DON GONYEA, HOST:
It's a deceptively simple book and, at the same time, impossibly ambitious. It's utilitarian but also incredibly erudite. I'm talking about the dictionary. For many decades, dictionaries were bestsellers and seen as the authority on the English language. But the internet and, more recently, artificial intelligence have transformed how we get information, including definitions of words. Stefan Fatsis has written about all of this in his new book, "Unabridged: The Thrill Of (And Threat To) The Modern Dictionary." He joins us now from our studio in New York. Stefan, welcome to the show.
STEFAN FATSIS: Great to be with you, Don.
GONYEA: So let's start with a little history. I think we've all heard the name Webster, but who was he?
FATSIS: Noah Webster was a newspaper publisher, a politician, a revolutionary and, most famously, a lexicographer. He was the founding father of the American dictionary. He published his first dictionary - it was called the "Compendious Dictionary" - in 1806, and it was panned because Noah Webster had some kind of crazy ideas about spelling and etymologies. And he started over. And he finally, in 1828, published his grand work, "An American Dictionary Of The English Language."
GONYEA: Why did he think we needed a dictionary of the American language?
FATSIS: Because he very much believed in the American identity. He felt that language defined who we are as a people and who we are as a nation. And that meant finding, defining and including in his dictionary American words, like revolutionary and Americanize, and words from Native American culture, like maize and canoe and snowshoe. He wanted his dictionary to reflect this new country at this period of time.
GONYEA: OK. So your research for the book included embedding with Merriam-Webster at their headquarters. It's in Springfield, Massachusetts. What was that like?
FATSIS: It was a lot of fun. I persuaded the publisher of Merriam-Webster at the time - a guy named John Morse - to let me write a book and also to basically take me on as a lexicographer in training. So I had to learn the procedures for researching and writing about words. I've been curious about language and dictionaries since I was a kid. So this was this wonderful opportunity to explore how the sausage is made in curating contemporary English, having access to this absolute trove of archival information about the American language.
GONYEA: And in your time there, you were a bit obsessed, I think it's fair to say, with the idea of getting into the dictionary yourself, of writing a definition for a new word.
FATSIS: Totally. I mean, I'm - you know, I'm obsessive by nature a little bit. And when I got there, my very first day, I met the guy that would become my editor named Steve Perrault, whose title is the best in, you know, maybe all of media. He was the director of defining. I love that.
And when I saw Steve that first day, he said, well, what do you want to do while you're here? And I said, well, I want to write definitions. And he said, definitions that get in the dictionary? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, we'll see about that.
And he wasn't just being dismissive. He was being realistic because this is incredibly hard work. I spent days, weeks working on definitions of words that professional lexicographers in the building would've banged out in much, much less time.
GONYEA: What's a word you pitched, and how did Steve Perrault reject it? - kindly or otherwise.
FATSIS: Well, I defined about 90 words, and 14 have made it so far into Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. I got microaggression and safe space and dogpile and headbutt - words that were part of culture, and we think of them as, oh, those are pretty common, but it takes a while for words to bubble up and to sort of become part of the list of words that need to get in.
But the words that got rejected - some of them, I feel, should be in there. I mean, one of my - one that I really liked was a concussion-related word called the fencing response. It's what happens when someone sort of hits their head and their arms go up in there. It's a scientific term. I thought that was going to get in, but it didn't.
Others were more frivolous. I tried to define sporticrat (ph), which means a executive for the IOC or the FIFA - the international soccer body. These sort of - these old men in blue blazers who are extremely privileged. And there's a bunch of that, and you'll see it occasionally in sports writing.
GONYEA: So words and their definitions can be political, and, of course, they can be controversial. Tell us about the covert operation from 1959.
FATSIS: To remove the F-word from the dictionary, Don?
GONYEA: That's exactly it. Yeah.
FATSIS: Yes. So the editor of the third, Philip Gove, believed very much - and this was a principle of this revolutionary dictionary, which generated tremendous cultural response after it was published in 1961 - a backlash actually, because it was viewed as permissive. Philip Gove's driving belief was that the dictionary should be descriptivist - it should give the reader explanations for how words are used - not proscriptivist (ph), telling readers what to do with the words.
And so Gove wanted everything to be in the dictionary. He defined the F-word just like every other word, and the president of Merriam-Webster struck it from the book. It was the one word that the president of Merriam-Webster felt was too offensive, would trigger readers, that would send 11-year-old boys looking it up.
GONYEA: Is language actually changing more quickly nowadays? We seem to be living in hyperspace. It seems like there are new words coming out of social media, out of technology. Is it changing more quickly?
FATSIS: Every era of dictionary has believed that its era is the most fruitful in the creation of new language. Yes, the internet has speeded everything up. So the main difference is that a word can go from obscure or brand new to widely used seemingly overnight. That was never the case, and that has pressed the remaining dictionary publishers to have a more open-minded approach to new terminology.
GONYEA: And what is the future of the dictionary? Language is doing just fine. But the dictionary itself?
FATSIS: Threatened. The most likely way that people look up words is they type a word into a space bar on Google. And 15 years ago, 10 years ago, Google added what are called knowledge panels. They licensed information from dictionary publishers and put their own definition up there. That's usually enough for a reader. And more recently with the advent of AI, Google's AI Overview will take information from around the internet and sum it up.
And the business threat there is that, you know, commercial dictionaries, the few that are left, need people going to their websites so that they can have advertising. That's threatened by these developments technologically.
And so what's Merriam-Webster doing? - diversifying. There are a lot of games on its website now. There are apps and newsletters and other ways to generate revenue that take it away from the traditional lexicography that the company has been doing since Noah Webster. The hope is that the innovation that Merriam has undertaken will save the business of lexicography for many more generations to come.
GONYEA: We have been talking with Stefan Fatsis. His book is called "Unabridged." Stefan, thanks so much for talking to us.
FATSIS: Thanks, Don. Thanks for having me.
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