Grammar Girl.
Here I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm talking with Stefan Fatsas, a journalist and author, about his new book Unabridged The Thrill and Threat to the Modern Dictionary.
Stefan takes us inside Merriam-Webster, how words get chosen, defined, debated, and even retired.
He, embedded with lexicographers, sifted through archival citation slips and voted on Word of the Year.
It's a behind-the-scenes trip.
We're going to talk about precision, language change and how the digital world is changing everything.
If getting a peek inside a dictionary office sounds like a thrill, or if you've dreamed of getting a job with words, I think you'll find our talk really interesting, but also maybe a little bit unsettling.
Stefan Patsas, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Oh my God, so great to be here, Mignon.
Thank you so much.
I know.
It's great to see you.
I think the last time I saw you was at the Reno Scrabble competition.
It was.
It was a national championship in Reno, and we had a great chat.
I can't remember how I did at that tournament.
Probably not that well, given my track record at national championships, but it is always fun to compete and I still compete.
So I just got back from this year's nationals, which were outside of Baltimore.
That's great.
And I loved your book, Word Freak, all about Scrabble.
But today we're going to talk about your new book.
All about dictionaries Unabridged, and you embedded at Merriam-Webster, which just sounds like a dream to me.
Tell me how that came about.
Well, this is like more than a decade ago now this project started.
Merriam had just begun revising the unabridged Webster's Third.
It was the first time since publication in 1961 that the company had undertaken a full-on revision of that landmark and controversial book.
And I wanted to write about it.
So I wrote a long magazine piece for Slate.
It was about 10,000 words.
And then, after that published, I approached John Morse, who was the publisher of Merriam-Webster at the time.
I went back to John and I said, you know, I kind of would like to do a book.
But if I did a book, I would want to embed and become a lexicographer and try to write definitions.
And John got approval for me to do that.
So...
In late 2015, early 2016 I started going up to Merriam-Webster pretty regularly and kind of de facto joined the staff.
It was amazing.
Amazing.
So, actually, I'm so curious.
What was the first definition that you tried to write?
Oh my God, very first definition that I tried to write.
I did a bunch of sort of sample, trying to just craft a draft definition for a bunch of sports words like deplete and slew foot, which was a hockey term.
But the first word that I really sort of sunk my teeth into and spent weeks and weeks researching and writing was, oddly enough, bleep the word pom-pom girl.
And that happened because I was sitting one day with the director of defining at Merriam-Steve Perrault and he said you got to see this.
In The Unabridged, he had discovered that pom-pom girl was defined... this way, pick up prostitute.
There was no mention of cheerleaders or fluffy balls that you wave over your head.
Oh my gosh.
It was a relic.
It was a World War II word used by soldiers.
And there was evidence for this definition, but not much.
And it was sort of a classic example of how old school lexicography had holes.
So whoever sort of took citations for the word pom-pom girl at merriam-webster in the 1940s and 1950s didn't find the modern usage, which existed already, of pom-pom girls as cheerleaders, And it got into the dictionary with just this one sense.
So I did this, like I spent weeks like poring through Merriam's old archives, which were the consolidated files of the 16 million slips of paper, and then doing modern digital database research.
And I wrote this incredibly long definition of Pom Pom Girl, and it never made the dictionary.
So if you go to the Unabridged, it actually still says pick up prostitute.
It does, yeah.
Oh my gosh, why didn't it make it in?
Yeah.
Good question.
Partly because the unabridged revision was and I'm checking right now to make sure that I am not misspeaking and that they haven't updated it.
Yeah, I'm afraid that is the only definition in Merriam-Webster.
Shocking.
Pick up a prostitute.
It didn't get in partly because not long after I arrived at Merriam, the project was put on hold.
Merriam's business fortunes had sort of declined.
There was a drop in clicks, drop in revenue.
So the company decided to pivot from this sort of grand, ambitious project to overhaul the unabridged and go back to the bread and butter website, which is based on the collegiate dictionary, the free Merriam website, merriamwebstercom.
And with that a lot of the work that I had done kind of went sort of like words, like that did not become priority definitions.
It wouldn't have been a priority definition anyway, obviously.
It was sort of something that's probably not looked up very often.
So I also had to pivot.
When merriam pivoted at first, my reaction was oh no, like now.
What am i going to do?
This project, on which i based this book proposal, has bitten the dust.
What do i do?
And i just decided to stay and keep defining and keep hanging out at merriam and hopefully i would find a narrative through line that wasn't dependent on the revision of the outer bridge, and that's what i did.
I would be like that.
Once they let me in the door, I wouldn't leave.
I kind of didn't want to.
I mean, I ended up hanging out at Merriam for like close to three years.
I sort of just commuted every month or two.
I would go up to Springfield Massachusetts, to Merriam's 1940s brick headquarters that were sort of unchanged from World War II.
And go up for four or five days and do more work and do more research and go down into the basement where all of Merriam's archives are located and sort of open up these creaky metal filing cabinets and go back into this dungeon, this fenced off, this metal fence gate, where Merriam kept, like all of, or most of, the books that were used there.
To create definitions for Webster's Third, we're still in the basement.
And so much more.
It was this wonderful sort of scavenger hunt.
Every time you go into the basement and pull open a drawer, you're uncovering some wonderful hidden bauble of the history of language in America.
And it was just so much fun.
I could have kept doing it forever.
Amazing.
What does it smell like?
Does it smell like a library?
Oh, it smells.
Well, the basement smells like like a musty old basement in your house, like your unrenovated basement where you know where it just used as storage.
So I would go down there for a couple hours and I would literally come up and be like a little bit wheezy.
Because it is so musty and dank down there.
But I love the smell of this stuff, too.
I'm like the kind of a person that opens a book and smells it.
And like the consolidated files which are in these sort of like shoulder high filing cabinets all around the main editorial floor at Merriam on the second floor of the building.
Those also have their sort of. a multi-sensory thrill.
I write about this in Unabridged.
I love the paper.
The paper was one of my favorite things about this project connecting with the history and seeing the way words and language were recorded on these three by five slips of paper through the decades, from the beginning of the 20th century until they stopped using paper near the end of the 20th century.
And you see sort of the way typewriters evolved and you see handwriting from the early years and how that changed.
And then into the computer age where printouts were pasted onto these little slips.
And you know, you get those early computer printouts that didn't have any tails on the J's or G's or Y's and Q's.
And I just love that sort of sensory aspect of it.
And it really did make me feel nostalgic for what is lost.
And it does raise questions for how we sort of caretake language and what we do with the history, so much of which is recorded on paper.
Right.
I mean, in some ways, digital files feel more fragile than the paper files.
I think that's a fair assessment.
I mean the Merriam files are.
I mean, they are works of art in my humble opinion, and Merriam treats them that way.
One of the funny little quirks of the place is that Merriam doesn't have sprinklers in the ceiling on the editorial floor.
Getting into the filing cabinets was worse than like fire getting into the filing cabinets.
So the notion of preserving and protecting this stuff is still pretty important to the people that care about it.
That doesn't mean that it's going to be protected and preserved.
And the further we get along in the digital age, the greater every day the risk is that someone will just say we can't possibly keep all this stuff anymore.
Let's send some of it to the Smithsonian or let's see if we can raise the money to start a museum of lexicography.
Good luck with that.
But I do worry that some of this will be lost.
The way that newspaper-bound volumes were lost and library card catalogs were lost, this stuff because it's also not, as there isn't as much of it as there were newspapers and library card catalogs.
So to me, like you have to find a way to save this stuff because it is such a critical piece of history of american language Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, when you're thinking back to the pom-pom girl, you know being a word in there that hasn't been updated.
One of the things you talked about in Unabridged is sort of the tension between updating the older words and adding new words, because the new words are so much more exciting to people.
Like, talk about that a little bit.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, the new words are sort of the foundation for clicks, for publicity.
And the experienced lexicographers who had been hired to revise and update and sort of overhaul the website were laid off.
So there is a – the new words are kind of the lifeblood of generating publicity.
You know, Mariam –
Does two or three or four, it's down to probably two now, updates a year.
And those get a lot of hits.
And Oxford does the same.
Cambridge came out with its most recent update recently too.
Dictionary.com still does them.
But those rely on new words, because new words are sexy and they're fun and they help us understand things.
Current culture and the way that the internet is reshaping language and the way that kids are reshaping language.
But the bulk of clicks for Merriam-Webster and other websites aren't new words.
Nobody's really going to go to Merriam to click on Riz, but they are going to go to click on pragmatic.
They're going to go to click on words that are difficult to understand, that remain confusing and complicated to readers and also are in the news and require a kind of refinement and a nuance.
So people look up fascism a lot and have been looking up fascism a lot for the last decade, for obvious reasons.
Insurrection was a top hit for a very long time on Merriam's website.
And of course, COVID, COVID words dominated lookups.
So there is this tension between the publicity that we can generate by letting people know about all the fun new words that we have added to the dictionary but at the same time, the real traction for a dictionary like Merriam, the bulk of lookups and what keeps numbers up and keeps advertisers interested is the bread and butter stuff that we need to look up because we need to understand what words mean.
Yeah.
And I mean, the Internet has just changed everything for dictionaries.
One of the things I learned.
I was so stunned to learn that Merriam-Webster missed getting the domain name dictionarycom by just six weeks.
Yeah.
It's a great little story.
And oddly enough, John Morse, who was the publisher at the time...
Never was really too upset that it happened.
It seemed like a disaster in 1995 because the way people looked up words was to type in dictionary words and a word or type in a website.
And having dictionary.com initially seemed like a disaster.
And Merriam at the time was having its own internal debate about how to handle the internet.
It was whether to just put the entire collegiate dictionary online and make it free, or and hope that people went there, or to license the file for the collegiate dictionary to other websites that would instantly generate revenue for Merriam.
Merriam chose to put it up for free and it was risky, because the crazy thing about dictionaries is that It was a product that nobody really knew how much people used.
Everybody bought a dictionary because you want your kid to have a dictionary, or you're going to college or you're working at a desk job and you need to look up words.
But no one could be really sure how often people actually cracked the binding and looked up words.
And what Merriam's initial foray online showed was that people used the dictionary and they used it a lot and they cared about it.
Yeah.
So what word that you defined that got into the dictionary are you most proud of?
Great question.
I got in the end spoiler alert.
I defined about 90 words, drafted about 90 definitions for Merriam over my few years that I was involved.
And more than a dozen have gotten into the dictionary.
I think the sexiest ones were topical in the late 2010s, which is when I did the bulk of this defining.
Microaggression, safe space, alt-right.
But I think my favorite, it's like picking your favorite child, right?
I
I think my favorite word was nothing new.
It was actually a new sense of a word.
I added a 31st sense of the transitive verb run.
That's one of the longer entries in a dictionary, isn't it?
It is actually, yeah.
Set in Merriam is the longest entry.
There are 36 senses, and run is right behind it at now 31.
And what is this new meaning?
Yes, my addition.
It was a baseball sense of run meaning and I'll just read the definition that I wrote to eject a player, coach or manager from a game.
Oh, use that in a sentence, please.
The umpire was so pissed off at Earl Weaver, the Baltimore Orioles manager from the 1970s, that he ran him in the third inning when he was arguing balls and strikes.
And I used Earl Weaver there because that was one of the citations that I used, the example citations that I found in my draft definition.
And the run in the OED is even longer.
There are 82 senses, 230 subsenses, and they used 130 phrases to illustrate the use of the word.
But even the OED missed my baseball sense.
So I think I'm proudest of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's probably not as much overlap between sports people and word people as there could be.
You know, like like I'm not saying word people don't like sports.
I think sports people like words.
Sports has a lot of its own lingo.
It does.
You were the host of the Hang Up and Listen podcast for Slate for 15 years.
And I think you worked on some other sports words too for the book, right?
Oh, I did.
Yeah, I did.
Let's see.
Some of the sports words I got into among my definitions included dog pile, when players jump on one another at after to celebrate a victory headbutt classic wasn't no crazy right yeah um and posterize i added a a second sense of posterize the first sense of posterize is literally to put on a poster um the sports sense is to like to dunk over someone fiercely in a in a basketball game Oh, I didn't know that.
I have posterized you.
I've dunked over you, Mignon, and slammed it through the hoop.
And I've posterized you because the picture of me abusing you is good enough to put on a poster.
Oh, fascinating.
Yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
So what did you learn about defining during this whole process?
That it's way harder than it looks, as are most things that you think look simple.
You know, it's like, hey, I'm an author, right?
I've written books.
I've been a journalist for my whole career.
How hard can writing a few lines actually be?
And it turns out that, you know, it is so complex.
Trying to take this sea of information, of usage of a particular word and refine it and distill it to a few words that absolutely capture the essence of its meaning, often in one sense, sometimes in more than one sense, is really hard.
And I learned from some amazing definers at Merriam Webster, Emily Brewster and Steve Perot and others who were incredibly gracious with their time and let me try to do this and teaching me how to do this.
But the thing that impressed me the most about professional lexicographers is that the speed with which they can do this.
You know I was sort of spending days and weeks sort of like in LexisNexis and on Twitter and online elsewhere and in other sources and reading, you know, through all of the print citations, trying to come up with the perfect group of sites, as they're known at Merriam, that reflect usage, and then drafting over and over and over again what I thought would be like the perfect definition.
And Meanwhile, Emily was doing three a day, and it's taken me three weeks to do one.
Then Steve Burrow would edit my work, and it would be like, oh, yeah, why didn't I think of that?
It's like, wow, maybe I'm not such a good writer after all.
It's a very precise kind of writing.
It is a precise kind of writing, and it's also a very precise kind of researching, too.
You really have to know how to target and where to look and to really be able to throw out the chaff quickly and indiscriminately and really be able to sort of zoom in on what matters and where the essence of a word's meaning lies.
Yeah.
Well, the first part of the book is a little bit about the history of dictionaries in Unabridged here.
And, you know, Philip Gove sort of changed the way that dictionaries are written.
He did.
So Gove was the editor of Webster's Third.
He was hired in the early 1950s.
He didn't have a lexicographic background.
And he was more a student of modern linguistic theory.
He wasn't a professional, but he had always wanted to work at the dictionary.
And he just cold wrote a letter to Merriam-Webster saying that he would like to apply for a job there.
He said – that he had about as much knowledge as an outsider could acquire about dictionary.
And for several years I have wished that I were connected with the printing of Webster's dictionary.
And they hired him as a low-level editor.
And the main way that Gove and Merriam helped change the idea of modern lexicography was that it was this pivot away from the idea of the dictionary as this sort of this magisterial document that belonged on a pedestal, that was crafted by learned men and was then handed down, like the tablets, to the public.
Gove and the people that he surrounded himself with viewed lexicography and the dictionary much more democratically.
It wasn't supposed to be this unassailable document. that defined how elites thought about language.
It was meant to be something that reflected the way normal people used language.
That was a real shift for Merriam-Webster.
Merriam had always had an academic or some other elite as the titular leader of the dictionary.
Titular editor of the dictionary.
The editor-in-chief of the 1909 dictionary was a philosopher who headed the U.S.
Office of Education.
Noah Porter, who edited the 1890 dictionary, was the president of Yale when he did that.
The chief editor of the 1934 the second, Merriam's second.
Webster's second was William Allen Nielsen, who was president of Smith College and he would kind of show up every couple of weeks and go to the editorial meeting but he wasn't involved in the nitty-gritty of lexicography.
Gove helped shift the dictionary away from that.
And both in terms of the management of the dictionary.
His bosses initially hired a Brown professor, who they thought would be the next sort of academic figurehead.
And that guy said after a few months at Merriam he said you don't need me, you've got the smartest people when it comes to lexicography here in the building.
You don't need some tweed blazer or figurehead anymore.
And they promoted Philip Gove, and Gove's approach to lexicography, as I said, was much more democratic.
So his idea was to make the dictionary reflect the way that people use language, to have it be descriptive, as opposed to the old notion of dictionaries as prescriptive, a sort of an instruction manual for readers and speakers of in English.
Yeah.
And like space was a real issue back then in print.
I mean, I love this part where you said he conducted a violent war on commas.
Yes.
I was so happy when I found that quote in a letter from Gove to one of his former editors.
Yeah, Gove, Webster's second was like, I call it the double wide of dictionaries.
It was as big as a dictionary could be before a book bindery just couldn't handle any more pages.
And the reason it was so big was in part because it was encyclopedic.
The dictionary in that era as part of its mission to be everything to everyone.
Intellectually it had like hundreds and hundreds of pages of lists and charts, characters from novels and biblical figures and place names and famous people.
It was just like section after section of this encyclopedic material.
Gove wanted to focus more on the words.
So he axed the vast majority of this encyclopedic stuff, which gave him more space for new words.
But he also cut out a lot of literally a couple hundred thousand words from the dictionary in order to save space, so the book could be slightly narrower, but also so that it could be more contemporary and comprehensive.
So, That was sort of the overarching sort of structural way to approach the girth of the dictionary.
The other thing that Gove did.
The main thing that Gove did, and is probably his biggest lasting legacy to American lexicography, was that he came up with the idea of the single statement replaceable definition.
You can take the definition and substitute it for the word in a sentence.
So no more periods.
Tried to get rid of as many clauses as possible in definitions.
Didn't always succeed.
Some definitions in the third are hilariously long, but in doing so Gove said that yeah, he wanted to get rid of as many commas as possible.
And he claimed later, and this seems to like stretch the boundaries of imagination or reality, but he claimed to have saved 80 pages by ridding commas from the dictionary.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How many pages were there to start with?
That book was like 2,600 pages.
Webster's Third wound up being.
Wow.
It was like 13 and something pounds.
Yeah.
So maybe 80 pages of commas.
Possible, right?
It's plausible.
I'm going to give Philip Gove the benefit of the doubt here.
Right.
Right.
Well, you know, reading the book, it did make me a little sad at the end, you know, because it does document.
You talk about the thrill and threat to the modern dictionary.
That's the subtitle.
And there is a huge threat to the modern dictionary.
Yeah yeah, there is sadly, i mean, and it's there are two factors.
One is is google and the other is ai.
Google has been the biggest threat for a long time.
Um, you know, back in the, you know, going back to the 1990s and the 2000s, i mean, this has been a constant game of trying to, to figure out google's algorithm to keep your dictionary link for a definition near the top so that people will click on it as opposed to clicking on something else.
And when Google started adding its knowledge boxes or knowledge panels, that was a problem for dictionaries.
And that was what, when I was there, triggered the first sort of panic at Merriam-Webster.
That led to layoffs which were unprecedented for the company.
And then, more recently, AI on Google has again raises this giant risk of never getting to the link for the definition and fewer people clicking on the actual definition.
Merriam has done, and done very well and has sort of saved the business in recent years, is done what a lot of modern media companies have done, which is try to find ways around this.
So if I type in pragmatic into my search bar and I get the AI information and my Merriam definition is below, the scroll is way down.
How is Merriam going to get eyeballs and keep them on the website?
Well, they've done what a lot of people have done.
They have added games and they've added content that will get you there and keep you on the website, and if that's what it takes, fantastic.
Merriam has done a much better job in recent years, of sort of beefing up its technology, getting smarter about how to deal with google's algorithms, and then done these other sort of ancillary expansions that will attract viewers eyeballs to the website.
It's not what people typically sign up for.
One lexicographer I remember at Merriam saying look, I didn't sign up for this to become famous doing videos and another written content.
The goal for lexicographers is to do lexicography.
But the only way to do lexicography now is to find ways for a company like Merriam has to find ways to get people to the site and keep them there.
And that's not just going to be through looking up, Even though looking up words remains incredibly robust, because our news cycle is so fraught and there are so many words that bubble up just in our sort of daily doom scrolling and other realities of modern life that people still want to look up words.
There is always going to be this hunger to understand the world better and this understanding that the best place to be able to do that is a respectable context, household name, this 200-year-old plus brand like Merriam-Webster.
Right.
Yeah.
You and I both know so many lexicographers who've lost their jobs.
Is Merriam-Webster, am I remembering right that they are the last American dictionary with full-time lexicographers?
I mean, dictionary.com does have a few, but that's about it.
Yeah.
I mean it has been a slow bleed of All of the names that we grew up with American Heritage and Webster's New World and other dictionaries over the last I mean at this point it's more like 30 years that this has been declining.
It's been since the 1990s.
Random House got out of the dictionary business in the 1990s.
Early 2000s.
So it's been this slow bleed.
So I found this piece that Aaron McKean wrote, the lexicographer who runs Wordnik.
Aaron wrote this on-language column 20 years ago in the New York Times Magazine, which said that there are more than 200 full-time working lexicographers in America.
And now it's probably 30, maybe, certainly less than 50, might be less than 30.
I mean, it's mostly people at Merriam.
So Oxford of course still has a full, robust staff, and that's partly because Oxford has this sinecure from the university.
Oxford boasts that it's sort of never made money through the dictionary, but it is a giant, sprawling company that is able to subsidize the dictionary as a kind of loss leader.
So Oxford remains committed and Europe has a different sort of approach to dictionaries than we do in the United States.
States, where it's always been sort of a cutthroat competitive business.
And that, over the last 30 years, has started to rear its ugly head, with a sort of inevitable decline in the success and the stability of dictionary publishers.
Yeah.
Dictionary.com is also leaning into games and things like that.
So yeah, I think that we should all do our part and play word games more on the dictionary sites.
That's a good way to do good in the world.
And look up more and more words.
And look up more and more words.
The book is Unabridged by Stefan Fatsas.
Stefan, I love this.
I don't know if people can see, but I dog-eared a whole bunch of pages.
Oh, awesome.
Yeah.
I'm a book defacer, so I've written in it.
There was so much to love in here.
I think if you love dictionaries and words, you'll love this book.
It'd make a great gift for a word lover.
I have the final copy.
Oh, nice.
We're recording this a few weeks before the release date of the book, but I'm very excited.
But this will come out after the book is released.
It will be.
Is that a hardback?
That is a hardback.
This is the real deal.
Nice.
Very light.
Very lovely.
Yes.
Yeah.
So where can people find you online?
They can find me at my website, buystephanfatsus.com.
And I'm on Blue Sky and Facebook.
And I am happy to answer questions about the book and excited to get it in people's hands.
And I will be traveling around.
You can check out my event site. stops on my website.
And I look forward to meeting people out there and talking about words and talking about this book.
How fun.
OK.
Well, thank you for being here.
For the Grammarpalusians, for our supporters, we're going to, of course, have a bonus episode.
We are going to talk about the sheeple incident.
We're going to talk about the backward index that Stefan found in the depths of the Merriam-Webster basement.
And what else was on here?
Oh, we're going to talk about COVID words and how they were so different from everything else.
So if you're a Grammarpalooza supporter, if you want to become one and get that bonus episode, you can go to quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus.
If you're already signed up, look for it in your feed.
But for everyone else, that's all.
Thanks for listening.
