Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

Pastor recommended this, and it was great. The author is a lexicographer for Merriam Webster. They lean descriptivist, so I also reread David Foster Wallace’s essay Authority and American Usage alongside this. Which led me to check out Garner’s Modern American Usage from the library. And buy Wilson Follett’s Modern English Usage from Half Price. And generally geek out about dictionaries and usage guides a bit. This is a side of myself that I was only vaguely aware of (at least, I was unaware of the degree that I might get into this), but it’s been fun to read usage notes, learn things that I say that are non-standard (e.g., “snuck”), and think about the issues on both sides of the prescriptivist/descriptivist debates.

"Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid."