Posted by Erin McKean, guest-blogging:
Guestblogging Dictionary Myths (Pt 4):
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_23-2007_09_29.shtml#1190992997
It's (Mostly Harmless) Drudgery
If you know the word lexicographer, there's a better-than-even chance
you also know Samuel Johnson's self-mocking definition of it: "a
writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in
tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words."
We should probably set aside, at least for now, discussion of whether
or not lexicographers are harmless (at least, harmless when it comes
to the language; I have a mean right hook), and instead turn to the
'drudgery' part -- is lexicography drudgery?
No. It's a complete myth. It's disinformation spread by lexicographers
so we can keep other folks away from our wonderful jobs.
In my first paying lexicographical gig, way back in the twentieth
century, I spent several weeks during which a sheet of transparent
plastic, marked with the ghostly outline of a dictionary page, never
left my hand. My job was to count the number of characters (including
spaces) in the material being added to a page, then count the number
of characters (including spaces) in the deletions that the editors had
marked on that same page. I used the plastic sheet as an overlay to
help me count. If the numbers matched, great! I could go on to the
next page. If not, I had to flag it for the senior editors, who would
then go back and make further revisions so that the material would be
neither too long nor too short, but exactly right. If revisions were
so long that the text had to reflow to the following page, that was an
added expense, so the editors were highly motivated to work their
changes within the page. And even that task, as weird as it sounds to
people now firmly in the computer age, was more along the lines of a
3-D word jigsaw puzzle than drudgework.
The truth is that the drudgeworky parts of lexicography -- the
counting, the alphabetizing, the sorting -- have now been farmed out
to tireless computers, and the lexicographer is left with the fun
parts -- the planning of projects, the actual writing and defining,
and the arguing. That work is endlessly diverting.
There's a quote about lexicography from J.R. Hulbert (who worked on
the great [1]Dictionary of American English) I haul out whenever I
can, because it's so apt:
I know of no more enjoyable intellectual activity than working on a
dictionary. Unlike most research, lexicography rarely sends one in
fruitless quests; one does not devote days, months, or even years
to testing an hypothesis only to decide that it is not tenable, or
to attempting to collect evidence to prove a theory only to have to
conclude that sufficient facts are no longer in existence to clinch
it. It does not make one's life anxious, nor build up hopes only to
have them collapse. Every day one is confronted by new problems,
usually small but absorbingly interesting; at the end of the day
one feels healthily tired, but content in the thought that one has
accomplished something and advanced the whole work towards its
completion.
That's the beautiful thing about lexicography: it's important, and you
work hard to make the best dictionaries you can, but it's not (as the
joke goes) [2]rocket surgery: the odds of someone dying because
there's a typo in an entry are very, very low. There might be
ridiculous deadlines, and budgets that wouldn't allow for the
publication of a suburban high-school yearbook, and occasionally, the
sinking feeling that you have overlooked something very important (but
you can't remember what it is), but at the most basic level, at the
level of the word, the definition, the phrase, the work is almost
exquisitely satisfying. The lexicographer, more than anyone else, can
see the underlying network that both connects and distinguishes the
words of English, and gets a perspective on language that would be
difficult to achieve from any other vantage point.
In fact, I think Johnson might have been the first to try to misdirect
people away from lexicography by pretending it wasn't fun. I believe
Johnson (as depressed, as sick, as beaten-down as he often was, and if
you haven't read Paul Fussell's [3]Samuel Johnson and the Life of
Writing, well, you should) felt the same exaltation, the same
endorphin hit, of pinning down the right 'signification' of a word.
That 'aha!' moment in lexicography is almost endlessly reproducible;
there's always the next word, and the next, and the next ... All I
know is that I am eager to get to work every day.
I think I had half-promised to write something today about norms in
English (and what is a 'rule' of English and what is just a suggested
serving recommendation, the confusion, ironically enough, lying in the
word rule) but that might be beyond the scope of a series on
dictionary myths -- I'll try to write about it next week at my usual
hangout, [4]Dictionary Evangelist. (It's not quite the kind of topic I
usually wrangle over at [5]A Dress A Day.)
I wanted to end this week by thanking Eugene for his kind invitation
to guest-blog, and with gratitude to you all for your trenchant
comments. (There's nothing like blogging for an audience of lawyers to
help you improve your arguments!) Thank you!
References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_American_English
2. http://threadless.com/submission/46364/It
3. http://www.amazon.com/Samuel-Johnson-Life-Writing-Fussell/dp/039330258X
4. http://www.dictionaryevangelist.com/
5. http://www.dressaday.com/dressaday.html
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