Learn English with a dictionary (with Peter Sokolowski) – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.people are passionate about language especially language change and words matter and nobody knows this better than peter sokolowski who is an editor at the merriam-webster dictionary one of the most famous and most trusted dictionaries in the world he has spent his life immersed in words and their meanings and all of the difficulties that come along with that work in this interview we talk about the role of the dictionary standard and non-standard english language and culture and how dictionaries are a sign of profound human agreement and also profound disagreement this is an edited version of our interview if you would like to listen to the full version you will find a link down in the description box i hope you enjoy it before we start talking about some of the like kind of practical aspects of working on a dictionary i wanted to just talk a little bit more about theory and i actually wanted to to start with not which is absolutely nothing to do with your work at all but um i noticed that when you were messaging me on twitter that in some of your messages uh you didn't use any capitals or punctuation and i suspect that there would probably be people out there who are horrified to learn that that you know the editor at large of a dictionary of a major dictionary is sending messages without proper without proper english well you know we're not the grammar police and also you know language is an organic and and utilitarian thing and so the fact is and i have a lot of fun with it and often if you actually look at my twitter feed uh that's public um you will see sometimes i will respond to individuals um and there's actually become a kind of grammar for this uh with no caps and no punctuation whatsoever that will make it clear to people that this is an aside that this is a lighter tone um or also a kind of intimacy you know that that i'm responding to this person and it might be clear to strangers that oh those two those two people have had exchanges before you know they're or or they know each other and uh i find that comfortable and also typing you know for uh dms you know direct messaging and things like that i find it easier to do without capital capital letters um but you know it's funny too because there's a there's an element of of pred of kind of of of of ideas of prejudice against um authority you know this sort of idea of a dictionary as an authority and uh i would say that that's a complicated relationship that i have and that dictionary publishers generally have with this idea of authority in other words there is a paradox with dictionary publishing especially the way we do it today which is that the research is entirely descriptive in the linguistic sense which is to say that we are reporting on the actual way that the language is used by real people in real publications um and at the same time we know that people come to the dictionary for prescription you know for calling balls and strikes and i have to recognize that there is a tension between those two sort of fundamental missions and roles um obviously there's a prescriptive mission for a dictionary we do tell you that the the conventional spellings for example of a word the conventional pronunciations um and certainly the um the conventional gram grammatical uh uh identification that we would make with a word uh but at the same time we want to keep up with the language and reflect the changes that happen constantly to a living language and so that's the descriptive part and the prescriptive part is sort of in a sense uh acknowledging that there is enormous consensus uh among the people who use english over a couple of thousands of you thousands of years and many millions of people we've all agreed that a certain set of sounds mean a very specific thing and to me that's why i do believe that a dictionary is maybe the greatest evidence of human consensus that we have because if we can't agree that this set of sounds means this certain thing we can't move on we can't go to the next idea we can't you know communicate clearly and so i i look at the dictionary as as a kind of collection of evidence evidence-based information um that can help you um at every level whether it's just basic knowledge of what a word is to the higher level of usage the cultural use of a word um is it offensive is it uh obsolete um is it british is it you know all the kinds of the little nitty gritty cultural information um that you also get from a dictionary and so you might say oh that's prescriptive if you say that laurie is a british word but actually that's descriptive we are saying that we find that the word lorry used to mean a thing with four wheels that that that moves people um is used more in britain than it is anywhere else and so that's our descriptive mission but then we put that label on it too and i don't i don't know if i if i answered your question but i do find there's a kind of a descriptive mission but also a prescriptive form to a dictionary yeah and i mean how do you feel about people using the dictionary as a tool for prescription well the fact is you know you know we are the official dictionary for the national spelling bee for example and so obviously you know we're we're determining the conventional spelling of a given word and it's correct or incorrect according to that given spelling that we that we provide so the fact is if you're using the dictionary for information it's there for you um and you know that is honestly a huge part of how we all use the dictionary i do too you know i look up 100 words a day probably more than most people but i often want to know is that word hyphenated um you know is it capitalized are there i have problems are there two l's or one l is it an a n t or an emt the same problems that we all have and uh there's certain words i'm sure we all have them that we have to look up every time we use them that's just the way it is it's the way language works um so that i'm very comfortable with the dictionary being a repository of information about language and it's there for that purpose um i don't like it when it's used as kind of a bat to hit other people with do you know what i'm saying i i feel like we can acknowledge that there's a convention that uh for example in american english we don't double uh the l in inflections for for words like canceled or traveled um but that's just a convention um i was once a pronouncer for a spelling bee in um in india and because it was me they were using american uh american spellings and there was a a a speller a young you know a 13 year old speller who spelled a word in what would be a conventional british spelling i think that it was a word like neighbor or something with a u and um the judge uh declared that the spelling was incorrect because it wasn't the american spelling and i had to intervene and say no no that speller spelled the word correctly uh in what is an absolutely standard way and we recognize it in in both face letters as a variant in our dictionaries so absolutely we are going to accept that as a correct answer so i i just i feel like we should look at the dictionary as a repository of information and again not as a not as a bat to hit other people with i just think that's a bad use of of the dictionary it's a bad use of uh any kind of cultural document yeah um and i'm wondering how you know especially now as we're moving towards um you know much more recognition of let's say alternative you know dialects of english and non-standard you know uses usage of grammar and vocabulary um is there a sort of concern that maybe that for example by not representing african-american english or something that that it's um almost promoting uh i don't know like there's this standard correct way of speaking when maybe there might be in the u.s for example there might be tens of millions of people who are using other forms every day um like almost like the dark side of that of that authority you know from the dictionary absolutely i mean you're raising a very important point and this gets to uh i think the history of the culture writ large and the dictionary as a as a kind of as a kind of representative piece of evidence of that culture the traditional way of making dictionaries was obviously based on published edited prose um and that was true for samuel johnson in the 18th century it was true for noah webster in the 19th century and it's true for us today now in the 18th century published edited prose basically meant books by white men and therefore johnson's dictionary and later webster's dictionary they were they were providing lots of evidence of words as they were used in examples and using examples from literature like shakespeare and milton and spencer but also the bible was a very important source for these dictionaries of course but they were overwhelmingly the works of white men and then as you move into the 20th century and the great um uh the great big unabridged editions you can see one over my shoulder right there that's the big second edition it's a book that had 600 000 entries it's a huge book it weighs about 18 pounds that was the 1934 edition the 1961 edition was highly criticized because it did something uh not really for the first time but in a very systematic way it it read not just the news stories at the front of the paper of newspapers but it read the sports pages and it read the arts pages and it started including words from fields that weren't just scholarship and literature but for example the the the lingo of jazz musicians or of carpenters um because those words were actually published and we were able to catch them we there was the only way we could find them was you know on on paper now um that meant that there was a structure of publishing that really favored one group of people uh and that group of people tended to be the the dominant economic uh force of of the european-based cultures and then the american cultures and so now what we see is as we continue into now into the digital age where we can um search much more quickly and and find much more information um but also we're getting so many more uh professional writers uh who are not uh white men writing about literature um and so that we can give evidence of their use of language and and in exactly the same way that we've always done this job we can actually reflect a greater diversity of language because we are finally acknowledging that there are a greater diversity of writers um and and i mean that in the in the broadest possible sense uh because the dictionary i mean like that 600 000 entries we all use uh these words but there may be new words that we haven't found yet or new uses of existing words that we can recognize the thing about standard english as you mentioned and i think that's a really important point because we are really measuring standard english there's a lot in a dictionary um i think uh that is kind of the center of the language in other words there's there's a register of scientific vocabulary or technical vocabulary or idiolect that you know that that may be a household word even that is so rare or so rarely found in print that it won't get out to the world you know i use words every day with colleagues that we'll never put in our own dictionary um because it's just an in-house term that we use you know uh one is prawn we say prawn can you give me a prawn for that and it just means pronunciation a phonetic transcription of a term so can you give me a prawn for but i mean that is an in talk about insider language but there's another there's another good word my brother's field of art conservation uses a term for drawing uh uh uh uh washed sheets of paper um and you dry them in uh in an oven and they use the term oven eyes which is perfectly transparent it's easy to understand and yet when you're treating uh for conservation purposes a document from you know the 18th century or something in that way you're not baking you know and so even though it's a it's a trend but here's a term that may never again may never make it to the dictionary but it's transparent it's useful it's it's it's a technical term there's also a lot of language that is simply always spoken and never written and that's the that's the level of language that we have the most trouble with because we don't have evidence for we need to compile evidence and that's just the sort of basic library function job of a lexicographer is to accumulate evidence once we see or encounter a word once then we need a lot more evidence because we typically say that a word needs to have widespread use long-term use and meaningful use in order to get into the dictionary and we really need evidence on all three fronts and so uh that's the problem with spoken slang now with standard english as you mentioned so that's that's why we have kind of the central what i call a basic vocabulary that is shared by many people that makes the core you know vocabulary uh that you that is recorded in a dictionary standard english is you know it's not a superior form of the language but it is a privileged form of the language and in a sense we have to acknowledge that privilege all of us the teachers of english the learners of english and the lexicographers and recognize that this is the this is the dialect that is used for communication uh in a professional academic international context um it may not be the dialect of english you speak at home it may not be the dialect of english that is spoken in your region and it and it may be only one of several that you speak every single day however it is the easiest one to measure and that's the one that gets the greatest representation in the dictionary so in a sense it's a chicken and egg problem do you see do you see what i'm saying but i think to your point um it's a long answer long-winded uh way to get around to this but we can today recognize these other varieties much more quickly and they themselves are um found uh in in published sources much more readily and so that they will be recognized because it's all english um i mean do you do you sometimes wish that you could put more information into your dictionary entries than you actually do oh of course of course um and you know what's interesting is that now we can more than formally so one of the big uh legacies and it's it's actually something i did i said this on twitter once um the the big dictionary you see behind me actually posed a problem because once that was published 1934 then it came time for the next edition how do you how do you make a book even bigger than that and the answer was we can't and so the immediate answer was because of the limitations of the printed page that editor in the 1950s and 60s said new rules we are going to be more strict with how we write our definitions and which words are included so the first thing he did is he threw out all proper nouns they're gone we're not going to define those anymore and that saved a lot of pages from that dictionary so in in an encyclopedic dictionary such as that which is called webster's second typically called webster's second um you could look up mount rushmore you could look up george washington the eiffel tower you know there were entries for those things and basically a proper noun of course is not well maybe it doesn't carry meaning it doesn't carry meaning it's exactly it's not lexical in that sense it doesn't carry meaning it's a label for a place or person or a thing and it was recognized too that an encyclopedia is a better place to get more information all we could do is put a little skeleton of a definition and it's insufficient but he really wanted to save space but also if philosophically he said you know what we can define a word that carries meaning we can't define these things so we shouldn't be in the business of defining proper now so we cut them all out um and that saved a lot of space and this idea of separating the lexical from the encyclopedic is a very fundamental one to to lexicographers now subsequently you you know we just tried to make definitions very concise um very short so there would be more room for other words but now online of course we don't have those limitations for space so the new work that we do ha is much more expensive and we can give much more information particularly information about usage and example sentences which are two things that are really helpful for language learners um and two of the three things that did distinguish our or any learner's dictionary from a dictionary written for native speakers um the three things i would say are the the vocabulary used in the definitions themselves is much reduced so in our case we defined about a hundred thousand words with a vocabulary of three thousand words so we we had a self-imposed limitation um secondly we added many many many example sentences usually complete sentences so you get the syntax the register and the context of every word which is unbelievably important um i know that for me as a as a learner as a as a bilingual person as someone who speaks french when i'm looking a word up in french very frequently it's not that i don't know the word itself it's what i i need to know what the damn preposition is what what would you use at or two you know and so you need to know that some tactical um contextual uh information and finally the third thing is idioms idioms idioms idioms the the metaphorical use of a concrete noun i could eat a horse uh you know i mean that is an incredibly powerful you know a figurative use of language and it requires uh enormous explanation what's funny and what i discovered in the process of working on our learner's dictionary is that we have so very few idioms in our dictionaries for native speakers such as the big on a bridge dictionary very very few for example i could eat a horse is not in those dictionaries but it is in our learner's dictionary because there is nothing more important than to define how the word horse is used when it doesn't mean horse and um and so uh for me uh and i do entire workshops just on american english idiom for this purpose because if you look up concrete nouns cheese hat fish horse table penny they are they all have metaphorical uses and what i always tell teachers is that even in the first year of study um when it's very dangerous for students to think of language like math and i think you know what i'm talking about that this equals this bilingual dictionaries allow that they allow for that uh sort of um yeah that or that i was going to say that almost like a fantasy because when you're talking about concrete nouns for example it does work that way i mean sort of you know the finger is draw and your table is table and you can just you know negative and you can just go and kind of learn them like as if this equals this as if it was a math problem of course language isn't math it doesn't work that way and so i think teach the two most common idioms by my estimation to a 14 year old first year student or a seven year old first year student or a 40 year old first year student piece of cake you know allow that speaker who in their own home language they know that language is rich that languages has images that language can tell a story piece of cake doesn't mean dessert and so you have to now we've got a little story you've got a chunk of language that tells a story and you've electrified parts of the brain that were falling asleep in class you know that were that had been that had been just doing math with words instead of learning language and so hold your horses and piece of cake you know those are two i think maybe the most common uh idioms used in english and i think every at the end of a first year every uh student should learn them partly because they they take you out of the the math kind of lesson and bring you into this idea of language as image uh language as metaphor and metaphor is a higher plane of thinking and so let's let's engage that to the extent that we can and i mean and these are chunks you know and fluency comes from the application of fixed forms uh in uh in spontaneous uh production so you have to mix them and the thing about idioms that's fascinating to me and i learned this sort of by doing it by working on it is that they are immutable in form that's how we define that's how i define an idiom from myself which is if you can change if you can swap the order or any of the words i could eat a horse if if if if you ever said i could devour a horse it doesn't mean anything it doesn't mean the same thing if you could say a piece of cake if you could say a slice of cake well you know what no native speaker of english will ever understand that as anything but dessert um and so you have and you notice that's the that's often a cue uh for a language learner is when they say uh when they employ an idiom but it's just one word off or two words off and uh and and then you realize oh right i understand what they mean um but the thing about idioms is you have to learn them literally as a chunk you know word for word yeah i mean i think um those aspects of of english specifically can be very intimidating for second language learners i mean i have an oxford um uh idioms dictionary that has 10 000 entries in it 10 000 idioms and that's and i think another part of that of course is phrasal verbs which you know which basically i'm going to say that's unbound because i think that you could probably find an unbound number of verb and preposition combinations that that instinctively native speakers could make sense of but you know how can a dictionary contain all of that information it's impossible it's very very difficult only the most common of those are included in our dictionaries for native speakers we do have a much much more comprehensive list in our learner's dictionary because we have to and again because horse around um you know you have to you have to define that that you know you have to explain what that means uh and uh i i think that is incredibly rich of course every language has idioms you know um you know we say it's raining cats and dogs and in french you say it's raining rope and raining rope is a wonderful image you think of oh it looks like you know it looks like rope coming down it's so thick well kind of thick but it it that's what you say it's raining rope or raining ropes in the in the french way um um but it's raining rope uh is it that's a that's a beautiful kind of poetic image that we can understand but it means nothing in english you know um so every language has them of course um and that's another point is that they're sort of fundamentally untranslatable you know that that we have to learn them each you know and and that's a a measure of fluency also you know because you have to think you know what is that thing in english about horses when you're hungry but not for horse you know and you have to think that through until you don't until you're fluent with that idiot because you know you often see these things on the internet where they say um um you know here's a list of 10 words from japanese that are untranslatable into english and then directly under the word they give you the translation in english of the word i will tell you that uh that is maybe my only language pet peeve is people who call things untranslatable because then they immediately tell you what it means um but what they really mean is here's a clever and concise way of saying something you know and and i'm sure you know as a speaker of other languages and i sure do there's a few things in french that i wish i could do in english that are just really concise and simple and just get right to the point and there's plenty in english god knows that doesn't uh that that is so um efficient compared to french um even though paradoxically of course english has maybe twice the vocabulary of french you know and and so you what you realize is that we have different ways of expressing ourselves and that comes out through the you know through the idioms and through the language but language ultimately and i always say this language is a habit it's just a habit that's what it is it's you have to acquire the habit and the habit comes through chunks through patterns um you know when teaching uh like sometimes people will be you know this gets back to an earlier question they'll be surprised to see very informal spoken kind of language in our dictionaries like like like the word like you know he was like a scientist or something that's a pet peeve for a lot of english teachers and a lot you know and and yet it's an absolutely real part of the language we would not be doing our job if we did not account for that use of that of that term um so we do account for informal very spoken language but then we also account for very formal language like whom which is a term that you could uh maybe live without as a speaker of english but many people are use it very carefully and of course it has a long history in english so i always say recommend to you know teaching it and it's a problem with object subject teaching as well because english has a strong gravitational pull toward the front of a sentence we really want the subject to come at the front whereas if you had a question such as whom do we ask where the object is actually first our ear still wants to hear that subject first which is which is my kind of rationalization for for explaining why we very frequently including me we say who do we ask about this and so we've replaced the object with the subject form and yet grammatically it's still functioning as an object it's very confusing to a speaker of a romance language for example for whom you cannot make that mistake you cannot possibly mistake the object for the subject for example with me and i which we do all the time in english but which you simply can't do in french or spanish or any uh romance language so i always say hey it's patterns it's patterns if you're teaching uh the object of a preposition and it's it's it and and and that's the the word of the day um you know get it in your ear it's to whom to whom to whom for home for whom for home buy home buy whom by whom with whom with whom with whom you know get yourself used to it and that is the more common place to find that particular term is as the object of a preposition um and we can deal later in an advanced class with the fact that the object sometimes comes in the beginning of a sentence but that's that's the problem of english the problem of of the learner um if they want to make that distinction it ultimately it comes down to patterns and chunks so that that when you when you hear that preposition you will naturally go to the object objective case to that object form and so i always recommend that kind of pattern work um with uh with teachers because you know again language is a habit and that goes for accent for phonetics that people often ask me about phonetics and i do something i've worked up for uh esl which is a um instead of a spelling bee it's a pronunciation bee um so i'll put a word up on the screen and have the these the learners or they're usually teachers who have themselves learned english um have them say the word and of course we pick all these tricky difficult words that are um that have uh different different uh clusters and different diphthongs and you know different elements and i'll talk about you know uh vowel distinctions vowel values and and funny things that just for the for for the teacher's own edification um you as a teacher uh you do not have to produce a native english sound of course that's that's not that's not necessary um but also um you should be aware of things like the pin pen distinction that we have in american english or the mary mary uh mary distinction that some people have are caught and caught you know the the all these and what's funny is even among a room full of teachers who speak perfect fluent english um you'll see their eyes cross you're gonna see them say wait a minute um and but that's kind of fun for them i'm just simply exposing them to um more of what you know of what english english is infinite you know more of what they love yeah um well i wanted to sort of talk to you a little bit more about um language philosophy because you've got something pinned to the top of your twitter feed it's been pinned this since 2013 and it says most english speakers accept the fact that language changes over time but they don't accept the changes made in their own time um so why do you think that is oh that's just that's because language is a habit that's because language is a habit if you grew up for example as i did um hearing the word impact uh only used as a noun then every time you hear it used as a verb you notice you know and you think at first you think that's an error and then later you kind of get used to it and you think well i you know i i understand it of course and then finally you have to make a choice am i going to use it um and so in the case of impact for example i don't use it as a verb um now i will die for your right to to to use impact as a verb but i choose not to is but at about the same time maybe a generation ago there was another word that was all always used as that had always been used as a noun that started to be used as a verb and that word was access and i wrote an academic article back in the mid 90s using access as a verb and it was crossed out by the editor of the journal and in red ink it said computer jargon and yet today uh we all probably use access as a verb five or six times a day and here's the difference frequency right it's frequency and so uh as david crystal says frequency breeds contempt you know so it's true that i use access as a verb today and i don't use impact as a verb today because of frequency i i encounter access as a verb much more frequently than i encounter impact as a verb so for me there's still a rub uh with impact there's there's no rub with access so my point about this is that we can see language change almost in real time um there are there are a lot of examples of this i mean most of them are invisible a word like wonderful which like so many other terms in english originally meant something more literal you know um full of wonder kind of like the word awful meant full of uh full of full of wonder also you know full of awe um awesome you know similarly terrible immense you know you know causing terror um uh and in the case of wonderful it meant astonishing um today we use it to mean excellent don't we oh we had i had a wonderful cup of coffee you know um and so we that the meaning of this term has been bleached over time and we just simply use it to mean excellent but it originally meant full of wonder so i i started thinking let's look back at the at the usage let's look at the king james bible for example which is a great example of good you know written english of 1611 or whatever it was and look at the word wonderful and the way it was used at that time and often you would see things it would say something like uh god thou are wonderful in thy plagues and you think well there's nothing wonderful about a plague but you realize oh they mean astonishing they mean you know creating fear um and they do not mean excellent the way we do and then uh i encountered it in the in the 19th century a letter from uh thomas jefferson um at the end of his life he was in his 80s and he was writing about um the revolutionary period and he said you know this 45 years after the fact after these events it is not wonderful that i should not recall the details and i realized in that context it's very clear that he didn't mean excellent he meant surprising right he meant astonishing and then i said okay let's pull it into the you know later in the 19th century i looked because now we can do this with online corpora i went through abraham lincoln's correspondence and sure enough he used wonderful only in that way astonishing and then i brought it and then i realized oh right the the wonderful wizard of oz which was published in the 1890s it doesn't mean the excellent wizard of oz it meant the scary wizard of oz the terrifying wizard of oz the astonishing wizard of oz but you can see what we call um this sense drift happened it basically is a 20th century phenomenon that this word went from meaning one thing its literal original meaning to the way that it is universally used so universally used that we actually literally misunderstand um without enough context so if you see a wonderful plague in the bible you'll you'll be cued that there's something there's something about the meaning of this that's different um it is not wonderful that i can't remember something 45 years ago we get a clue we know there's something wrong there but the wonderful wizard of oz is not enough context and it's so easy for us to superimpose our contemporary definition on the old one so another example of this is mean as in mean girls uh un uh you know unfriendly um that is also a 20th century construction so mean originally meant um lowly or you know uh or non-noble um and if you look at look it up in shakespeare you know there are nobles and then the the the mean a mean man is is a commoner um later it meant uh um stingy which is a use that's still made in british english and possibly in your idiolect ii um and then finally in the 20th century it came to meaning uh you know unfriendly um uh and uh and so that drift but the point is that unfriendly meaning is so overwhelmingly common today that it seems to have washed out the earlier ones at least in american english we don't use the stingy meaning practically ever in american english and it's only historical you find it in dickens for example you'd find it in other other senses and so my point being that language changes right before our eyes and we don't even see it but the ones that we do see the few that we do notice they tend to irritate us um especially if we were schooled by a teacher who who taught us to care about language and so when someone um says to me that hey the dictionary is throwing the baby out with the bathwater you know that that we're that we are actually sanctioning or recommending improper usage by recording actual usage i will first of all celebrate the fact that this person loves language so much um that they care about the the way a word is defined in the dictionary and and and uh and and and that's something that we share um but then i'll have to explain it and a classic case that's kind of been in the news recently is irregardless um it's not a word that i use it's not a word that i recommend you use however there's so much evidence of this word in print that we are required to record it in the dictionary we would be derelict in our duty if we didn't account for this word now it's clearly a hyper correction or an error whatever you want to call it um we can talk about its usage its usage is clearly non-standard and you you know if you care about the way you're you're presenting yourself in words you shouldn't use this word and we say that at the death at the dictionary entry however we do record the form because it's an error that gets published fairly frequently uh and has been around for a couple hundred years and so um and i think one of the one of the compelling reasons to put it in a dictionary of english is for a learner of english who has become a good fluent speaker of english if that person encounters irregardless there's a logical problem they will say wait a minute this doesn't make any sense and if they look it up they'll realize ah i see this is a hyper correction or this is the the addition of an extra syllable um that might be emphatic or who knows why but whatever it is it's an error and i will use regardless instead um but the point is all of that information we can give in the dictionary i i i heard um corey stamper who i believe is a colleague of yours um in a podcast talking about um i think it was a few years ago when some um conservative radio commentator discovered that in the merriam-webster dictionary that you had listed under the definition of marriage that you'd also listed same-sex couples and you received death threats i i believe at the office um i mean why you know it's like you said people obviously feel so passionately about this but it seems irrational sometimes you know like for example people uh really don't like it when people use literally in a figurative way you know like i was literally dying of thirst or um or the singular they which was actually your word of the year um last year um i mean where's the line between i'm sort of wondering where's the line between feeling passionately about language but also teaching people to kind of be tolerant of change or um because it's something you mentioned before right like a lot of people they feel so passionately about singular they or irregardless because they had a teacher who was like no look here's drunk and white you know don't say that or i mean how do you feel about maybe the philosophy of prescriptivism outside of the dictionary well i think for and and you know marriage is a good example and there's there are there are others and we get we do we do get we do get a lot of angry male for sure um about a number of different terms but um i think we start with and you use the word philosophy we start with the idea that there is a philosophical distinction between defining a word and defining a phenomenon we are not dictating to you what marriage is we are dictating what the word marriage denotes and connotes you know and what how and so we for example an easier way to kind of take a little bit of the um uh a little bit of the the sort of tension out of it is to talk about a different word like a word like love uh which is weirdly enough looked up very frequently in the dictionary and especially around um valentine's day now the fact that it's the number one word in our data around valentine's day i think is fascinating and i don't think it's because of spelling you know i don't think people are looking up the word for spelling um however i think that what they are looking up we we got a letter into the office once and um uh the question was how long does love last and you don't answer it in your dictionary definition and so we had to respond to this person saying you know we are defining the word as a label for a feeling we are not defining the feeling that you have those are two different things we're not defining the phenomenon of for example um uh inflation you know financial inflation we're defining what inflation means when it refers to uh financial transactions and and currency growth or whatever um so the fact is we have to make that philosophical distinction first and foremost we are describing the usage of these words we are not describing what you should be feeling or how you should think uh we're not describing uh what an emotion uh is we are defining what the label of that emotion is you know those are so those are two different things um in the case of marriage is a really good one too because it shows stages of descriptive development so initially it said a man and a woman you know whatever that the language was and then subsequently we added a second a substance a and b um a a a contract or a relationship similar to that of a conventional marriage but between two people of the same sex so we basically said it's we acknowledged that and that's the one that actually that cory was referring to this uh second sense um but we still separated them because in the evidence that we had the usage of that term in newspapers and books and magazines when marriage was used to describe a same-sex marriage it was almost always described in that way they would call it gay marriage or same-sex marriage or they would have some kind of a dis describing term and it wasn't standing on its own to mean the exact same thing as con as as a conventional or traditional marriage now if you look it up today we simply use the term spouse there's only one definition and we combine them together between two people you know but that's because today we have absorbed as as a culture we have absorbed the idea of gay marriage so deeply that we no longer routinely refer to gay marriage as gay marriage we just simply say marriage so in other words these three stages of this definition show the absorption into the culture of this idea and then its reflection in the language and our definition has reflected those three stages the first one the traditional one the second one the marked uh game is same-sex version and finally the unmarked uh acceptance of that in into the culture and that's a great i think a great example of descriptivism at work which is to say that we are trying to be accurate and not you know you know activism doesn't change the dictionary activism changes the language and when many people use the term in a way that offends fewer people that's good for everyone but it's not something it's not an action that's led by the dictionary it's an action that's reflected in the dictionary beautiful explanation um and and i'm actually wondering um because i've seen you talking a little bit recently about the the culture right now and about how you're a little bit maybe worried or afraid about what you consider to be maybe the war on meaning well there is there has been you know there's clearly a war on meaning when we have to deal with ideas like alternative facts and and fake news and when when when when it's clear that the rhetoric uh in terms of the news or the par or the politics um is attacking the the vehicle you know that we have language um itself that when they're when they're using words uh in in ways that when they're actually refusing the meanings of these words um and that that that hurts everyone you know as i said before consensus is what language is really uh is is what is at the origin of all language it you know two two people at some point had to agree on a set of sounds to mean a certain thing and if we don't have that we don't have anything you know but at the same time there's a hopeful element to this because we have at merriam-webster a huge amount of data a hundred million words looked up a month um a 100 million page views at the website and a couple billion words looked up a year on our phone app um so it's a huge amount of data and what we can see is uh by the minute sometimes which words people are looking up in real time uh according to the news and what we see is that people are really paying attention um not just to the pandemic terms but to political terms to words in the news um words used by leaders and it's not that they're uh you know we're good at reading data we're not good at reading minds i don't know that people are trying to correct the words of a politician or or the spelling of a politician's tweets or something sometimes we see data that shows people are following that very closely and what that tells me is that words matter that people are paying attention that the dictionary serves as sort of a neutral and objective arbiter of meaning at a time when meaning is in crisis and so uh i think the dictionaries always serve that function but it might be more accentuated today and of course the dictionary is more accessible today because we're carrying it in our pocket you know you can look up a word immediately um and i think that's terrific i think the dictionary is being used more perhaps than ever for that reason because we're so accessible and you might have the app or just go on on the web on your phone and you can look words up but that new that funk that role that neutral objective arbiter of meaning is something that i think all dictionaries have have had in the past but is important today and so uh that makes our role in the in the in the political discourse whether it's about for example when when gay marriage was a political issue which is now in the past it was 16 17 years ago in the united states when that was a political issue the the the definition was the question you know the definition of marriage was the issue um there are also political issues in the united states about the about abortion and yet we never see the word abortion looked up because the meaning of the word is not the political issue do you see do you see what i'm saying and so when when uh and so for example with the term they uh we see that many people are recognizing that there are many people who prefer to to be referred to with they and them or who are simply using it more frequently it's important to recognize too that you know the dictionary reflects the language uh which reflects the culture um and so uh we are not prescribing or ordering you to use these words in this way we are describing uh the consequences of changes in the culture that have resulted in changes in the language that's a really important role but it's one that we take seriously and it's one that we can always provide provide evidence for in other words you know when we make a change to a dictionary definition when we add a definition to the dictionary for example or add a new word to the dictionary it's on the basis of a huge amount of evidence and research and uh that is the that is that gives me the confidence uh to look in our reference and to see you know what did we say about this last year what did we say about it ten years ago what did we say about it a hundred years ago um and uh we can find uh over time an honest representation of the best scholarship that we knew how to do i know that we have you know different standards um because we can do so much more research today than we could in the past um so we can find more uh evidence and therefore to me we have higher standard today than we ever have had in the past because we can really do we can dig down we can go further back in time to see how the word was used in the you know 15 1600s in the early days of print uh that's now searchable um and of course now we can use corpora to discover uh how many times it was used yesterday um and that's that's really exciting for a lexicographer i mean that was never available before and so what you're getting therefore is more evidence-based research and less of the individuals sort of prejudice that you might have gotten in older dictionaries from older generations and part of that was that the job was you you had to sit at a desk and and you know create knowledge and you only had a small stack of of quotations to deal with whereas now you might have hundreds or thousands of them uh and and you can perhaps make a better assessment of what that word means according to a wider census in a sense of uh of its usage and so that's really that's really interesting to me i mean there's a point about dictionary definitions that i i think um is not obvious regarding this prescriptive descriptive divide and that is that i think there are two kinds of facts given in a dictionary definition there's the linguistic fact which is the spelling conventional spellings the phonetics conventional phonetics and the traditional uh uh use usage-based meanings of those terms but then there's the cultural facts of this word um is it archaic is it obscene is it offensive is it british is it um uh is it uh disparaging you know uh there are so many different ways that we can indicate that the company this word keeps uh will tell you more about the the appropriateness of this word in a given context than its isolated definition by itself and so that cultural fact the usage so for example we'll say irregardless use regardless instead we tell you this is a non-standard term and you should you should avoid it if possible um but at another term like lori it will indicate that it's chiefly british um and maybe that's all you need to know and you can move on and it might answer a question for you but i do think it's important to separate them philosophically the cultural fact is not lexical you know the the cultural fact has no bearing on uh the the spelling for example of this word um except in weird rare patterns like british english typically puts use in places that american english doesn't you know that kind of thing but um typically those cultural facts are given in what we call usage notes or usage labels and that's because we have to recognize that this um this this series of letters that you could isolate as a lexical fact also has a cultural role to play and uh we can't ignore that and so we try to give as much as of that information as we can in a dictionary and it's really important in terms of words that are likely to cause offense for example um it's really important to make it very plain um that those are terms that uh will cause offense um and and if you look up those offensive words in a dictionary and i recommend you do because you know that's a good way to test a new dictionary and also to see what kinds of information you get and uh it's very important for english language learners dictionaries to have extremely clear labeling for offensiveness and region that that would be i mean normally that's that's the first thing that teenagers do right when they get the dictionary they look up the bad words but but that's interesting advice maybe that's the first thing that um that anybody should do when they're looking at a dictionary look up the kind of difficult words the offensive words to see how good is this information that i'm getting absolutely and does it correspond with your cultural knowledge um and i i have to say that as you as you well know uh a learner of a language can't can't have the experience of growing up on a playground hearing that language spoken um and registering as a as a as a as a first-person experience uh the level of offensiveness of some terms uh and so they therefore have to learn that you know that has to be acquired information until they become fluent and maybe very experienced in the language um they will not understand uh that for example you know across different languages what you might consider to be parallel uh terms of offense uh may actually not uh match up in terms of their offensiveness and so uh that's something to be very very careful about and you know it may be that that's more advanced than most teachers get into in the classroom but i think of our learner's dictionary as a dictionary that is made as a teaching tool and what i mean by that is when the teacher is not there to help that the student can can read it alone you know can can read it without a teacher uh present and that's why they're written that way they're written in a very basic kind of english uh i call it plain english not baby talk but plain english so that so that it's understandable so that um that even um outside of the classroom uh they can get the information that they need and it's really important that they get usage information as well as the rest of it spelling and meaning and phonetics well um i think that was actually a fantastic way to end the interview because um because like it was just a beautiful philosophy about language it's a treat to talk to you