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

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.

Why do we call them “sideburns”? It’s a play on the name of the Civil War officer who made them popular, General Burnside.

Generally speaking, and as mentioned earlier, the smaller and more commonly used the word is, the more difficult it is to define.

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

I had friends split over whether sounding white was a sellout and whether sounding black was playing into a racial stereotype.

So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.

put a check in the margin next to the marked word so the typists don’t go blind trying to find your faint, chicken-scratch underlining in all that text.

Of course, we say, we have a great grasp of grammar;