Stefan Batz's book Unabridged keeps getting accolades, so I thought you'd appreciate this bonus episode I did with him back in October for the Grammarpalusians who support the show.
Greetings, Grammar Pelusians.
I'm here today with Stephan Fatsas and we just finished talking about his book, his new book Unabridged, all about dictionaries he embedded in Merriam-Webster, which just sounds like a dream to me.
And we have just more wonderful things to talk about.
Stephan Fatsas, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
You bet.
So you know, you defined a number of words that got into the dictionary, a bunch more that didn't, but there was one that caused a kerfuffle.
I want to hear about the sheeple incident.
Yes.
I thought sheeple was kind of a normal word, that people that already would have been in the dictionary.
And very often what I would do was you know you have a hunch, you go to mwcom and I would type it in.
And if it was there, it'd be like, oh, somebody got there first.
Not surprising.
I'm just like some rookie lexicographer.
What do I know?
But sheeple wasn't there.
So I immediately was like, I dibs'd it, as we say at NPR.
I put dibs in on it.
And I started researching the history of sheeple.
And it was fascinating.
I went into the Merriam archives and did deep dive online research about the origins of the word and its history.
I had seen it.
I think what the trigger was.
I had seen it During Trump 1, when Kara Swisher, the tech journalist, had called out a bunch of the tech CEOs for groveling to Trump after he was elected and called them sheeple.
And that was sort of like, oh, okay, I'm going to go look this up.
And it wasn't there, so I did the research.
How far back does it go?
Oh, Sheeple goes back.
The OED did enter Sheeple and the first citation in the OED is from 1945.
Oh, wow.
So very interesting.
And I found the first hit for Sheeple in the OED.
It was a citation from a journal called The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular.
And the quotation was, the people as ever, I spell it Sheeple, will stand anything.
Huh.
And what they would stand, what he was referring to was how announcers on British radio would use the R, you know, when like the Brits sometimes say, what's a good example of this?
And I don't know, I'm not a linguist, so I always forget what this actually means.
Like the name Eleanor, right?
Like use the R instead of an A. Yeah.
So like Mark versus Mock?
Yes, something like that.
Okay.
So that's what it was referring to.
But anyway, so that was the first hit.
And then I found.
The first US hit I found was from 1949, in an Atlanta newspaper, a columnist named Ernest Rogers.
And he, I think, was the first person to use the phrase, we the sheeple.
Okay.
Okay, and so you wrote the definition for sheeple?
I wrote the definition for sheeple.
I accumulated all of these citations.
I tracked the history and the evolution of the word from this early usage as – you know, like as a as just people who are docile and submissive, and how it sort of reemerged in the 1980s as the lingo from the sort of far right.
Anti-American anti-tax, anti-government groups use the word sheeple a lot.
And I sort of wrote a nice definition and I wrote an etymology note and found a bunch of hits citations for it.
And the way, The way definitions at Merriam are crafted.
You submit to the editor a group of citations.
Examples of usage from fairly recent is best popular media, mainstream media.
I had thought I had a nice balance.
I didn't go with weird stuff like the comic book, the comic XKCD, which had a couple of amazing panels that used sheeple.
That would be a little too arcane for a Merriam definition.
So I picked a couple of quotations.
I submitted four.
One was from the Karis Wisher quote.
One was from a quote from the right-wing rocker Ted Nugent.
One was from a New York Times story about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
That was when the story was published.
And another was from a 2015 review of an Apple iPhone case on CNN.
Steve Perot chose the iPhone case from CNN and the Oklahoma City bombing as the two examples that illustrated the definition when it was published on merriam-webstercom.
And then how long was it before that started attracting attention?
Okay, it wasn't very long at all.
It was like a day.
Oh, that quick.
Yeah, it was that quick.
The Apple review was was that was derided, the iphone case.
It said that it was not good.
And let me find the actual quotation.
The apple quote said that apple has debuted a battery case for the juice sucking iphone, an ungainly lumpy case.
The sheeple will happily shell out 99 for it.
Now, this to me just seemed like an excellent use of the word.
Apple users are pretty loyal.
In this case, the implication was that even if Apple produced a lousy product, people would still buy it.
The public did not agree with my assessment.
And the Apple army kind of rose up against the use of this quotation on Merriam-Webster's website.
And the comments section, Merriam still had comments on definitions at that time.
It has since disabled those, largely because they, like every other comment section, devolved into an absolute cesspool of definitions. racist and abusive language.
Yeah.
So there were comments then.
The comments section filled up with people getting mad at Merriam for criticizing Apple.
How could you criticize this company?
And then the media picked it up, which was just kind of bizarre.
But there were stories like in...
I'm just going to list a few here.
Fortune Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle CNET Gizmodo, Yahoo Morning Edition on NPR did a little snippet at the bottom of the hour, these little transitionals that they call buttons.
Rachel Martin was the host.
She said, the dictionary takes a dig at one particular tech brand.
On and on.
It was like multiple languages it was translated into.
Yeah.
So it became this giant headache for Merriam-Webster.
And then the question is, what do you do?
Merriam is not a newspaper or magazine.
It's not a journalistic outlet.
So my journalistic instincts were to back up the reporter.
Like, I didn't do anything wrong here.
I just am reporting the facts.
This was a good example of the usage of this word.
You didn't make up the quotation.
I certainly did not make up the quotation.
Someone writing for CNN did.
But sadly for me journalistically, but completely understandably for Miriam, this was not worth the headache.
It was not worth the volume of emails that were pouring in.
And ultimately Steve Perot, the director of defining at Merriam.
At the time, Steve felt like that the example sentence wasn't doing its job.
It was detracting from the definition itself.
It wasn't a matter of journalistic principle.
It was a matter of ensuring that the entry that Merriam has on its website serves the purpose of best defining the word for whoever comes to that page.
And the example sentence had become a giant distraction.
Yeah.
And Miriam took down the example sentence.
But I got something to write about, so it all worked out.
Yeah.
It was just so unexpected because it's like you were trying to pick the non-political.
Correct.
The non-inflammatory examples.
Yeah, there was no Ted Nugent, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, it was so great.
I mean, my favorite was that the people for the ethical treatment of animals, PETA picked on it.
Oh, no.
Issuing a press release that said that sheep were gentle, social and intelligent animals who are so smart that they listen to and watch the wisest oldest leaders of the flock and follow them.
A common sense thing to do if you don't know the ropes.
PETA, to be fair, was not criticizing PETA.
Merriam, it was urging people to boycott wool, not Merriam-Webster.
Right.
They objected to sheep being used in a derogatory way.
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's also something funny about things you said earlier that basically the sheeple rose up.
Yes.
And the sheeple rose up.
The sheeple mob came after you, which is not what you expect sheeple to do.
No.
They're supposed to follow.
Exactly.
Oh, my gosh.
Well, one of the other delightful stories and this actually was.
You have this section in the back, a huge section like 30 pages of notes.
I'm sorry, 60 pages.
Oh, 60 pages of notes in the back.
And notes and not buried in there, highlighted in there, lovely to find in.
There is a story about the backward index, which is just so odd.
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't know anything about the backward index until I literally was climbing up the back stairs at Merriam, which is how I would get into the building.
I went in through the back loading dock at the back of the parking lot.
I had my own key, which I was very proud of.
And I was just like, there was like, stuff, like I said, everywhere in Merriam, right?
Nothing has been thrown out.
And there were filing cabinets like on each landing and bookshelves and other discarded stuff.
And one day I just kind of was like looking at these different filing cabinets and one of them was the backward index.
And then I asked Peter Sokolowski, Merriam's editor at large, about, you know, what is this thing?
I didn't understand it.
And the backward index was actually a creation of Philip Gove, the editor of Webster's Third.
And the point of it was to identify related terms that might be defined the same way, or particular groups of compounds or words that rhymed.
And the backward index listed words in reverse order.
So like not from Z to A, but from starting with the spelling, like the spelling is flipped, right?
The spelling is backwards.
So the word mignon would be N-O-N.
G-N-O-N-G-I-M, right?
So why would you ever need that?
Well, you would need that because, as Peter explained, and Peter ended up writing a post on Merriam's website about the backward index
Peter explained and he explained it to me too was that before the computer era there was no way to try to figure out certain categorizations of words.
The best way to do that would be to look at the way necessarily that words ended.
How could we know?
If we wanted to create a list of words that ended in "-ology", was one of the examples Peter used.
Or words that ended in G-R-Y, that famous conundrum, what are the only two words in English that end in G-R-Y?
Well, the only way to do that would be to look at the words in reverse, look in the letters in reverse order.
And that was sort of reflected the kind of annality that Philip Gove, the sort of the, The precision that Philip Gove brought to the idea of lexicography, like we want to be able to answer every question that people might have about English.
So if somebody asks, what words end in G-R-Y?
Well, now we can tell them officially that the only two words that end in G-R-Y are homophones.
Hungry, but there was also an old word anhungry, which was an obsolete variant that Shakespeare actually used in Coriolanus.
And now there is a third word that ends in G-R-Y.
Of course, hangry has been added, so the answer to the question is now three words.
But anhungry is the weird one that always will trip people up.
Yeah.
Do you have any idea how much time it took to make the backward index?
It seems like a life project.
Yeah, before computers, it seems like it would take forever.
Exactly.
So, I mean, Merriam did have a big staff.
They had a giant staff.
And among the people that worked at Merriam for decades, there was a staff of typists, right?
And the typist's main job was to take the citations that editors would come up with.
So part of the job at Merriam was, and still is to some extent, to read newspapers and magazines and trade journals and cereal boxes and whatever and look for interesting uses of language and then flag those.
And then they would be typed up into those citation slips that would be put in the consolidated files and the new files, which is another set of filing cabinets at Merriam.
And so the typist's job was to sort of work through these piles of print documents that editors created.
They created these citations, and that was called reading and marking.
Reading and marking was something that every editor was required to do for an hour or two every day.
And I assume that part of when Philip Gove came up with the idea for the backward files, some set of typists set about taking the dictionary and typing each word onto a card in reverse order.
Amazing.
And you said in the book that when the four typists finally got laid off, they were only up to the letter D.
Yeah, the typists were plowing through the most recent stack of example sentences because they There was this transformation.
What they were doing was taking the old paper citations and creating digital slips out of the old, more recent paper slips from the last few decades before they stopped using paper.
They were trying to add those to Merriam's digital database to sort of create the parallel so they would be searchable.
Because like the stuff from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s is still relevant.
The older stuff, not so relevant if you're writing a definition of a word today.
Okay.
And so the last topic I want to get to before we go to your book recommendations is the COVID words.
And was part of the time that you were there, did that span the major first part of COVID?
No, I was not there at that point.
I had already written the first draft of the book by the time COVID started.
And the reason this book took 10 years is...
Because I mean, COVID was part of the reason and I also switched editors and publishers and it was sort of a long, drawn-out process.
But I'm very happy with the way the book turned out and I'm really grateful that it's out there in the world.
So I was gone already from Merriam when COVID hit and I was working on the manuscript and just writing the book.
But what happened was so fascinating that I ended up writing a piece for Slate about Merriam's approach with COVID.
And what happened was Merriam had never – historically seen volume of interest and lookups, attempted lookups for words, as understandably occurred in the first few months of the pandemic.
And so Merriam had a decision to make.
Typically historically, words were allowed to sort of percolate in culture and develop a critical mass before Merriam or other dictionary makers would determine that they were ready to be entered into the dictionary.
They were ready to be enshrined permanently in the gatekeeper, in the keeper of language.
COVID was so different that you know you had to go back to AIDS to find an example of a word that was rushed into the dictionary because its use had become so universal.
And it took AIDS like two years to go from first usage to entered into a print dictionary.
This was the 1980s, so there was no digital dictionary yet.
Merriam was pretty slow still in 2020.
It still took weeks or months to prepare the files and prepare the data sets to get them uploaded online.
So the real hindrance was technological for the pace at which words could be entered.
But there was also still this lingering philosophy that words needed time to marinate before we wanted to put them in.
And so the times were not like 10 years anymore, so words were getting into the dictionary after two or three years since first usage.
But with COVID, it became this urgent project.
And Merriam wound up deciding to do what it had never done before, which was really to act like a newspaper on deadline.
As the analogy that I used to quickly draft a batch of words and get them into the dictionary.
Because hundreds of thousands of people were attempting to find a dictionary definition for COVID and they were failing.
So Merriam managed to go from first usage of COVID, announced by the head of the World Health Organization, to entering the word in the dictionary in 34 days, which was astounding for a dictionary company.
For Merriam
And I did a piece for Slate that sort of tracked what happened not long after that, after the word was entered.
And I think the most amazing and interesting detail of this is, Merriam went through this typical standard laborious studious, academic approach to creating a definition, got it all prepared.
Because also, it's very cumbersome.
The data sets for dictionaries have a lot of moving parts, a lot of different parts.
So it takes a lot of editorial work and then back end computer work to prepare a dictionary entry for the website.
And what happened was when they hit the button for publishing COVID and a group of other COVID-related words before Mariam had even tweeted it out.
It was getting hits.
Wow.
Which indicated that people were constantly going to the dictionary and trying to find a definition for COVID and COVID-related words.
It was really again.
It was another example of how much people turn to the dictionary as an authority to help confirm and help them make sense of the world.
And as I wrote in this piece and write in Unabridged, this was a real example of how important lexicography is.
It's a matter of, as Corey Stamper said to me, a former Merriam lexicographer who wrote the great memoir Word by Word.
Corey said.
When I interviewed her for the Slate piece, she said this was literally a matter of life and death for people trying to understand, parse the differences between all of these new words, all this new terminology about what was safe to do and what this disease meant.
And Mariam's ability to do that was for the company and for lexicography.
It was really revolutionary.
And it was really this amazing sort of confluence of of, like a cultural phenomenon, a giant news event, an unprecedented worldwide sharing of language.
And Merriam had to find a way to quickly help make sense of this for people.
And it did that.
It sort of broke all of its rules and charted a new course.
Yeah.
They're a trusted source that people turn to for guidance.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Wonderful.
So interesting.
So interesting.
And so now we're going to get to what I would normally call this, my favorite part of the show, but I think all of this has been my favorite part because it's so interesting.
But your book recommendations.
So we're looking for three book recommendations from you.
All right.
You said it in your email to me that they didn't have to necessarily be related to what we were talking about.
But I want to do two books that were related to what I'm talking about.
Okay.
The first is – I'm sorry, and people who are wordies may have already read at least one of these.
But I want to sort of – my favorite novel about lexicography is – is The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, which is a wonderful book.
It is just it's about the OED and it's about the sort of the early years of the OED in the early 20th century.
And it's set in Oxford.
Have you read this?
Sure.
No, it's a relatively new book though, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah, it is a relatively new book.
It is delightful.
It's the story of a woman who is at the OED and sort of what happens to her and her sort of secret collection of words and her sort of life in the early 20th century.
It is beautiful.
It's beautifully written, and it's so fascinating.
And it really is.
For those of us who are deeply into this stuff, like wow, this amazing novel about lexicography.
You've got to be kidding me.
But it is a novel that anyone would love.
So that's number one.
And the second word-related book I'm going to recommend is one that I read while I was writing the manuscript for Unabridged.
While I was writing the book.
And it is by Susan Orlean, the library book.
And it is about the history of a library in Los Angeles and a giant fire that occurred there at one point.
And it is just wonderful because Susan Orlean, who I was like, I think like life achievement, like blurbed unabridged.
So it's like, now I can die in peace.
Like, what a wonderful like for me, like honor to have someone as amazing as Susan Orlean blurb your book.
But when I was writing On a Bridge, the library book actually sort of made me feel like re-energized about trying to tell the story, the story of words, because her narrative storytelling is just like.
She's one of my favorite writers.
And it sort of made me, gave me sort of energy like hey, I can tell a good story about the dictionary.
Won't be as accomplished or as literary, maybe as Susan Orlean in the library book, but it sort of made me feel like this is a book that people will care about and will want to read.
Yeah.
I read that book too.
And nobody's recommended it yet.
It was a guest on the show.
Yeah.
And it reminded me actually when you talked about Miriam not having sprinklers.
It reminded me of the scenes in the library.
They had a flood.
Yes.
Right.
She writes about the flood at the LA library.
Right.
Yeah.
And I have one more.
Okay.
So I've got two more.
I'm going to go one more.
We can do more.
All right.
I just read a great discussion of one of my favorite baseball novels on the website Defector, which people should read and subscribe to.
They did a staff conversation about The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.
And The Art of Fielding is set at a small college in the Midwest and is sort of a coming of age story about baseball player and other characters at this small college.
And it is lovely and amazing, like a great novel about baseball.
There are a lot of good novels about baseball.
This is one of the better ones.
And I just picked up, because I've been meaning to read this for a long time, and the U.S.
Open has just started.
When we were recording this Andre Agassi's autobiography, which I've been meaning to read for years and is one of the most honest sports biographies ever written,
And I'm looking forward to finally diving into Agassi's biography during the Open.
Nice.
Yeah.
Good timing too.
Totally.
Yeah.
Wonderful.
Well, Stephan Bassis, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Mignon.
This was so much fun.
I really appreciate your interest in the book and your being supportive of it.
And I had a blast.
Absolutely.
We barely even talked about Scrabble.
Imagine that.
I know.
We could do a whole other show.
Well, I'm going to hold it up one more time.
Unabridged.
I will too.
The Thrill and Threat to the Modern Dictionary.
Just a fabulous book.
I really loved it.
Stephan, where can people find you and the book?
They can find me at bystephanfatsis.com and the book anywhere.
And I will be touring in October and November.
And list of stops is on my website.
So it's bystephanfatsis.com.
And I hope people will turn out and say hi and read the book.
Fabulous.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
