- Voiceover
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
- Paul Vogelzang
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series. I'm Paul Vogelzang, and today we have a fascinating program about word warriors. That's right, word. I love words. In the vast landscape of human knowledge, few artifacts hold as much power, mystery, and authority as the dictionary, where we can find words. It's not just a tool for understanding words, but a mirror reflecting the intricate tapestry of history, culture, and revolution. Today, we delve into a story that transcends mere words on a page. Welcome to Words, Words, Words, the English language dictionaries and the people who made them episode, part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series. We have the Smithsonian Associates today talking, of course, to Jack Lynch and his writing partner. Brian Garner. But you can find more about Jack Lynch and Brian Garner at the Smithsonian Associates page. We will have links so that you can do that easily. Imagine a world where every word is a battleground, a site of struggle, not just for meaning, but for dominance. Here, giants like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster didn't just write dictionaries, they shaped The very soul of a language, from the audacious efforts of James Murray with the Oxford English Dictionary, to the defiant creation of the first dictionary by a black American capturing the vibrant pulse of the hipster jive. These were not just scholarly pursuits. They were acts of cultural defiance and intellectual heroism. But the story doesn't end in the past. As we step into the digital age, the battle... for linguistic authority has taken new forms websites like dictionary.com and the crowdsourced urban dictionary redefine Who has the power to declare what a word actually means or how it should be used? The rise of social movements has led to the birth of dictionaries for feminists, hackers, and much, much more, each reflecting a facet of the world's ever-evolving ethos. Join us as we explore these stories with Smithsonian associates Brian Garner and Jack Lynch, who have chronicled these epic battles and victories in their book, Hardly Harmless Drudgery. Together. We will uncover the unsung heroes and unexpected stories behind the dictionaries that have defined and redefined the English language. Prepare to be challenged, enlightened, and inspired as we turn the page on what you thought you knew about the words you use every day. Brian Garner and Jack Lynch, welcome to the program.
- Brian Garner
Delighted to be here.
- Jack Lynch
Yeah, thanks for having us.
- Paul Vogelzang
Great. to talk to you. I am excited about this. I have to tell you just right up front, my mom was an English teacher growing up. She taught at public school. I had an English minor in college. This book of yours, Hardly Harmless Drudgery, was not drudgery at all for somebody like me. And I mentioned this to my mom, who's still writing, as a matter of fact, to this day at age 94. So it's a pleasure to talk to you guys. I'm very excited to talk about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. So excuse me for my A slight little departure there, talking personally for a moment. Let's just jump right in. I want to talk about your book. I want to talk about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. And let's just start, Jack, Brian, you can just tell us about your upcoming presentation and in particular, how you'll use Zoom to engage our audience. We're all using Zoom these days.
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Go ahead, Jack.
- Brian Garner
Sure. I'm happy to give it a go. We'll be talking about the book, which is associated with an exhibition that is now on FB. ...Grolier Club in New York City, most of which comes from Brian's and his wife Caroline's personal collection of dictionaries, which is far and away the best collection of English dictionaries in private hands in the world. And the book includes, Brian, do you remember the number? It was 700-some photographs. Yeah, 753.
- Jack Lynch
753 photographs. Some of these objects... Some of them are beautiful, some of them are fascinating, some of them are disastrous typography, but we'd like to show how people have presented the information in dictionaries, so we'll be sharing some images there. We'll also take some time to slow down and talk about some of the entries in dictionaries, how people go about defining how they present information in ways to be as clear as possible, to separate different senses and so on. We're working on getting some... slides together to show off what's in the book.
- Brian Garner
Jack is an English professor. I'm a law professor. We both have a lot of experience engaging people on Zoom. I really enjoy teaching on Zoom, particularly because you can lecture and have people communicating with you in the chat box and very quickly answer the questions that arise without disrupting the train of thought and without having somebody in a classroom, somebody has to raise a hand and ask a question. And often people won't do that. But participants can. In Zoom, we'll often be much more willing to pose a question that can be answered incidentally, and then it saves time. You can cover much more material. But I think in the right hands with the right kind of lecture, Zoom can actually be a wonderful way of having participatory engagement with people all over. the world.
- Paul Vogelzang
I think it really does that too. And in this particular case, because I've had a chance to go through the book and the pictures are wonderful. I just can't recommend it highly enough to our audience because you get a sense as to all of these dictionaries and their representation in a printed form. And I want to talk to you a little bit about print versus digital in a bit, but let's also touch on why... The study of dictionaries. I mean, to me, it's fascinating. I know it will be to our audience, but what struck you about this subject that is just such an important one, I think, to us, because words are so important.
- Brian Garner
Well, we're both word nuts. Yeah. And we're both lexicographers. It's fascinating if you care about words, understanding. not just the developments in how various lexicographers tried to marshal the English vocabulary and illustrate it, but also their personal travails, their own personal stories. And some of them were highly unusual personalities that engaged in highly irrational behavior. And their lives are full of struggle, even the sanest ones. Full of... struggle and difficulty in each of the vignettes throughout the book. We tell the story of these curious people who were word nuts over the last several centuries and how they find their trade.
- Paul Vogelzang
That's wonderful. Thank you. Maybe share, maybe Jack, jump in and share one of those studies. I was amazed to read about J.R.R. Tolkien's involvement in the world of dictionaries. I didn't necessarily think of him as somebody who might be contributing to words, words, and words. Yeah,
- Jack Lynch
Tolkien was actually a scholar of Old and Middle English, and when he was early in his career, one of his side hustles was working for Oxford University Press, and he drafted many of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, that begin with W. I believe Walrus was one of his. He came in toward the end of the alphabet, by this point we're in the 1920s, he worked there for a good long time. And we've got a number of fascinating characters, some of them best known for their dictionary work, Noah Webster for instance. But we've also got, like we have a dictionary, a little just for fun giveaway dictionary by Cab Calloway, who was one of the jazz giants in the 1930s. Already we have... books by a number of people you would not expect and cameo appearances by more.
- Brian Garner
Yes, a lot of cameos by major writers, people like Defoe, the novelist, and E.B. White, and Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, but probably the most fascinating personality is that of Noah Webster. who was bested as a grammarian. He lost out as a grammarian to Lindley Murray, shifted his ground to lexicography, and he was a great self-promoter to the point that he actually fabricated, as we document for the first time in Hardly Harmless Registry, he fabricated blurbs from British publications that supposedly said he had bested Johnson, but to the best of our ability to find out, he seems to have made these up. And... He, meanwhile, was crazed. maniacal etymologist who was trying to trace English words back to Persian and Ethiopic and various unrelated languages and even Chinese. He believed in the power of Babel, the biblical version of the diffusion of languages, and therefore thought he could rather freewheelingly associate words that sounded or looked a little bit alike, but from completely unrelated languages. So he stuffed his dictionary with all kinds of fallacious and erroneous etymologies that added another 10 years to his effort, and all for naught.
- Jack Lynch
Webster is such a bizarre character. He, first of all, had a completely misguided... theory of the language. He took it from someone named John Horn Cook and developed it in his own direction. Just about everything he thought about the history of languages was wrong. He probably had the worst business instinct in his life. No one made worse investments than he did. irritated everyone he worked with. He alienated every friend. He had nothing but rivals everywhere. And somehow, this fellow managed to create, or at least initiate, the longest-running and most successful dictionary franchise in history. We're coming up on two centuries since his big book appeared, and it's still the name in American dictionaries.
- Paul Vogelzang
Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a non-profit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate Guest Speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcast can explore our website for more information, links and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody. Our guests are Brian Garner and Jack Lynch. Both are Smithsonian associates and both will be presenting at Smithsonian associates coming up. We'll have links so that our audience can find out more information about Jack Lynch and Brian Garner and their new book. Hardly Harmless Drudgery links to all of their additional work. Fascinating subject and fascinating people here, Jack and Brian. I really appreciate your time. The book is getting great reviews. I enjoyed it. It is a nice big thick book and I found it to just be absolutely captivating. Edward Finnegan, a professor emeritus of linguistics and law at the University of Southern California says, Hardly Harmless Drudgery is an exciting and enriching read, an intellectually delectable feast for anyone who loves the beauty of dictionaries and the richness of their cultural content. And I want to ask you a question about the cultural aspects of dictionaries, because I mentioned my own personal situation. My mom was an English teacher. We had an Oxford English dictionary, one of the big ones, a big thick one on a separate table in our house, and it dominated the entryway of our home. And we walked by it every day and it shaped all of us because we could always refer to words and check each other. It does that in culture and certainly in politics. And so I wonder if you'd just discuss for a moment what it's meant historically. and in contemporary settings to have this role of dictionaries in our society.
- Jack Lynch
Dictionaries, as we know it, are actually fairly recent developments in English. Shakespeare did not have a dictionary to consult, at least not an English dictionary to consult. The very first work that most people consider a monolingual English dictionary came out when Shakespeare's career was more than half over. So for the first century and a half of their existence, they were not... playing much of a role in the culture. By the late 18th century, that's for Samuel Johnson's dictionary. Dictionaries became a pretty standard fixture in literate households, and they acquired more and more authority. And once they were combined with widespread education in English, they took on ever more authority about what you are allowed to say. Since then, we've had this conception that dictionaries, first of all, we describe it as dictionary as if there is one instead of many hundreds of competing and often disagreeing dictionaries and we have this notion that they've got some special insight into the language and brian and i both find that phenomenon fascinating and worth understanding in as many ways as possible and in most
- Brian Garner
Litterate households for the last several hundred years, people would look things up in the dictionary and parents would make a point of saying, well, let's look that up in the dictionary. We're about 30 years now into this distant society in which the majority of American households used to have a dictionary, a physical dictionary that has declined rapidly. The number of households now with physical dictionaries, relatively few, certainly relative to past generations. and people get their information digitally without necessarily understanding what the basis is for what they're looking up and quickly get an answer. There are certainly great advantages to that, but there's probably a loss, too, about a sense of what a physical dictionary looks like and the difference between looking up the meaning of a word or looking up some fact. So it's interesting, we take our exhibition and our book into the digital era, but it's yet to be understood what is going to happen with this social experiment in which a very basic part of literate culture is falling, at least the physical manifestation of it is falling by the wayside. What would you say about that, Jack?
- Jack Lynch
They were learning it all on the fly. So there are some real advances. In dictionaries in the digital age, among other things, it's now possible for dictionary makers to see how people actually use their... We've been sort of a black box, lexicographers books out there and had no idea how they were consulted. We've now got statistics on what people look up and what they want to expand and so on. Fascinating. The scary part though, is that people have been saying for a long time, information wants to be free. internet there's a lot of free lexicography that's not always the best lexicography and as a result dictionary publishers have been struggling to make a profit and a whole lot of them have closed their doors some after decades or centuries just in recent years will we ever have print dictionaries again i mean is it a business like
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they say the buggy whip Is it going to go by the way of just a business that's just not going to exist anymore in the form of a printed version? I mean, if we can just simply look to Alexa and say, what is the definition of such and such? I mean, my gosh, that keeps it so simple. To me, I love leafing through a paper book. You've shared with me a hardbound edition of your book, Hardly Harmless Drudgery. And personally, I love that, but I'm old. So maybe these just aren't going to be as relevant.
- Brian Garner
The dictionary will persist. The one-volume version. There is an idea now that we may never again have a print version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which in its second edition of 1989 was 20 volumes long. It was very cumbersome to take off the shelf. Now, the digital form of that is wonderful for people who have access to it, but it's also costly. The one-volume dictionary, even the big one-volume, seems likely to persist. It could be that sales will diminish but not go away completely. Every library has a dictionary stand, and those dictionary stands need to be populated. And so Black's Law Dictionary, for example, which I've done the last six editions of, continues to persist. You can use the cell in print and that's not going away. And a lot of law students want their law dictionaries. And I think that's true of the college dictionary for many people as well, for many, but still the app. For example, for the Webster's Collegiate, the app is probably much more broadly used than the physical one volume. Interestingly, the newer generations are unaccustomed to looking things up in physical books.
- Paul Vogelzang
Let's talk for a moment about the cultural dictionaries that you've uncovered and that you touch on in the book, Hardly Harmless Treasury. Not surprising, there is a black American dictionary. There is a gay dictionary. What do those variations tell us about those societies? societies, and that they needed their own dictionaries, just perhaps didn't feel represented enough in a standard Oxford English dictionary.
- Jack Lynch
The history of dictionaries from the 17th century nearly to the 20th was about covering what people called the entire language, the whole of the English language. But it wasn't really the whole of the English language. A whole lot of dictionaries would omit. slang, would emit technical terms, would emit regionalisms and things like that. So in the 19th century, you get this real explosion of dialectic dictionaries, people looking up words used in rural Yorkshire and so on. So by the 20th century, we had excellent dictionaries. Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary were out there. They covered the shared language pretty well, but a whole lot of groups, they discovered that their distinctive language was excluded. So we start seeing dictionaries related to different groups of people. Some of them are regional, some of them are of their interests, some of them are ethnic, some of them are related to gender or sexual orientation, all capturing the vocabulary of subcultures that had been crowded out of main dictionaries before.
- Paul Vogelzang
What about the debate that exists over what's known as language purity and the inclusion of some of these slang terms or what might be considered non-standard words in dictionaries? How do you both approach that in terms of the debate? Where do you fall?
- Brian Garner
Well, let's just say any reputable lexicographer today would not see the role of a lexicographer as being engaged. and deciding what goes in and what goes out. They do. They really do. What is mainstream, at least, is not saying, well, I disapprove of this slang term, and boy, everybody's using it, but I'm going to keep it out of my dictionary. That is not the role of a lexicographer. Words can come in as slang. A lot of slang is deciduous. It comes and goes. Sometimes slang will be upgraded to informal, and then from informal, maybe even to standard. Traditionally, it would take generations for that kind of change to happen. Today, it can happen much more rapidly because of the viral nature of social media and so on. Things that were relatively unknown can become ubiquitous in a matter of just a few years, and sometimes just a matter of a few months. Ultimately, any reputable lexicographer, if something gets widespread usage, it will be duly recorded. And then the question is, well, how do you tag it? Mostly we've gotten it as colloquial. ...for example, the tag, because good English is good colloquial English, that is spoken English, but... They'll be tagged as slang. Often they'll be tagged as non-standard, but it still has to be widespread before it'll be recorded at all. And what Jack is talking about with these subcultural groups that have distinctive linguistic forms, ultimately it's really good to have these dictionaries of specialized forms of language, whether it's slang or simply a professional subgroup, because it tells you something more about how words come to permeate the general culture. And and a few will become mainstream and therefore become standard.
- Paul Vogelzang
Jack, real quickly, tell us about the lexicographers like Samuel Johnson or James Murray and how they viewed their roles in terms of being a gatekeeper or not and the impact that they played.
- Jack Lynch
Johnson is a really interesting figure in the history of thinking about the role of a dictionary. He was approached by a group of publishers who asked him, to write a dictionary. And he agreed and he wrote a proposal at that stage. And the proposal is a fascinating document because he's got the mind of a poet. He waxes poetic and imagines himself writing a dictionary and he likens himself to a member of Caesar's army invading Britain. And he imagines Caesar's army imposing culture on ignorant Britons. So he really has this idea that it's the job of the lexicographer to come in and fix problems with the language. Then he works on a dictionary for eight years, and as he finishes, he writes a preface to the dictionary that actually came out. And there, his attitude has changed markedly. There are still some things that he doesn't like, and he tries to tidy up in the language. For the most part, he realizes it's not his job. Try to change the language. In fact, it's impossible. There are things, yes, life would be easier if certain things in the language were different ways. If our spelling was rational, if we used words like cleave, which can mean together or split apart, if we imposed some logic on those, life would be simpler. But he recognizes it's just not. possible to do that. And he's the first one in English to give us a record of that realization of what the job of the dictionary writer is.
- Paul Vogelzang
Brian, in your collection, do you have a favorite dictionary?
- Brian Garner
I have about 4,500 dictionaries, which is kind of a very useful thing to have all those within. They're not all within easy reach, but they're all on one piece of property, which makes it easy to... For example, a few years ago, I had to do a report on the meaning of the word vicinity over time. I have all the lexicographers said about the word vicinity. And this related to an insurance claim after 9-11. There was some business interruption insurance. And the question was whether the business was in the vicinity of either the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, which were attacked. Boom. There was a major dispute about the meaning of vicinity. Well, I was able, without leaving my house, to show something like three or four hundred dictionary definitions beginning in the late 17th century. I think it was 1676 when it first appeared, all the way up through the 21st century. So that's a very practical reason to have them. It's useful to be able to do that. But in terms of a favorite, I suppose my favorite is my earliest dictionary. It's called an incunable because it was published before 1500, and therefore, incunable essentially means swaddling clothes. It's swaddling clothes for books when they were first being printed after Gutenberg did his Bible. And I have one that is about 19 years after Gutenberg's Bible. It's the 1474, and it is a law dictionary. That's probably my prize. And then I have another one that's 1491. really active lexicographers in the early days and continue to be because law is a profession of words and the meanings of words will matter so much in the decision of cases. And that's why judges and lawyers seem to cite and covet dictionaries perhaps more than the population in general.
- Paul Vogelzang
In the book, I really enjoyed the hacker's dictionary. Maybe Jack, tell us about the hacker's dictionary and maybe tell us if you have a favorite dictionary.
- Jack Lynch
Brian is the collector. I cannot compete with him. So I think my favorite is one of the standard works, especially on Samuel Johnson, that I've devoted a whole lot of time to Johnson's dictionary. That one probably counts as my favorite.
- Brian Garner
Jack, you're too modest. You bought a first edition Johnson. Your very own.
- Paul Vogelzang
Congratulations. That's wonderful.
- Jack Lynch
The Hacker's Dictionary is a fascinating little document because we don't have its early stages. In 1975, a computer science graduate student on a whim started collecting the jargon he heard around the computer lab. And on the early precursors to the internet, he began sharing it with friends at other computer labs. And he started to bounced around this network for about six years before anyone bothered to save it or print it out. We don't have any of those early stages of the hacker's dictionary. But in 1981, selections from it appeared in a magazine, and after that, a book came out. The hacker's dictionary, that was a much expanded version of it. There are still people hoping to discover somewhere out there in the electronic world an early version that got saved or printed.
- Paul Vogelzang
information about Brian Garner and Jack Lynch and all of their work, including their new book, Hardly Harmless Drudgery, which is just excellent. Thanks so much for your time. Have a great rest of your day. And I just appreciate you being so generous with us.
- Jack Lynch
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
- Paul Vogelzang
My thanks to Brian Garner and Jack Lynch, both Smithsonian associates who will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our website for more details on their Smithsonian Associates presentation about words, words, and words. my thanks to Sam Hanegar, our executive producer for all he does. My thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on the not old better show on radio and podcast. It's our Smithsonian associates interview series. Please be well, be safe. And let's talk about better the not old better show. Thanks everybody. See you next week.
- Voiceover
Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about better.
- Paul Vogelzang
of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelzang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better, the Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
