Look It Up! The Story of the Dictionary.

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Lexicon Valley Introduction

0:30From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. Mike Volo is recovering from winter this week. I'm Bob Garfield. The show is called Lexicon Valley. I confess we chronically pay short shrift to valleys, but we do have a proprietary interest in lexicons, which the dictionary principally defines as the dictionary.

1:00So imagine our good fortune to have our old friend and colleague Stefan Fatsis write Unabridged, a book about dictionaries. Actually, Unabridged is six books about dictionaries, intertwined narratives on dictionaries' history, the eccentric publishing process, the industry's curious denizens, a highly fraught prospectus, a love story, and an adventure, namely the author's personal quest to make his own mark in lexicography.

Stefan Fatsis Interview

1:33Stefan, welcome back to Lexicon Valley. So good to be back, Bob. Hope you're well. I am well. I hope you are as well. Let's start with the love story. To borrow the title from another of your books, you were a word freak from a tender age. Yes. The word freak book, of course, was about Scrabble, and I still am Scrabble-obsessed and competitive. But the love story goes way back to when I was a kid. My mom gave me a Webster's New World dictionary when I was 11 years old on my birthday.

2:08I have it on my desk right here. It's a deluxe color edition. It had a great multicolor, glossy cover with drawings and these amazing full-page drawings inside that I loved. But it was also a book that I grew to use obsessively, constantly, in high school, in college, as a reporter, into my career as a writer. So this is one of the most cherished objects that I have and probably the oldest. I mean, there are two things I care about that I own that I've had since childhood.

2:42One is this dictionary. The other is my baseball glove, which I got when I was 14. So the dictionary tops it for longevity. What was the autograph on your baseball glove? Oddly, Willie Stargell, who was a left-handed first baseman, and I was a right-handed shortstop second baseman. So go figure. But his name was in there. I did a piece about the lineage of my baseball glove that I'm very proud of. Well, I was a Bob Friend kind of guy. Look, you mentioned it. Apart from your writing, the biggest manifestation of your wordliness is competitive Scrabble.

3:17Scrabble is sort of the inverse of lexicography. The nature of the word, apart from the spelling, is irrelevant. It's not about meaning or etymology. It's just vocabulary. Does that require a different Stephan Fatsis to Scrabble than the word nerd Stephan Fatsis who grooves on lexicography? Yes and no. I mean, no, because good Scrabble players love the language. Yes, anagramming is a math skill.

3:49It's a creative side of the brain process. All I care about when I'm over a Scrabble board is, can I put the letters in the right order? Do I know enough words to recognize something that is hidden on that rack of seven tiles? But knowing and appreciating what the words mean and just appreciating their aesthetic beauty, I think, goes hand in hand with lexicography. People that care about words care not only about what they mean and their etymology and their definitions.

4:23They care about them as these little jewels. Language is not just about communication and writing and speaking. It's also something, I think, that's more artistic. And if we look at words as this kind of aesthetic package, then I think there's a stronger connection between the game and the defining that I did when I embedded at Merriam-Webster for this book.

4:55Well, either way, art or mathematics, your nose is perpetually in the dictionary. At what point did your study gravitate from memorizing vocabulary, to be a better scrabbler, to understanding precisely how all these words got into Merriam-Webster, how they got that seal of approval in the first place, or the American Heritage seal, the Oxford seal, the Funk and Wagnall seal, or whatever? I think I'd always been curious about the process, but this project started more than 10 years ago when I was writing for Slate, and I did a piece about Merriam's effort to revise the 1961 unabridged dictionary, Webster's Third.

5:41The goal was to do a complete AA to Zazogaton, I think was the last word in the unabridged overhaul online of this book. And I wrote a 10,000-word piece for Slate, and your co-host interviewed me for a podcast at Slate about that project, and I got a book deal out of that. And it took me 10 years for the usual reasons, you know, publishing, procrastination, pandemic. That's quite alliterative.

6:12Yeah, I've been working on that. I've been workshopping that when people ask me why it took you so damn long to write this book. But the curiosity was there, and doing that piece about Webster's Third was the opportunity to explore that. As soon as I was done with that piece and it published on Slate, I immediately went back to the then publisher of Merriam-Webster, John Morse, and I asked him if I could do a book. And I said, but if you let me do this, I want to become a lexicographer.

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Dictionary History

7:19Let's talk about history. The first English dictionary, Dr. Samuel Johnson's History of the Language, 1755. The first American dictionary, Noah Webster's Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, 1806. The posthumous acquisition of Webster's publishing rights and its brand by what's now called the Merriam-Webster Publishing Company. That was in 1843. And the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the famous OED, in 1884.

7:56I want to know, which of those points in history do you think most influences the dictionary that we see today? I would go back even further, Bob. I would go back to 1604 and the publication of Caudry's A Tale Alphabetical, which is considered the first monolingual English dictionary. That was important because it was the first time somebody tried to effectively put words in alphabetical order with some semblance of a definition.

8:26And it was also designed for not just monks and scholars, but for people. And that was a big change in how lists of words were promulgated. Johnson, obviously, hugely influential in 1755. The OED, I think you gave it a little bit credit for being sooner than it. It took 75 years for the OED to be completed. So the first fascicles came out in the 1880s, but the book wasn't done until the 1920s.

8:58But if we're talking about American dictionaries, and I think we should stick to that, it's Webster. And it's really Webster in 1828. His 1806 book, The Compendious, is considered sort of a little bit shoddy, really bad etymologies. The 1828s etymologies weren't great either. Webster was kind of ridiculed because he wanted to change the language. He and Ben Franklin had these cockamamie ideas to replace letters, certain letters in English with other letters.

9:28Webster was huge on phonetic spelling. So he loaded up that 1806 book with phonetic spellings. Many of which were excised after he was criticized when he redid his work and published it in his landmark work, An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. That was the biggest dictionary to date. It was the one that feels most conventional in a modern sense with headwords and parts of speech and definitions and etymologies.

10:01And it was praised. Webster got the recognition that had eluded him for most of his life in all of his pursuits. He was often viewed as a crank and arrogant and politically abrasive. And here with the dictionary, Webster left his mark on American culture. In my question, I strategically embedded several fact errors to give you the opportunity to demonstrate your erudition and command of the subject. I hope I passed the test.

10:33I think I was gently trying not to say, Bob, you're wrong. I think it's fair to say that the main character of your book is the successor to the original Webster's Compendius, which is the various editions and manifestations of Merriam-Webster's lexicography.

Merriam-Webster Company

10:54Tell me about that company. So Noah Webster dies in 1843, and a local printer in Massachusetts acquires the rights to the proofs to his dictionary. And after about a year, he decides to put them up for sale. He doesn't want them. And these two brothers, George and Charles Merriam, who had started a printing and publishing business, got wind of this. One of the brothers was at a trade show in New York, and he writes a letter to the other brother, who's back in Springfield, saying the guy that has the Noah dictionary is on his way back to Massachusetts.

11:28You need to meet with him. He wants to get rid of it. Acquiring this would be worth more to us than anything we will do in our lives. That was the most important moment in the history of American lexicography. The Merriam brothers cut the deal, they get the dictionary, and they transform what Noah Webster and Samuel Johnson, for that matter, had pursued as an individualistic job, one-man operation, writing these definitions, toiling over their desks with very little help.

12:04The Merriam brothers turn it into a business. They loved the idea of the dictionary, but what was most important to them was the realization that they could make a lot of money doing this, that people would want to buy this work. And they set about transforming, creating the business of lexicography. They immediately cut the price of Webster's book because Webster had priced it at the equivalent of like $660.

12:36They immediately set to work on hiring people to do a revision of Noah's last update of the 1828. And they effectively outsource the creation of the dictionary to a group of scholars at Yale, professors and others in New Haven, who are charged with writing definitions in particular specialties and collecting examples of usage of words to include in definitions.

13:08They professionalize the dictionary, and they are out to crush any competitors, and that's what happens in the 1840s and 1850s. There are competitors, and the Merriams are ruthless in trying to take everybody on and win the war of the dictionaries. Now, one thing that struck me about Merriam is its kind of retro production methodology, which seems to go back to Bartleby the Scrivener.

13:39Paper, note cards, old wooden file drawers, complete silence on the editing floor, virtually no modern technology. You didn't mention green eye shades and arm garters, but I wouldn't be surprised. Oh, I think the dictionary editors in the 1930s and 40s did have green eye shades, yes. When you first walked in, were you taken aback, or was it like, oh yeah, this is on brand? We don't really have a sense of what a dictionary publisher looks like in the modern world.

14:14Media companies are digital. And here was Merriam-Webster clinging to these old rules that were established decades earlier for the process of making a dictionary. By the time I got there in the mid-2010s, of course, this was largely an online practice. But the thing that is most distinctive about Merriam-Webster is the archives that they have amassed over the entirety of the 20th century.

14:46On the main editorial floor, on the second floor of this brick building in Springfield, there are rows and rows of these metal, actually, not wooden, filing cabinets. And metal, because they theoretically won't burn in a fire, which is why also Merriam doesn't have a sprinkler system on the editorial floor, because if they don't want to damage the paper, that's a bigger risk than fire would be. But those filing cabinets remain. They are filled with 16 million slips of paper, citation slips, that include draft definitions, conversations among editors about how to write a definition or revise a definition.

15:28But mostly, these examples of usage collected from newspapers, magazines, novels, books, plays, cartoons, cereal boxes, you name it. And they are jammed into these library, old card catalog style library drawers. And they are there for use still. That's how dictionaries were published until around the turn of the century, the current century. Those were used regularly into the 1990s and even into the early 2000s before everything was digitized.

16:00I wanted to put on a hair shirt and be like an old lexicographer. I used those files more than any current definer or editor at Merriam would. But I was interested in sort of painting these historical portraits of language and trying to see how editors in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and 60s were thinking when they were defining or revising words. I was never happier at Merriam than when I got to walk over to the citation files, which are called the consolidated files.

16:31I love that name. Or go down into Merriam's basement, which was crammed with more filing cabinets and shelves of books in this sort of dank dungeon-like basement. And do research, I mean, in quotes, because it was so much fun, but do research for this project I was embarking on. All right, Bartleby, we will return to technology presently. But in the meantime, these people you wrote about are irresistible, fastidious, heroic kooks.

17:04Do I misrepresent your colleagues and subject? They are certainly kooky when you describe the art and practice of lexicography. In terms of the people that worked at Merriam, my colleagues, they were mostly, yes, fastidious, yes, caring, incredibly hardworking, very much shouldered to the wheel, nine to five, never looking up except for that 30-minute lunch break. You mentioned old rules like no talking.

17:36That was established by the editor of Webster's third, Philip Gove, and it applied to work on the editorial floor. Talking was verboten. There were no telephones on the desks of Merriam-Webster editors. There was a phone booth on the floor at Merriam that editors had to go in if they wanted to make a call about anything, even in the era of cell phones. When I was there, you would go in to the booth and make a phone call or leave the building to use your cell phone.

18:10Editors on the main floor communicated by writing notes to each other that they would put in their outboxes and someone would come and pick it up and then put it in someone else's inbox. So, even for like, do you want to go to lunch? That's how people communicated at Merriam in the heyday of the company. I guess you'll accept irresistible and heroic. Yes. Of that cohort, which character do you think most stands out for you?

18:41If you mean among the lexicographers, John Morse is one of my favorite people alive. He worked at Merriam for more than 30 years. He shepherded the company from the print age into the digital age. But it was more John's enthusiasm for this craft, this undying belief that there is a place for the dictionary in popular culture. It is a central ingredient of who we are as a people, and it is necessary for the continuation of a civil society.

19:21John's job was to sort of figure out the business ways to keep the dictionary profitable and relevant. But underlying all of that was this charming belief in the art and craft of collecting and defining and disseminating words and what they mean. And I love that. Outside of Merriam, hands down, the winner is Madeline Kripke, the foremost private dictionary collector probably of all time.

19:51She had more than 20,000 books in her loft apartment in Greenwich Village when I visited her a couple of times before the pandemic. She began collecting dictionaries in the 1960s, 1970s, and amassed this absolutely gargantuan collection of books and documents and postcards and advertisements, other ephemera, anything having to do with language and lexicography.

20:23She was an absolutely voracious collector. Every private book, rare book dealer knew who she was. She had alerts for every possible website, auction house, you name it. When anything came on the market, you did not want to get into Madeline's way if she wanted it. She was brilliant. She knew something about everything she collected. It wasn't just a hoarder's paradise. She was an intellectual too. But her apartment, holy shit, I've never seen anything like it.

20:54Yeah, 20,000 volumes is a big number for an apartment, for a museum. Yes. It was a little bit frightening. Like you walk into Madeline's apartment, and I sort of gasped the first time I walked in because her collection covered every conceivable space. Shelf space, refrigerator, counters, floors. It was sort of like walking from the front of the apartment to the back. And this was a pretty good New York apartment, like 1,200 square feet, four times the size of the place she lived in for like 40 years in Greenwich Village and had not quite 20,000 books, but had thousands and thousands of books.

21:36But it was like walking from the front of the apartment to the back, Bob, was basically like walking down a path in like a snowstorm. There were stacks on either side, and she had carved out a way. A labyrinth hedge. Labyrinth hedge, yes. Getting from the front door to what was at some point for someone a living room and into her bedroom was just walking down this path. She had a little office, absolutely stuffed with material, and not super well organized except for certain aspects of the collection, which she very proudly would show off.

Madeline Kripke Collection

22:11Where did Madeline get the money to amass this collection? Madeline Kripke's father was a rabbi named Meyer Kripke, lived in Omaha, Nebraska, was the rabbi at a synagogue there. Madeline's mom was a writer of children's books, many of them about religion. And some people in the neighborhood read one of Dorothy Kripke's books about religion and got in touch with the Kripke's, and they had dinner one night and became friendly. And that couple was Susie and Warren Buffett.

22:45And young Warren Buffett was a money manager in Omaha in the 1960s. And eventually, the rabbi and his wife gave Warren $65,000 and asked him to manage the money. And that turned into $25 million over time. And Madeline used her slice of the fortune to collect dictionaries and other related material. Sadly, Madeline died during the pandemic of COVID.

23:19She was in her early 70s. Her death stunned everybody, as every death in COVID did. But this core group of dictionary lovers and academics and lexicographers sort of rallied to help. Madeline's brother was a famous philosopher, Saul Kripke, who taught at Princeton and then later CUNY in New York. And he convened a sort of panel of wise editors to try to figure out what to do with Madeline's collection because she died intestate.

23:54They all urged Saul Kripke to find an institution that would buy and preserve Madeline's remarkable collection as a whole. And after months of deliberations and discussions with various universities, they did a bidding process. And the winner was Indiana University, which acquired the entire collection, which included everything in the apartment, plus dozens of boxes that were in storage facilities around Manhattan.

24:25And they paid about $800,000 for the collection. My guess is that Madeline spent much more than that acquiring the material over time and cataloged it, boxed it up, shipped it out to Bloomington, and have been going through the material for the last four years. Madeline Kripke, yes, right out of The Avengers. But may I tell you the character in your book who most amused me? Who? Well, it's this late-onset lexicography trainee determined to get his own definitions enshrined, enshrined, nay, immortalized, by Merriam-Webster.

25:07I speak, of course, of the quixotic hobbyist Stephen Fatsis. Tell me about that young man and his ambitions. Well, his ambitions were to write a good book, Bob. And I had done a couple of books before this one in which I do the George Plimpton thing and try to do the thing that I'm writing about, right? I became an expert scrabble player. I became an NFL kicker. I spent a summer with the Denver Broncos to write my book, A Few Seconds of Panic.

25:37And this time I became a lexicographer. I had met the people at Merriam because I had done that very straight, not first-person piece of journalism for Slade about the revision of the unabridged. But then I show up with the intent of effectively working as a definer at Merriam. And on my first day on the job, lots of air quotes here, too, I met, again, the director of defining, best title ever, Steve Perrault.

26:12And so I reintroduced myself to Steve. And he said, so what do you want to do when you're at Merriam? And I said, I want to write definitions. And he said, what, definitions that get in the dictionary? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, we'll see. Stephan Fatsis is author of Unabridged, The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary. This has been part one of our conversation. Part two is just around the bend. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, a proper noun tracing from 20th century New York State,

26:44defined as a person cruelly exploited by her colleagues, yet somehow always on task and cheerful. Get in touch with us at BookSmartStudios at gmail.com. Subscribe for free at BookSmartStudios.com. Or better yet, become a paid subscriber, which gets you all kinds of bonus content and gets us money to support our relentless food and shelter habit. Truly, this ain't Google or Meta.

27:16We do depend on your support. Please also leave your comments on Instagram, X, Blue Sky, Facebook, Threads. We are everywhere at Lexicon Valley. And a review on Apple Podcasts is priceless. Mike Vola will be back in due course. I'm Bob Garfield. Later, skaters.

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29:03Thank you. Thank you. Ten cents.