Word by Word Quotes

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them a supply of water and enough nonperishable food to last several days. “Unless…” almost always marks the beginning of a wild lexical goose chase.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Removing racial slurs from the dictionary will not eliminate racism; removing “injustice” from the dictionary will not bring about justice. If it were really as easy as that, don’t you think we would have removed words like “murder” and “genocide” from the dictionary already? Jerkery, like stupidity and death, is an ontological constant in our universe.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“In short order, I became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist. I recorded a short video for Merriam-Webster’s website refuting the notion that “irregardless” wasn’t a word; I took to Twitter and Facebook and booed naysayers who set “irregardless” up as the straw man for the demise of English. I continued to find evidence of the emphatic “irregardless” in all sorts of places—even in the oral arguments of a Supreme Court case. One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales? I began telling correspondents that “irregardless” was much more complex than people thought, and it deserved a little respectful respite, even if it still was not part of Standard English. My mother was duly horrified. “Oh, Kory,” she tutted. “So much for that college education.” —”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Words are stubborn little fuckers.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Yes, this is what I want to do. I want to sit alone in a cubicle all day and think about words and not really talk to anybody else. That sounds great!”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for. They”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Most words come into being first in speech, then in private writing, and then in public, published writing, which means that if the date given at the entry marks the birth of a word, the moment when it went from nothing to something, then Merriam-Webster must have an underground vault full of clandestine recordings of each word’s first uttering, like something out of the Harry Potter books, only less magical.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Ah, but those horrid initialisms, naysayers cry—“LOL” and “OMG”—surely a mark of modern laziness, moral decline, and the end of Good English as we know it! Never mind that these naysayers use plenty of initialisms themselves—please RSVP ASAP and BYOB. Or that “OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill. What now? Shall we blame the decline of English on typewriters?”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“But S—S goes on for-fucking-ever. Exactly 11 percent of your dictionary is made of words that begin with S. One-tenth of your dictionary is made up of one twenty-sixth of the alphabet.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Good” has been used for almost a thousand years as an adverb, even though usage commentators and peevers have condemned this use. Dictionaries, he explained, were records of the language as it is used, and so we must set aside our disdain for the adverb “good” (and here he looked over his glasses at me) and record its long use in our dictionaries in spite of the rather pointless foofaraw around its existence.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It’s not all “molly” and “asshat.” The etymologies of some words are, for the lexicographer and average joe alike, boring.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Properly, an acronym is a word that is created from the initial letters or major parts of a compound term whose pronunciation is a word (“NAY-toe,” “SNAF-oo”), and an initialism is an abbreviation created from the initial letters of a compound term, like “FBI,” whose pronunciation is a collection of letters (“EFF BEE EYE”). “Acronym” gets used of both of these, however, and such use burns the biscuits of some.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Every republic runs its greatest risk not so much from discontented soldiers as from discontented multi-millionaires. They are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality, and the larger the population which is said to be equal with them, the less content they are. Their natural desire is to be a class apart, and if they cannot have titles at home, they wish to be received as equals by titled people abroad. That is exactly our present position, and would be the end of the American dream. All past republics have been overthrown by rich men, or nobles, and we have plenty of Sons of the Revolution ready for the job, and plenty of successful soldiers deriding the Constitution, unrebuked by the Executive or by public opinion.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Dude, do you even English? That defining job is hella bad.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Real defining answers questions like “What is truth?” “What is love?” “Do sounds exist if no one is around to hear them?” and “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“This is a question sent to the dictionary, after all: this is serious shit.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It is best, in fact, to assume that every verbal illustration you write will offend someone, somewhere, at some point.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“bor·bo·ryg·mus \ˌbȯr-bə-ˈrig-məs\ n, pl bor·bo·ryg·mi \-ˌmī\ : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas (MWC11)”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“I am the world’s biggest epistemophilic dork.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“I’ma ______ ya ass.” I’ma bend ya ass (to Webster’s will). There you go: this sense of “bend” must be transitive.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“dictionaries are not set up to adapt to a user’s mental pictorial database of things.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“The longer you define, the better you become at determining how close to a definition a citation falls and how far away it needs to be for it to be its own sense. Meaning is a spectrum; you are only describing the biggest data clusters on that spectrum. Madeline Novak puts it this way: “There’s a meaning there, and it could be sliced up any of a variety of ways, none of which really capture the whole thing. You’re going to be dissatisfied with it no matter what, so you’re kidding yourself if you think you’ve pinpointed it. There’s still stuff oozing around the edges.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“In June 2014, a sixteen-year-old teen named Peaches Monroee made a six-second video in which she called her eyebrows “on fleek,” meaning “good” or “on point.” In November, just five months after Monroee posted her video, nearly 10 percent of all Google searches worldwide were for “on fleek.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries