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Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

Book by Kory Stamper · 3 quotes · Language, Alive, Change

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Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries Quotes

“There are occasions, however, when even S holds a secret delight or two in the form of a pink, such as the one I found among the citations (or "cits" for short) for "sex kitten": sex kitten sex pot There is no essential difference in these defs [definitions], but they're not the same. Some differentiation shd be made. The pink was written by one of our former physical science editors infamous for commenting as brusquely as possible on things beyond his remit... Another one of our science editors who was reviewing the batch later was apparently irritated by this note, and decided to comment on what he no doubt saw as needless meddling. His typewritten response to the note about "sex kitten" reads, "I will no doubt regret saying this but I think you have misconstrued the meaning of 'physical' science somewhere along here." But a pink's a pink. Steve acted on it for the Tenth, adding the word "young" to the definition for "sex kitten.”

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“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.”

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