Review
“[An] eloquent love letter to letters themselves. . . . A cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.” —The Atlantic
“Both memoir and exposé, an insider’s tour of the inner circles of the mysterious fortress that is Merriam-Webster. Stamper leads us through her own lexicographical bildungsroman, exploring how she fell in love with words and showing us how the dictionary works, and how it interacts with the world that it strives to reflect.” —Adrienne Raphel, The New Yorker
“As a writer, Stamper can do anything with words. . . . You will never take a dictionary entry for granted again.” —Mary Norris, best-selling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
“A fascinating, even enthralling, examination of the way words actually work in our language, warts and all.” —The A.V. Club
“An unlikely page-turner. . . . Stamper displays a contagious enthusiasm for words and a considerable talent for putting them together.” —The New Yorker
“Word by Word cherishes the dexterity involved in making dictionaries, and . . . proves refreshingly attentive to its human stories. Part of its quirky charm is a delight in the idiosyncrasies of others—not least Merriam-Webster’s many correspondents.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Packed with the kind of word-lore that keeps readers and writers up late at night: Where do our words come from? How and why do their meanings change year to year, century to century?” —The Dallas Morning News
“Great fun. . . . [Stamper] brings both zest and style. . . . An exuberant mash note to language.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“[Word by Word] mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries.” —The New York Times
“Anyone who loves words or has opinions about them will have fun in this sandbox of a book.” —The Washington Times
“A delectable feast. . . . [Stamper] declaims elegantly on the beauty and necessity of dialect, how to evaluate emerging words, and many other topics. [She] is at her best when entertaining the reader with amusing etymologies, celebrating the contentiousness of grammar, and quoting annoying emails from an opinionated public,” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fascinating. . . . Part memoir, part workplace chronicle and part history lesson.” —The New York Post
“A lexicographical bildungsroman. . . . [Stamper] presents passionate, precise, good-humored (and bad-humored) descriptions of every stage of the process that goes into making an entry.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education
“[Word by Word] entertains as much as it instructs.” —Baltimore Sun
“A captivating book.” —Lincoln Journal Star
“Idiosyncratic and engaging.” —The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)
“A smart, sparkling and often hilarious valentine to the content and keepers of dictionaries. . . . A paean to the craft of lexicography.’” —Shelf Awareness
“A funny inside look at how new words make their way into dictionaries, an irreverent take on the history of English itself, and a memoir of [Stamper’s] own journey.” —Daily Hampshire Gazette
“[A] marvelous insight into the messy world behind the tidy definitions on the page. . . . By turns amusing, frustrating, surprising, and above all, engrossing. It is perhaps unsurprising, given her line of work, that Stamper employs words with delightful precision in her writing.” —Booklist
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hrafnkell
On Falling in Love
We are in an uncomfortably small conference room. It is a cool June day, and though I am sitting stock- still on a corporate chair in heavy air-conditioning, I am sweating heavily through my dress. This is what I do in job interviews.
A month earlier, I had applied for a position at Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary company. The posting was for an editorial assistant, a bottom-of-the-barrel position, but I lit up like a penny arcade when I saw that the primary duty would be to write and edit English dictionaries. I cobbled together a résumé; I was invited to interview. I found the best interview outfit I could and applied extra antiperspirant (to no avail).
Steve Perrault, the man who sat opposite me, was (and still is) the director of defining at Merriam-Webster and the person I hoped would be my boss. He was very tall and very quiet, a sloucher like me, and seemed almost as shyly awkward as I was, even while he gave me a tour of the modest, nearly silent editorial floor. Apparently, neither of us enjoyed job interviews. I, however, was the only one perspiring lavishly.
“So tell me,” he ventured, “why you are interested in lexicography.”
I took a deep breath and clamped my jaw shut so I did not start blabbing. This was a complicated answer.
###
I grew up the eldest, book-loving child of a blue-collar family that was not particularly literary. According to the hagiography, I started reading at three, rattling off the names of road signs on car trips and pulling salad-dressing bottles out of the fridge to roll their tangy names around on my tongue: Blue Chee-see, Eye-tal-eye-un, Thouse-and Eyes-land. My parents cooed over my precociousness but thought little of it.
I chawed my way through board books, hoarded catalogs, decimated the two monthly magazines we subscribed to (National Geographic and Reader’s Digest) by reading them over and over until they fell into tatters. One day my father came home from his job at the local power plant, exhausted, and dropped down onto the couch next to me. He stretched, groaning, and plopped his hard hat on my head. “Whatcha reading, kiddo?” I held the book up for him to see: Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, a book from my mother’s nursing days of yore. “I’m reading about scleroderma,” I told him. “It’s a disease that affects skin.” I was about nine years old.
When I turned sixteen, I discovered more adult delights: Austen, Dickens, Malory, Stoker, a handful of Brontës. I’d sneak them into my room and read until I couldn’t see straight.
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. As I grew older, words became choice weapons: What else does a dopey, short, socially awkward teenage girl have? I was a capital-n Nerd and treated accordingly. “Never give them the dignity of a response” was the advice of my grandmother, echoed by my mother’s terser “Just ignore them.” But why play dumb when I could outsmart them, if only for my own satisfaction? I snuck our old bargain-bin Roget’s Thesaurus from the bookshelf and tucked it under my shirt, next to my heart, before scurrying off to my room with it. “Troglodyte,” I’d mutter when one of the obnoxious guys in the hall would make a rude comment about another girl’s body. “Cacafuego,” I seethed when a classmate would brag about the raging kegger the previous weekend. Other teens settled for “brownnoser”; I put my heart into it with “pathetic, lickspittling ass.”
But lexophile that I was, I never considered spending a career on words. I was a practical blue-collar girl. Words were a hobby: they were not going to make me a comfortable living. Or rather, I wasn’t going to squander a college education—something no one else in my family had—just to lock myself in a different room a few thousand miles away and read for fourteen hours a day (though I felt wobbly with infatuation at the very idea). I went off to college with every intention of becoming a doctor. Medicine was a safe profession, and I would certainly have plenty of time to read when I had made it as a neurosurgeon.*
Fortunately for my future patients, I didn’t survive organic chemistry—a course that exists solely to weed slobs like me out of the doctoring pool. I wandered into my sophomore year of college rudderless, a handful of humanities classes on my schedule. One of the women in my dorm quizzed me about my classes over Raisin Bran. “Latin,” I droned, “philosophy of religion, a colloq on medieval Icelandic family sagas—”
“Hold up,” she said. “Medieval Icelandic family sagas. Medieval Icelandic family sagas.” She put her spoon down. “I’m going to repeat this to you one more time so you can hear how insane that sounds: medieval Icelandic family sagas.”
It did sound insane, but it sounded far more interesting than organic chemistry. If my sojourn into premed taught me anything, it was that numbers and I didn’t get along. “Okay, fine,” she said, resuming breakfast, “it’s your college debt.”
###
The medieval Icelandic family sagas are a collection of stories about the earliest Norse settlers of Iceland, and while a good number of them are based in historically verifiable events, they nonetheless sound like daytime soaps as written by Ingmar Bergman. Families hold grudges for centuries, men murder for political advantage, women connive to use their husbands or fathers to bring glory to the family name, people marry and divorce and remarry, and their spouses all die under mysterious circumstances. There are also zombies and characters named “Thorgrim Cod-Biter” and “Ketil Flat-Nose.” If there was any cure for my failed premed year, this course was it.
But the thing that hooked me was the class during which my professor (who, with his neatly trimmed red beard and Oxbridge manner, would no doubt have been called Craig the Tweedy in one of the sagas) took us through the pronunciation of the Old Norse names.
We had just begun reading a saga whose main character is named Hrafnkell. I, like the rest of my classmates, assumed this unfortunate jumble of letters was pronounced \huh-RAW-funk-ul\ or \RAW-funk-ell\. No, no, the professor said. Old Norse has a different pronunciation convention. “Hrafnkell” should be pronounced—and the sounds that came out of his mouth are not able to be rendered in the twenty-six letters available to me here. The “Hraf” is a guttural, rolled \HRAHP\, as if you stopped a sprinter who was out of breath and clearing their throat and asked them to say “crap.” The -n-is a swallowed hum, a little break so your vocal cords are ready for the glorious flourish that is “-kell.” Imagine saying “blech”—the sound kids in commercials make when presented with a plate of steamed broccoli instead of Strawberry Choco-Bomb Crunch cereal. Now replace the /bl/ with a /k/ as in “kitten.” That is the pronunciation of “Hrafnkell.”
No one could get that last sound right; the whole class sounded like cats disgorging hair balls. “Ch, ch,” our professor said, and we dutifully mimicked: uch, uch. “I’m spitting all over myself,” one student complained, whereupon the professor brightened. “Yeah,” he chirped, “yeah, you’ve got it!”
That final double-l in Old Norse, he said, was called the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. “What?” I blurted, and he repeated: “voiceless alveolar lateral fricative.” He went on to say it was used in Welsh, too, but I was lost to his explanation, instead tumbling in and over that label. Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. A sound that you make, that you give voice to, that is nonetheless called “voiceless” and that, when issued, can be aimed like a stream of chewing tobacco, laterally. And “fricative”—that sounded hopelessly, gorgeously obscene.
I approached the professor after class. I wanted, I told him, to major in this—Icelandic family sagas and weird pronunciations and whatever else there was.
“You could do medieval studies,” he suggested. “Old English is the best place to start.”
About the Author
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer who spent almost two decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post, and she blogs regularly on language and lexicography at www.korystamper.com.
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