The Lexicographer's Rules

I am not a professional lexicographer, merely an amateur linguist. ... The word quacks would have you believe that lexicographers invent or canonize new words. Besides the impromptu rounds of Stump the Chump, in which the general public expects lexicographers to be able to define and explain the etymology of every word in the dictionary, probably the next biggest irritant are the earnest attempts to force a new word into “The Dictionary,” as the quacks put it, as if there was just one dictionary. We anglophones don’t have anything like the Académie FranÁaise to officially induct new words: despite our prescriptivists tendencies, we tend to bow before the overwhelming evidence that the mutability of language surpasses the ability of any one person to have a great impact upon it, neither by keeping language in, nor by keeping it out. The French, by way of comparison, spend an unhealthy amount of time digging canals to reconnect oxbows long since separated from the main water course of la langue hexagonale by accidents of history and fashion. For the most part, English-language experts are content to map the language as its course changes. The English-language non-experts are a different story.

One of the other hats I wear is as webmaster for the web site of the American Dialect Society (it’s a red crushed velvet hat, with three long corners, silver bells on each end, with a lining made from the skin of a wild pig). As part of that job, I receive a lot of mail: some of it from students looking, basically, for someone to do their research for them. High school and college students. [This is a good a point as any to say that any opinions expressed here are mine, and not those of the American Dialect Society, an organization which is populated by professionals who are infinitely more qualified than I am to talk about dictionaries, lexicography and words in general. But on I go.] A good number of the letters I receive from visitors to the ADS web site are from people who have invented a word and want it inducted into The Dictionary. How many times have I received a message: a letter, usually carefully typed, but with one or two tell-tale errors, a letter claiming the sender has found, nay, discovered! a word that deserves to be in The Dictionary. They don’t admit to having invented the neologism. They are content with coyly claiming they found or heard the word in the course of their daily lives. Usually the word is so obviously fabricated by the letter-writer as to make the infantile attempts at deception embarrassing. I usually send back a polite thank you, or nothing at all. A friend in the dictionary business remarks on the constant stream of “look what I found” letters this way (and I am paraphrasing in order to condense multiple ideas from a long conversation): “I have at my disposal the best libraries in the world, room-sized file catalogs with citations and sources. I am in touch with armies of readers and researchers. If there is a new word in the world, it is unlikely that a word should appear first, and just once, to someone outside of the lexicography trade.” He was also very adamant that lexicography is not a profession, as no degree or state-approved certification is required, though that didn’t mean that he held his trade in any less esteem. “No, it’s almost impossible. Except perhaps for those rare voracious readers who also possess fantastic memories (and inevitably write long letters using every ten-dollar word they can think of), to most people outside any of the word-based trades, the better part of the existing English vocabulary appears to be made of ‘new’ words: they wouldn’t know a rare word when they saw it because they know, relatively speaking, few words at all.” Some of the coinage attempts I receive are cutesy words which, like Richard Hall’s Sniglets, thankfully were long-dead before they were ever entombed upon the pages of any book found on the humor shelves of your Borders bookstore. Keep them within your family, please, so the rest of us don’t retch. Others are attempts to bowdlerize or laud; I received more than a few September 11-related submissions, which were almost as bad as the mailbox-load of 9/11-related poetry I also received. These two types of candidates we can safely ignore. There’s a whole other category of word submitters I want to talk about: the ones in search of legacy. They want to be remembered. They want to forever be attached to a word as the inventor of it. Most of the attempts are awkward and annoying. Some of the authors of ooh-look-at-me-I-coined a word letters not only want to be listed in the dictionary next to their word, but they want to find out how to copyright it. So on one hand, they want their word to become wildly circulated, but at the same time they want to restrain it, to control its use some how, so that everyone is forced to acknowledge their primogeniture (if we can lightly redefine that word to mean something more akin to, “first or earliest rights"). Such attempts to introduce words are doomed. They have a stink about them. When they are forcefully and consciously spread, they stink more: they have the air of inauthenticity, like your grandmother using “bling bling.” It’s just odd. It’s out of place, and clearly does not belong. Nobody picks up a new word unless it works, and such words tend to not. During the last few days, an erroneous news report has been going around which claims the Oxford English Dictionary has inducted the word “bling bling” into its pages. It hasn’t. I have that fact directly from the keyboard of a high-level editor of the dictionary in North America. Not only has it not been inducted, it hasn’t been defined. There isn’t even a draft. Bad reporting aside, here’s a quote from Cash Money Millionnaire rapper BG, who is credited with coining the word: “ëBling bling’ will never be forgotten. So it’s like I will never be forgotten. I just wish that I’d trademarked it, so I’d never have to work again.” He’s willing to attach his personal legacy to a word, and yet, he can’t dissociate the idea that there is profit to be gained from it. The two go in tandem: money and legacy. But what’s more interesting is what the MTV reporter writes in the paragraph before: “While BG once felt territorial about his much-loved term, he’s since opened his arms to the slang’s universal appeal.” In other words, the success of the word was accidental. He had no control over it. The song became famous, people picked up bling bling, and, wham, into the common parlance it goes. That’s the lesson for the word-mongers, slavering over their Scrabble tiles and ragged copies of the 2003 World Lexicographers Directory and Red Book: You cannot control language. You cannot force it to change any more than you can force it to remain the same. It’s a natural, unconscious, organic process. All the proscriptions and prescriptions in the world would be insufficient. A government-ordered switch to another alphabet, say, from Arabic to Cyrillic, is about as far as you can go, and you’ll still always have hangers-on to the old script, and libraries full of books and periodicals in the old form. Many a failed advertising campaign, particularly teaser campaigns which are intended solely to establish a brand, have failed for not understanding how words (and memes in general) spread. You cannot, in short, request a word be accepted. To can try very, very hard, but it’s basically out of your hands. I have just this afternoon received another such “look at my word” message in my mailbox. The message and web site are so baldly attempting to garner some sort of fame and money for the inventor of the word, that I will not only link to his site, but I’ll use the word in a sentence: Wis is a cockamamie, jackass, bullshit word invented for the self-glorification and vanity of a man who apparently can afford to host a web site, but is still begging for money for his family.

More bullshit words. I must admit, some of these are good. But it’s the painful, unglamorous insistence on attaching a name to the words, giving an “author” credit, that makes them useless. These words aren’t free (as in “as a bird"). They’re still imprisoned in ego. ... Two books I would recommend on this topic, by fellows whom I know to be experts. by Sidney Landau. The book on dictionaries and putting them together. Absolutely top-notch.

by Allan Metcalf. Excellent work detailing how neologisms survive. Allan’s got a whole muckle of books available, many of them accessible to folks without particular knowledge of linguistics or lexicography.