveness, but with Yolmo this was much more a kind of opportunistic output of what was done within the documentation.
Gretchen: So then if someone was trying to make a more comprehensive dictionary they could use that as a starting point and then get some more and kind of keep building on that.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Yeah, I've heard of people doing things where you get a get a couple of speakers and you sit down and say ‘okay, today we're going to talk about body parts’, or ‘today we're going to talk about family terms’.
Lauren: One time I was in Nepal and I spent a week watching a Rapid Words workshops, a dictionary workshop, happen. Which is that they got 40 speakers of Syuba, which is the language I work with at the moment, they bought them all to a single place together for two weeks. There's this very very elaborate semantic set that gets used and they were given all these worksheets and it was like ‘right today name all the words in relation to house building, name all the words in relation to women's clothing’. So they have hundreds of semantic prompts.
Gretchen: And these are things that most languages have some words around?
Lauren: Yeah, sometimes they’re big like ‘name all of the astrological phenomena in the sky’ and sometimes they're much more specific.
Gretchen: And I guess it might depend you know if you have a language only spoken in a landlocked region they probably don’t have a lot of words to do with the ocean.
Lauren: Yeah, and so they ended up pulling together about 20,000 words, some of which were overlaps, but within two weeks they built the guts of a dictionary, it was a very efficient machine.
Gretchen: Wow. And then so someone has to go through and collate all those worksheets and put them together and compare all the words that everybody wrote down?
Lauren: They had a pool of people typing it up, it was a kind of factory dictionary building, in a really cool way.
Gretchen: Wow, that's really interesting.
Lauren: I wrote an article about that and I'll link to it in the show notes. So for those two examples the words that were getting in are just all of the words, we're kind of starting from scratch, we're literally adding words like ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ and ‘person’, and really basic vocabulary.
Gretchen: And you might have a harder time with even grammatical words or something like that because it’s a lot harder to be like ‘list all the function words in your language’ or ‘list all of the propositions in your language’. I mean, maybe you could do prepositions by asking about locations, but like ‘list all of the the particles’ or something would be harder, you'd want to do a grammatical description for that.
Lauren: One thing you get a sense of from Kory's book is that people who are trained to do lexicography and dictionary editing have a very finely tuned sense of language, and this is not what was happening for us, this was a very basic word collection. But dictionary writers and people who are figuring out definitions have to kind of have a very finely tuned sense of the slight differences between very similar words, or different senses of a single word.
Gretchen: Yeah, I think the example Kory had was ‘measly’, it's like measly is a small amount but it's also kind of small and mean, it's not a good small. So having this sense, she called it ‘sprachgefühl’, which is the German word for the feeling of a language and I liked that. Kory walked us through the sense of how she and Emily Brewster defined a new sense of the word ‘a’ - ‘a’ as in ‘an apple’, er I mean, ‘a’ as in ‘a banana’! And you know, you think you know approximately what this word does but they noticed there was another thing that it was doing. Emily figured out exactly how to describe and characterise the particular sense that hadn’t been described. So if you're doing very initial dictionary building for a language that doesn't have one you may not be trying to catalogue all of the possible senses for every single word, you're saying we need to kind of get down a word list as much as possible and then we can work on refining it more later, there's a lot of different stages.
Lauren: But dictionaries at some point become big enough that they have to kind of start deciding – especially for a language like English where there are so many speakers in so many parts of the world and English is used in so many domains, it's the language of day-to-day chat for people, it's a language of law, it's a language of science it has a lot of domains in which it operates and so it has a lot of vocabulary that may not be in other languages but that needs to be defined.
Gretchen: Yeah, but which you might not want to have a standard dictionary, you may not want to have every name of every possible chemical compound in a small hand-sized dictionary.
Lauren:, Yeah, and like some words that may have not been updated for a long time suddenly become very topical, and suddenly need some attention. There's a really nice quote from Sue Butler back in 2012. In Australia the word misogyny suddenly became very topical because we had a female prime minister who was trying to call out some misogynistic behaviour.
Gretchen: She gave that great speech in Parliament, it was good.
Lauren: She did, and Sue had a very busy week because that was something that people were looking up a lot. She said ‘I always think of myself as the person with a mop and broom and a bucket coming in and cleaning up after the party's over. In this case it was a fairly big party and what was left on the floor was misogyny’. So sometimes a word will become popular again and a dictionary hasn't really touched their definition for a while, or suddenly lexicographers are being called on to talk about these topics and that might be a word that had been neglected and not in an abridged dictionary is suddenly an important and useful word again.
Gretchen: Yeah, like a politician will use an obscure word in a speech or a debate or something and everyone kind of goes ‘I kinda know what that means but I'm not quite sure let me go look that up’ and then ‘oh we haven't touched the definition in years.’
Lauren: I do like how Merriam-Webster will talk about which words are trending in terms of they haven't been looked up for a while and suddenly people are, and is often related to something that is happening.
Gretchen: Yeah, several of the dictionaries do that it's great.
Lauren: And it's one of the nice things about these new online dictionaries and that they're using this data of who's interacting and how they're interacting with a dictionary. I find it so fascinating.
Gretchen: I think it's also interesting because when we made paper books and sent them to people you had no idea what people are looking at. Some of the earlier earliest English dictionaries were like a table of hard words, so they wouldn't even include the basic words because they were like ‘well everybody knows you know what “love” is or what a “mother” is or something like that we don't need to put that in we're going to put, you know, “indefatigable” or something like that in our dictionaries because people look that up, it's hard’.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: indeFAtigable? inDEfatigable?
Lauren: I don't know, and you should look it up in the dictionary to see how it's pronounced.
Gretchen: Yeah exactly! But what they found is that when you put them online you can use stats, you have you have visitor stats now and a lot of people do look up words like ‘love’ and ‘mother’ and they wanna express their feelings. Kind of like you go to the drugstore and you look through all the cards and try to find something that really sums up what you want to say about your feelings for your mother - sometimes people go to the dictionary for that.
Lauren: ‘You are a good female parent’.
Gretchen: Or on Valentine's Day they look up what love is because they want the dictionary to put that into words for them. I don't think the lexicographers really think of themselves as greeting card writers, they're just trying to describe how people are already using the word rather than give you a nice pithy thing to put in your greeting cards.
Lauren: I mean, that's probably a very obvious point that we maybe just need to make very explicit, and that dictionary makers are still trying to make explicit after years of claiming themselves to be the authority, but a dictionary is being descriptive, it's describing how people are using language commonly at the time the dictionary is published. They're not trying to tell you how a word has to be used.
Gretchen: I think there is a history of dictionaries that did try to tell people how to use words though, like they came by that reputation honestly. It's just they have now disavowed that because they’ve realised that it's kind of a jerk thing to do.
Lauren: Yeah. One way that some dictionaries do this and the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, is the most famous and probably the most comprehensive in English, is by using historical quotes to provide supporting evidence for their definition and the change in a words meaning over time. Which is the something that I take for granted, but I use all the time, it is such a useful feature of dictionaries.
Gretchen: And Oxford lists its definitions in order of which ones came first whereas most other dictionaries list their definitions in order for which one’s most common. If you go to the Oxford definition and you see the first meaning and you're like ‘that's not what I would use this for’ it's like ‘no that's not how you use it now but that's how people used it 50 years ago or 300 years ago or something like that.’
Lauren: I’m always surprised. Words are always older than I think they are and this recency illusion is something people talk about a lot and we all think that language has changed when we see it having been different, but I have a surprisingly large number of posts on Superlinguo where it's like ‘ah turns out g-strings are older than I thought, the word “hipster”? much older than I thought’ and I really love that feature.
Gretchen: How old are g-strings, Lauren?.
Lauren: The oldest citation for ‘g-string’ that the OED has... do you want to have a guess?
Gretchen: Um, 1920s?
Lauren: Earlier.
Gretchen: Oh, I was thinking the roaring 20s.
Lauren: I’ll give you a clue, the entry for ‘g-string’ hasn't been updated since 1933.
Gretchen: Oh God.
Lauren: Which is like when it was published, probably.
Gretchen: Like, 1850s?
Lauren: 1878, so within that window.
Gretchen: Yeah, still the Victorians.
Lauren: It was first used ’gee-string’ g-e-e string, as a description of the loin cloths of Native Americans, is the first written citation that we have, I'll link to that in the show notes.
Gretchen: So it wasn't initially like dancers and stuff?
Lauren: No, I first came across it because I was reading ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ which was published in 1955 and I was like ‘oh that's much earlier than I thought’ and it's even earlier than that.
Gretchen: Oh yeah, I think of it as being whenever pole dancing became popular, around that period.
Lauren: Nope older than that. And people have this sport of trying to find older, to antedate the earliest reference. Again, warning, it's always the earliest written reference that we have, right, especially for slangy or informal words, people were probably saying them long before they were written down. Especially for anything before the modern era I guess? Or maybe the Victorian era? You see a lot of stuff is, like, letters from that era.
Gretchen: Yeah, letters and newspapers and ad campaigns, advertisers tend to be trying to pick up on modern slang, and newspapers sometimes are closer to slang and they have a much shorter production time than a book. Depending on the newspaper I mean. The New Yorker is still writing ‘cöoperative’ with a diaeresis over the ‘o’.
Lauren: Which is the two dots.
Gretchen: Just because they want to be “those” people.
Lauren: While we’re talking about the OED’s historical quotes, probably a good time to shout out to another book that is worth reading on dictionary making. This is a piece of pseudo fiction if I'm not mistaken?
Gretchen: I haven't actually read it but I've been hearing about it for a while.
Lauren: I read it and now I just can't remember if it was fiction or not but it was very compelling it's called ‘The Surgeon of Crowthorne’.
Gretchen: It's based on a true story but I think it may have some poetic license taken. I heard of it as ‘The Professor and the Madman’ which I guess it was retitled for the North American audience.
Lauren: Yeah, it has two different names.
Gretchen: They're also making it into a movie now with Mel Gibson so depending on how much you like Mel Gibson….
Lauren: The book is by Simon Winchester who also wrote a nonfiction account of the early years of the Oxford English Dictionary and I'm intrigued, I mean it's really great that we're going to have a Hollywood film about the OED! So stay tuned!
Gretchen: We can add it to the list of linguist movies with ‘Arrival’ and ‘My Fair Lady’ and... that’s... that's it.
Lauren: Yeah three, woo!
Gretchen: Three! But like two of them in the past couple years that's very exciting.
Lauren: That becomes technically a movie marathon so that is a fabulous development.
Gretchen: There's also other national dictionaries, so there’s a dictionary of ‘Canadianisms on Historical Principles’ and there's Canadian versions of the OED and stuff. The dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles has recently done an update and they have a very extensive, I think it's about 3,000 words on ‘eh’ and how it's used in Canada, so that was great I really enjoyed that. And they also have various other Canadian regionalisms which took me back to the time I took a Canadian English course once in undergrad.
Lauren: And I'm going to give my local shout out to the Australian National Dictionary Centre who are affiliated with the OED and work specifically on Australian lexical terms. The first edition of that dictionary is available for free online, super useful, they have a second edition that's just come out very recently. And of course the Macquarie dictionary is Australia's dictionary as well. And as someone who's often asked about Australian words and whether they really are Australian both of those are invaluable to me.
Gretchen: I recently quoted you as my source on Australian English because I did an interview with NPR.
Lauren: I am your Australian?
Gretchen: You’re my official Australian, my go to Australian.
Lauren: You’re my go to Canadian.
Gretchen: Okay, good, we're equal.
Lauren: I do sometimes get a bit nostalgic for my printed dictionaries, none of which made the move with me to the UK. They're all languishing in a box for the moment, but there's something really nice about rifling through a dictionary and you kind of stumble upon something that's related to it but not quite what you were looking for. But I do also remember just the pain of learning to search alphabetically as a child, I just have memories of primary school and the minutes that it would take you to look up a word in the dictionary and that's a very specific skill that you had to learn.
Gretchen: Yeah you had to be taught that, I remember being taught how to alphabetise and how to go alphabetically by each letter and not all languages alphabetise as easily as English does. Not all languages have alphabets so they don't all alphabetise. So you have memorise radical order if you want to look stuff up in a paper dictionary in Chinese, you have to know what the first radical is in this particular word and if you want to look up a word based on hearing, it's kind of hard to do that if you're using paper dictionaries because you don't know what the radicals are going to be.
Lauren: I have never had to look up a sign language print dictionary but I believe that they, at least some of the ones that I know of, worked on the English kind of gloss or translation words that was the basis of the equivalent for the sign, so you had to know English to be able to look up an Australian Sign Language sign.
Gretchen: Which is not great if your first language is actually Auslan or ASL.
Lauren: But also that's how modern – so I've only ever looked up online sign dictionaries and Auslan has an amazing one which is the Auslan Sign Bank, there's also a British Sign Language one and I think they're building one for American Sign Language at the moment, I'll put the links to those in the show notes.
Gretchen: But one of the great things that has happened with sign language dictionaries in the online space is they can have videos and gifs and pictures.
Lauren: It’s so good!
Gretchen: Rather than just line diagrams of how to make this sign or descriptions of it.
Lauren: Yep you're trying to follow a static image and you like ‘does that arrow mean that the whole hand moves or just the arm?’ so the videos are a real boon for sign dictionaries.
Gretchen: And multimedia in general, because Kory Stamper has this blog post which I think is going to be related to the topic of her next book about how dictionaries go about defining colour terms, which if you need to do it in kind of black-and-white dictionary in text and, say, like, this is what this shade of red is, you know that's actually quite hard. We have a whole colour episode you can go listen to about defining colours.
Lauren: And I think that's also something that's important to mention is that the way words work in dictionaries is not necessarily how they work in your brain. I mean, dictionaries have an important function and we use them to come to an understanding of the meaning of words, but it's not necessary there's a one-to-one equivalence between a dictionary and your brain - thankfully, because I could not sit here rifling through my brain in alphabetical order, it would take me five minutes to say any word.
Gretchen: Your brain probably doesn't have an alphabetical order, the alphabet is an arbitrary order order that’s just historical.
Lauren: My brain probably doesn’t, it possibly has some amount of cognitive organisation that now occurs alphabetically because of the way English was imposed in my education system, but definitely not as a kind of primary structure in the way it is in a dictionary.
Gretchen: Yeah one of the analogies I like to use is that language is open source, and dictionaries are a form of help documentation.
Lauren: Ahhh that’s nice.
Gretchen: And so if you think about an open source project, you have different people contributing to it and stuff lives or dies based on whether other people take it up. So every speaker of a language is contributing to that language’s open source project, and it's useful to have help documentation, but help documentation often lags behind new features, you know, like it still says that this menu is over here but actually that's not true anymore because in version 7….
Lauren: We changed things –
Gretchen: We consolidated the menus. Dictionaries are help documentation for a language, they're not the language itself. The speakers of Yolmo, even though their dictionary is not as complete as the many dictionaries that speakers of English have, they still talk.
Lauren: They still have all the words and they can add more words.
Gretchen: Yeah they still have more words than that, their language is still as complex as English even if their dictionary technology - their help documentation - isn't as as comprehensive.
[Music]
For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to Lingthusiasm dot com.
Lauren: You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.
Gretchen: and I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com.
To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions and help keep the show ad free and sustainable, go to Patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Bonus episodes that you can listen to right now as soon as you pledge include one about swearing, another about how to teach yourself linguistics, and another about explaining linguistics to employers. If you can't afford to pledge, it really helps the show reach new listeners if you can rate us on iTunes or recommend us on social networks or to people in person.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire and our music is by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay Lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The term recency illusion was coined in 2005 by American linguist Arnold Zwicky. It in fact belongs to an entire taxonomy of linguistic illusions, including its antithesis, the antiquity illusion, which refers to the belief that a word, meaning, grammatical construction, etc. that you're familiar with has been used for a long time, when in fact it was only coined recently. Other illusions include the adolescent illusion, the (mistaken) belief that young people are responsible for what some consider to be 'undesirable' language trends (e.g. text speak and abbreviations, associated with teenagers but in fact used by texting and e-mailing adults of all ages) and the frequency illusion, the idea that, once you know of a particular linguistic phenomenon, you decide that it occurs a lot, but that's just because you happen to notice it more readily and are therefore tricked into believing that it's particularly frequent. Zwicky claims that such illusions are the effect of what he refers to as selective attention, positing a general theory based on what you, as an individual, happen to have noticed.
It's been argued that these kinds of illusion need not be confined to the domain of linguistics. The frequency illusion, for instance, is a good example – ever had the experience of seeing something for the first time, it could be an item of clothing or food, a style of writing, a street sign, a flower or plant … and then feeling like you see it everywhere?
The recency illusion as applies to pop culture is wild enough, but what really gets me is knowing that logically there must be all sorts of stuff out there where I haven’t even gotten that far – i.e., ubiquitous and enormously influential pop culture phenomena that I’m genuinely completely unaware of because the subject just happens never to have come up in my presence. We’re all out there Phineas and Ferb-ing our way through our respective media landscapes.
Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper
Dictionaries: they’re made by real people!
In episode 8 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch talk about Word by Word, a recent book by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, about how dictionaries get made. (Spoiler: we liked it.) We also talk about how dictionaries get made for languages that don’t have any yet, the changing role of dictionaries on the internet and with social media, and how words often have a longer history than we expect (’g-string’, for example has been in use since at least 1878).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how to sell your linguistics skills to employers! Whether it's a semester of Linguistics 101, a BA, or a PhD, in our third bonus we share our tips for selling linguistics to future employers. We talk about why linguists have valuable skills that employers love, how to translate linguist-speak into boss-speak, the linguistic and other skills that have made our own careers possible, and cool things that other linguists have gone on to do for work. Join us on Patreon to get access to this and other bonus episodes, and help keep the show ad free!
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Word by Word (Gretchen’s livetweet, Lauren’s review)
Harmless Drudgery, Kory Stamper’s blog
Gretchen’s SXSW dictionaries panel
Lamjung Yolmo dictionary
Merriam Webster’s on point Twitter
Sue Butler on misogyny in the dictionary
TED talks by Erin McKean on dictionaries and Wordnik: one, two
Dictionaries have blogs now: “woke” on Oxford Dictionaries by Nicole Holliday, “ship” on Merriam-Webster, singular “they” on Dictionary.com by Jane Solomon (who’s also blogged about the upside-down smiley face)
Recency Illusion
The history of hipsters and g-strings
Books about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary: Mashed Radish review of John Simpson’s The Word Detective, The Surgeon of Crowthorne aka The Professor and the Madman
Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-2), which Jesse Sheidlower wrote about for the New Yorker
Auslan Signbank
BSL Signbank
Lexicography people mentioned in this episode to follow on twitter: Kory Stamper, Erin McKean, Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon, Jesse Sheidlower, Katherine Connor Martin, Emily Brewster, Lauren Naturale
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
«Another selective attention effect, which tends to accompany the Recency Illusion, is the Frequency Illusion: once you've noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot, even "all the time". Your estimates of frequency are likely to be skewed by your noticing nearly every occurrence that comes past you.» —Quoted from an article on the Recency Illusion, explained simply as “I never saw it before now so now it's taking over everything.” This particular article focuses on linguistics, but the phenomenon extends to the equality struggle as well—I mean, how many damn times have I heard “BUT BEING NONBINARY IS SO NEW AND NOW IT'S EVERYWHERE” out of people who just WILL NOT HAVE my pronouns? I'll be looking for broader articles on it later.
