Explosions, chemistry, and dictionary 'spite,' with Kory Stamper

Lexicographer Kori Stamper interview

0:00Hello. I know last week we said this week would be the start of our new season, but we had a guest cancel at the last minute, so the season got pushed back a week. But I know you're going to enjoy this interview with Kori Stamper that was originally a bonus for the Grammar Pelusians, because her main interview back in April was especially popular. Greetings, Grammar Pelusians. Thank you so much for being here and supporting the show.

0:30And we are here today for your bonus segment with Kori Stamper, author of True Color, lexicographer formerly for Merriam-Webster for many, many years, just knows everything about words and now everything about colors. I swear you must be one of the color experts in the world. Kori, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I think there are color experts who would argue with you on that, but I'll take it. Well, at least in our world, in the world, word nerd world. That works. I'll take that crown. So at the end of the main episode, which if you haven't heard it yet, you should go listen, we started talking about the people involved in making the color entries for Webster's third.

1:11And even starting back to Webster's second, it was really, I mean, in a way it seems like it chewed up and spit people out. It really did, yeah. And the personalities really influenced how the color definitions came up. Do you want to give us sort of a broad overview of the people and the times?

I.H. Godlove and Webster's Third

1:29Yeah, absolutely. So for Webster's third, there was one primary consultant for color. His name was I.H. Godlove. He was a really well-known physical chemist and color scientist. He, in fact, has sort of a couple of really important papers on illuminance. So that has to do with what light is best to view which color and where. And he was just kind of he had his fingers in every pie he could. And he was a member of this group called the Inter-Society Color Council.

2:02In fact, he's one of the founding members. And this was a group that was pulled together and had people from all over who were interested in color and who worked on color. So people from industry, manufacturers, people from the science end. And that's everyone from chemists and physicists to people who worked for the government in color measurement, artists, people who did color forecasting, people who did all sorts of anything that had to do with color description or color making. So he founded that and does that exist today still?

2:35It still does. You can join the ISCC, in fact. And if you are a member, then you, too, will get to hear all sorts of papers about colors and illuminance and all sorts of weird things about TVs. TVs are very fascinating for color folks. Amazing. Yeah. So he wrote these long, long letters to the Merriam-Webster people. Badger them, it sounds like. Oh, yeah. I mean, and when I say they were long letters and he was a prolific writer, that was just who he was.

3:05He was involved in a number of academic societies. He was a top scientist for General Anline. He worked at DuPont for a while. And he really just, he was just an effusive person. Everything he did, he just kind of gave 110% to. He was also a really generous collaborator. He was really well-known for that. And I think that plays a huge part in Webster's third in particular. So when the ISCC first formed, one of their first problems, they dealt with color problems.

3:40And problem number two was coming up with a plain language system to describe color. And IH really took the helm of that. He had done a little bit of defining at the very end of Webster's second in 1931. He was kind of brought in mostly to clean things up. There had been a previous color scientist who had, much like IH, just kind of, you know, sent in a lot of long letters. And said, this is all very complicated, but didn't actually define much.

4:12And IH picked up again for the third. As I said in the first episode, he died suddenly in the middle of defining. And that's where we get our second major and hidden color definer.

Margaret Godlove and Dorothy Nickerson

4:26And that is his wife, Margaret Godlove. Margaret was a scientist. She had a bachelor's in chemistry. She worked at DuPont as a file clerk. That was kind of the option for women who were interested in the sciences but did not have a PhD in the 20s and 30s when she was working. So she became a patent clerk. She was a file clerk. She was the head patent clerk for a while at DuPont. And that's where she met IH. DuPont was one of the main experimental color labs in America at that point.

4:59It employed tens of thousands of people at the Deepwater Horizon facility, which is the Deepwater facility was where all the dye works were, was where all sorts of experimental material science was happening. So Kevlar and neoprene came out of the Deepwater facility. And am I remembering right that there were explosions related to color experiments there? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Color, I mean, even still, manufacturing color at scale is not a safe thing.

5:33You know, we think of like, oh, you just mix a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and it turns purple. And that is not what happens. I was very surprised. Yeah, it's, you know, a lot of the chemicals that are used to make a lot of the dyes, commercial dyes that we use, even today, they're really dangerous chemicals. In fact, there are lots, there's lots of overlap between pharmaceuticals, explosives, and dyes. There was one dye that was manufactured early on in the 20th century, gave this beautiful yellow.

6:06Oh, we know it as TNT.

6:10It's not a dye stuff, it's an explosive. And that's kind of how a lot of, a lot of these chemical companies that had dye works, it was really common for there to be massive, you know, chemical accidents, explosions. It was not a safe industry to be a part of. Fascinating. Yeah. So, so Margaret married IH, and as was required by company policy and law, she quit. Outrageous.

6:40You couldn't be married, and because, you know, you're supposed to, if you're a woman and you get married, you're going to go have babies. That's what you're supposed to do. But obviously, they were both older when they married, and IH really respected Margaret so much. And she assisted him quite a bit with the color defining for Merriam-Webster. IH was hospitalized several times while the color defining was happening. And it was really clear to me as I was going through all of this archival stuff, you know, I'd get a letter from IH.

7:16It was dated in July. And he said, I've been in the hospital for a month. And it would be accompanied with a pack of hundreds of definitions that were all dated while he was hospitalized. And he had said, you know, I wasn't able to work, but I'm about to get back to work. And so what's happening? It became clear that IH probably came up with the defining structure, but Margaret is the one who did all of the actual defining. She's the one who picked those supplemental colors for distinctions.

7:50She's the one that wrote everything. She's the one that kept track of the style guide, which was wild and changing every moment.

7:58I love the clue that you found, the very detail, the periods in her definition. Yeah. So one of the first things that they decided at Merriam-Webster was that definitions would not end in terminal punctuation, no periods. And this was a departure from the second used periods at the end of many of their definitions. And this was a thing that when IH would send in his letters and he would send in sample definitions that he clearly had written, it was just all over the place.

8:32He always ended everything with a period. But all of the slips that got sent in were not, they didn't end with a period. And in fact, as the slips went further along in time, you could see that there was an integration of small style changes that really only lexicographers would have caught on to. This was a thing with a lot of the special editors was they were fabulous, genius people who just did not have lexicography sense at all.

9:04So they'd send in these long disquisitions and then some in-house editor would have to hammer that into a dictionary definition shaped object. But Margaret had a really keen eye and just a really good sense of what a dictionary entry needed. And she did refuse to define a handful of terms. She said they were beyond her skill and those were the basic color terms. So that's like blue and green and red. And what she did was she actually referred those to another friend of IH's, Dorothy Nickerson. Dorothy Nickerson was a scientist who worked at the USDA.

9:39She was also well known in the color field. And she decided she would go ahead and do these core color definitions, which are so difficult to do because really for scientists, it's all about the, you know, what's the nanometer of that particular wavelength? And that means nothing to normal folks. But Dorothy did it. She did a really beautiful job of sort of balancing what we would call comparative defining. She did a little bit of defining for the third and she's actually the one who came up with those color plates because she was very interested in color education, just like IH was.

10:19And she wanted very badly to make sure that this sort of structure, the standard that they had used to define for the third and which they were trying to push into science and industry on the color side, it's called the ISCC NBS standard. She really wanted that to get out. And so she used the color plates in the third as sort of a primer for the ISCC NBS.

10:52So Dorothy was a strong adherent to the scientific ideas of color as much as IH was. She saw the need for good, clear definitions that people could understand. But then wasn't one of the backlashes to Webster's third was how science-y it was, right? It really was. There was this push from the humanities in the early 60s against what was perceived as broad scientism, sort of science will save us in American culture.

11:24And for whatever reason, a couple of really important thinkers and writers latched on Webster's third as an example of what scientism was doing to language and wrote scathing reviews, scathing articles, and really pushed back against a lot of this highly, highly technical, you know, structured, defining style. And that, you know, one of those people, he had a little newsletter called the Lexiconoclast, and he highlighted the definition for color, which was actually not really a definition.

12:02It was just a very long essay about color sensations and color perception and color measurement. And, but he latched on that. It's like, this is so technical. No one's going to understand it. And this is, you know, this isn't about communication. This is about showing off. And that was a lot of what the backlash was about, was science is taking over. We need to let humans be human. We need to not give the sciences too much sway in our language.

12:34And then this led to the founding of the American Heritage Dictionary, which is where Dorothy ended up. That's right. So the American Heritage Dictionary was a backlash to the third, and it was funded by James Parton. He ran the American Heritage Magazine. He had a lot of money and no experience in the dictionary. And so the staff scrambled, and they hired actually a ton of people who had worked on Webster's Third and who burned out really quickly and still left and did other things.

13:11And they hunted down a lot of the consultants that wrote for Webster's Third, including Dorothy Nickerson. And they had said to her, you know, hey, we want you to do for us what you did for Webster's. And she was frustrated with Miriam Webster. She had felt like they had not treated her well. They had not given her, they'd promised her quite a number of the color plates that she put together. And in the end, they didn't give her nearly as many as she thought they owed her. So when American Heritage said, hey, you want to right the wrongs of Miriam Webster?

13:44She was like, absolutely. So Dorothy Nickerson did all of the defining for the American Heritage Dictionary on the same principles that IH used and Margaret used for the third. And it's really fascinating. If you're a dictionary nerd, I encourage you to get a copy of American Heritage's first edition and the third and compare the color definitions. Because they're using the same measurements, they're using the same basic vocabulary.

14:17And sometimes they are so wildly different from each other that you're kind of going, whose eggplant is actually the right eggplant here, according to these two standards? Which ones do you think are better? I actually think Margaret's is better. Dorothy's is more precise for the American Heritage Dictionary because it talks about like eggplant can be a range of dark purples and Dorothy lists all the major types of dark purples. So it's like, oh, it's a dark bluish purple to a dark reddish purple to a dull bluish purple to a blackish purple.

14:53And Margaret's is is much more concise and gets it across to a layperson. I think Margaret's is a variable color averaging a blackish purple, which is which is better. Like, you don't get lost in so many purples. Right.

15:10American Heritage, the dictionary built on spite.

15:15It's true. Well, and Dorothy was she I'm not I'm not saying at all she was a spiteful person, but there was this tiny detail that she was she held a grudge because they didn't include this word she thought was really important. Yeah, it's very true. So one of the things that happened during the writing of the American Heritage Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary was intended to be an unabridged dictionary. And they ran out of money. So then in the middle, they're like, well, we're going to turn it into an abridged dictionary. It's going to be a family dictionary, maybe not as sciencey as we thought.

15:48And so they cut a bunch of of the colorimetry terms. So colorimetry is about the measurement of color and the standardization of color. They kept most of the color names. But one of the words they cut was the word metamer. And if you're a color scientist, metamer is a very important word. A metamer is a color that appears to be one color in one setting, usually a light setting and another color in another setting. And it would kind of be like for word nerds saying, we're just going to pull preposition from the dictionary.

16:24No one cares about those. Like, I mean, they're small and who cares? It's just kind of a nerd thing. So Dorothy kept all of her defining slips. So I found all of those in a corporate archive and she kept a copy of both Webster's Third and the American Heritage Dictionary. And she noted in pen, in her American Heritage Dictionary, where metamer should have gone and what the definition should have been.

16:55And in letters to people when they said, oh, I saw the American Heritage and you did excellent work. And she'd say, thank you so much. I'm so sad that metamer's not in there. Please don't think worse of me because metamer is not in the American Heritage Dictionary. Amazing. Just like a word person would say, I'm so sorry, the prepositions aren't in there. I told them they should be. Yeah, exactly. Even you would carry it with you your whole life. Exactly. Yeah, I know. And it just goes to show how complex the production of dictionaries actually is.

17:28You know, we think of them as being this sort of almost theoretically perfect platonic ideal of capturing language. But, you know, they're affected by market forces. And if you run out of money or you run out of staff, you run out of money and you run out of staff. You have to change. So, yeah. No, it seemed like the color definitions throughout the years have just been affected by catastrophe after catastrophe. Struggle after struggle. And you can see why they are the way they are now. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

18:00Amazing.

Recommended reading on color history

18:01Well, the book is True Color. You want to get the book. And after you are done reading True Color, then Corey has some recommendations for other books that you might want to read. I do. I focus specifically on other color books you might want to read. So, if you are interested in the history of individual colors, individual color names in particular, I recommend The Secret Lives of Color by Cassia St. Clair, which my copy has this beautiful, well, it has a lot of my sticky notes in it.

18:32But it also has this beautiful four-edged rainbow. Oh, nice. Hunt that down. I have read that book, but I got the e-book, and I've always regretted it, actually. There is something about when you're doing, I mean, I bought a lot of books for the color book, and there's something about having the book in hand. If you're interested in the history of the science of color, and particularly of how people came up with the idea of smashing rocks and putting them in oil and painting with them, I recommend Bright Earth by Philip Ball.

19:03Bright Earth, The Invention of Color. It's a really fascinating, very accessible scientific history of pigments and color. And if you are interested, if you're the person who goes on the internet and sees those things that are like, this square is blue, unless you cover it with your hand and then it's brown, then you absolutely need to read Joseph Albers' Interactions of Color. This is the foundational text where most of those things come from, and it's also very pretty on the inside.

19:35So you get to see all sorts of things about how we perceive color, how colors affect the way we see them when they're next to each other. So Joseph Albers' Interaction of Color, Philip Ball's Bright Earth, and Cassius St. Clair's The Secret Lives of Colors. Wonderful. That sounds great. Thank you, Kori. Yeah, thanks for having me. So again, the book, One Last Time, is True Color, The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color. From Azure to Zinc Pink.

20:06It's a long subtitle. It is a long one. Sorry, y'all. It would make a great gift for someone who is into words and color in particular. And the history of dictionaries, you know, we didn't even touch on it, but I learned so much about Gove, who is the editor for Webster's Third and how influential and interesting he was. So if you're interested in dictionaries, this really is also a fabulous book. If people want to catch up with you, keep up with your writings, where should they find you? I have a blog, as does everybody. It's at koristamper.com.

20:38And I occasionally post on Blue Skies. That's koristamper.bluesky.social. Awesome. Thanks, Kori. Yep. Thanks so much. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori.

21:08Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori. Thanks, Kori.