Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

They believe that if we make a change to the dictionary, then we have made a change to the language, and if we make a change to the language, then we also make a change to the culture around that language.

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It is that the general public—particularly in America—has been trained to think of the dictionary as an authority, and so what “the dictionary” says matters.

We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to mean something, and the difference is palpable.

Peter Sokolowski remembers being in the hallway outside the pronunciation editor’s office one day and hearing from within the office a very measured voice say, as blandly as possible, “Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” It was one of our old pronunciation editors, trying to get the intonation right for the audio file. He left a few years la

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

there was a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings.

no fallacist suggests that we need to reorder the months of the year because the names for a bunch of them—September through December—don’t match up etymologically with their placement in the calendar. September (seven) is the ninth month of the year; October (eight), the tenth; November (nine), the eleventh; and December (ten), the twelfth.

language that doesn’t change is a dead language,