Olivia: Alright Jackson, pop quiz. What do you think is the single most difficult word to define in the English language? Jackson: Oh, easy. 'Love'? 'Justice'? Something profound, right? Olivia: Nope. Try 'take'. Or 'but'. Or 'is'. The smallest words will be your downfall. And today, we're finding out why. Jackson: Whoa, okay. That is not what I expected. My brain just short-circuited a little. Olivia: That's the world we're diving into with Kory Stamper's fantastic book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Jackson: Kory Stamper... she's the real deal, right? An actual lexicographer? Olivia: The realest. She spent nearly twenty years at Merriam-Webster, America's oldest dictionary maker. This book is her insider story, and it completely shatters the image of dictionaries as these dusty, boring books of absolute rules. Jackson: I'm ready. My image of a dictionary is basically a grammar-themed horror movie, with a stern librarian as the final boss. Let's bust some myths.

Olivia: It all begins with the people. You'd think getting a job at Merriam-Webster requires a perfect grammar test and a personality made of beige cardstock, but Stamper's story is completely different. Jackson: Okay, I’m picturing a panel of judges in robes asking her to diagram a sentence from Chaucer. Olivia: Far from it. She describes her job interview as a sweaty, rambling mess. She'd just abandoned a pre-med track in college after a disastrous run-in with organic chemistry and fell head-over-heels for medieval Icelandic sagas and Old English. Jackson: As one does. A very normal career pivot. Olivia: Exactly. So in the interview, the director of defining asks her why she wants to be a lexicographer. And Stamper just... unloads. She talks about her childhood love of words, her fascination with the history of English, and how she got obsessed with something called the "voiceless alveolar lateral fricative" while trying to pronounce the Old Norse name 'Hrafnkell'. Jackson: The what now? I feel like I need a dictionary just to understand her job application. Olivia: You and me both. After this long, passionate, and slightly unhinged monologue, she just gives up and says, "I just love English. I love it. I really, really love it." Jackson: And they showed her the door, right? Thank you for your time, please see yourself out. Olivia: The hiring manager, a man named Steve Perrault, just looks at her, deadpan, and says, "Well, there are few who share your enthusiasm for it." Three weeks later, she had the job. Jackson: Wait, that's it? Her big qualification was being a massive, unapologetic word nerd? I love that! It completely reframes the whole enterprise. It’s not about being a robot who knows all the rules; it’s about a deep, almost irrational passion. Olivia: Precisely. Stamper says lexicographers are people who see language as this beautiful, chaotic, living thing. She describes their office cubicles as little "storefront churches" for their linguistic passions. One person's desk is a shrine to etymology, piled high with books; another's is dedicated to pronunciation, with audio equipment everywhere. They aren't guards at a fortress; they're more like naturalists in a wild, untamable jungle. Jackson: A jungle is a great way to put it. Because jungles are messy and unpredictable, which is the opposite of how I think of a dictionary. Olivia: And that messiness is where the real work begins. They aren't there to tame the jungle. They're there to draw a map of it, as it is right now.

Jackson: Okay, so these are passionate people, not robots. But they still have to enforce the rules, right? I mean, what about words that are just... wrong? Like 'irregardless'? That word makes my skin crawl. Olivia: Ah, 'irregardless.' The word that launches a thousand angry emails. This gets us to the central war in the world of dictionaries: prescriptivism versus descriptivism. Jackson: Layman's terms, please. Olivia: Prescriptivism is the idea that a dictionary should prescribe the rules. It should be a linguistic law book, telling you what's right and what's wrong. This is how most of us are taught to think about grammar. Jackson: Right. 'Irregardless' is wrong because it's a double negative. End of story. My high school English teacher, Mrs. Davison, would have a heart attack hearing you even defend it. Olivia: But lexicographers at places like Merriam-Webster are descriptivists. Their job isn't to be the language police. It's to be language reporters. Their goal is to describe how the language is actually being used by people. If millions of people are using 'irregardless' and everyone understands what it means, their job is to record that fact. Jackson: But it's illogical! It's redundant! It's like saying 'un-without-regard'! Olivia: Stamper has a great comeback for that, which she uses on angry letter-writers. She says, "All words are made-up. Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor?" The idea that words must be 'logical' is itself a myth. Language is full of illogical things that we accept without a second thought. Jackson: Okay, but where do you draw the line? Does this mean anything goes? If I start saying 'flibbertigibbet' means 'sandwich', do you have to put it in the dictionary? Olivia: Not quite. There are criteria. For a word to get in, it needs widespread, sustained, and meaningful use. One person saying it isn't enough. But when a word like 'irregardless' has been in use for over a century and appears in edited, published text, a lexicographer's duty is to document it. To ignore it would be like a mapmaker refusing to draw a mountain because they think it's an ugly shape. Jackson: That’s a good analogy. The mapmaker doesn’t judge the mountain, they just draw it. Olivia: Exactly. And this isn't just about annoying words. Stamper makes a powerful point about how this connects to social prejudice. She talks about the Trayvon Martin case, where a key witness, Rachel Jeantel, was largely dismissed by the jury because she spoke in African-American Vernacular English. Her dialect was perceived as 'uneducated' or 'unintelligible' by the jury, and it may have cost her credibility. Judging someone's speech as 'wrong' is often just a coded way of judging the speaker. Jackson: Wow. That takes it from a simple grammar debate to something with incredibly high stakes. It’s not just about being a grammar snob; it can have real-world, life-or-death consequences. Olivia: It absolutely can. And it shows that the so-called 'rules' are often just social conventions. Stamper points out that the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition? That was basically invented by a 17th-century poet, John Dryden, because he was obsessed with Latin and you can't do it in Latin. English isn't Latin. It was a personal pet peeve that got codified into a law. Jackson: So my entire education was based on the whims of a 17th-century poet. Fantastic. My world is crumbling.

Olivia: And if you think that's wild, wait until you hear about the actual process of defining a word. That reporting process—deciding what a word means—is where things get truly mind-bending. It's not just about 'wrong' words, but the ones we use every day. Jackson: This is where we get to 'take', isn't it? Olivia: This is where we get to 'take'. Early in her career, Stamper rashly signed out the batch of words for the letter 'T'. She thought it would be a quick job. The entire batch consisted of one word: 'take'. Jackson: How hard can that be? Take a picture, take a break, take a seat. Seems straightforward. Olivia: It took her an entire month. She describes her desk disappearing under mountains of citation slips—little cards with examples of the word used in context. She spent five hours just on the first box. Is 'take a seat' the same as 'take a bus'? Is 'take a pill' the same as 'take a punch'? What about 'give or take'? Or 'reason has taken a back seat'? Each one is a slightly different shade of meaning. Jackson: My brain hurts just thinking about it. Olivia: At one point, she had all these carefully sorted piles of citations all over her desk and floor, each representing a different nuance of 'take'. She went home, and the overnight cleaning crew, trying to be helpful, gathered up all her piles and dumped them in a single heap on her chair. Jackson: No. Oh, that's a true villain origin story. I would have quit on the spot. Olivia: She almost did! But she persevered. And that story perfectly illustrates the immense, invisible labor that goes into the most common words in our language. We never look them up because we think we know them, but they are the most complex. Jackson: A whole month for 'take'. That's insane. It makes you realize the invisible labor that goes into this. And if that's a 'simple' word, how do you even begin to define a word like 'bitch' without taking a side? It seems impossible. Olivia: That's another brilliant part of the book. She walks us through the minefield of defining taboo words. For 'bitch', you have to account for its original meaning—a female dog. Then its long history as a misogynistic slur. Then its more recent reclamation by some feminists as a term of empowerment. And its use against men. How do you capture all of that in a concise, neutral definition? Jackson: You can't. Someone is going to be angry no matter what you write. Olivia: Exactly. The lexicographer has to be what she calls a 'linguistic bystander,' trying to be objective about something that is deeply subjective and emotional. The book shows that the meaning of a word isn't just in the dictionary; it's in the space between the speaker's intention and the hearer's reception. And that is a very difficult space to define.

Jackson: So after all this, what is a dictionary, really? It's not a rulebook. It's not a bible of language. It's not even a perfect map, because the landscape is always changing. What is it? Olivia: I think Stamper's ultimate point is that a dictionary is a profoundly human document. It's a snapshot of us, at a particular moment in time. It's a record of our arguments, our innovations, our jokes, our slurs, our love, our mistakes. Jackson: It’s a collective diary of a culture. Olivia: That’s a perfect way to put it. She has this beautiful analogy at the end. She says we think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of it as a child. It’s living, it’s growing, it makes messes, and it changes in ways you can never predict. Jackson: And you can't control a child with a rulebook. You can guide it, but it's going to do its own thing. Olivia: Precisely. The job of a lexicographer isn't to control the language. It's to document its life, with as much care and honesty as possible, word by word. Jackson: That completely changes how I see it. I’ll never look at a dictionary the same way again. I'm now curious what words our listeners think are 'wrong' but use anyway. Or words they've seen change meaning in their own lifetime. Let us know on our socials; this feels like a conversation that could go on forever. Olivia: It really does. Language belongs to all of us, after all. Jackson: A messy, beautiful, and sometimes infuriating inheritance. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.