Wednesday, July 12

I've found a book called Word by Word, sub-titled The Secret Life of Dictionaries, written by Kory Stamper.  I grabbed it with glee.  I regard myself as something of a Word Nerd and there's nothing I like more than a book which helps me indulge in the guilty pleasure of sneering at less fortunate people  who don't know the difference between bought and brought, and when to use 'less than' and when to use 'fewer than'.

I'm still in love with Lynne Truss, the author of 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves: the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, who recommends biblical smiting of people who can't be bothered learning how to use commas and apostrophes correctly.

Kory Stamper, on the other hand has been a disappointment.  Instead of supporting my secret vice, she denigrates those of us who insist that we are the only ones who are right.  In an early chapter she outlines how spelling and grammar and punctuation have evolved over the centuries and our modern 'rules' have more to do with practices adopted by newspaper editors and university professors than any historical precedent.  Is nothing sacred?

Ms Stamper is a lexicographer, who makes her living updating dictionaries.  She is one of those responsible for identifying new words to be added to the language and seems to spend her working life scouring sources to find new uses of existing words and new words that people are using.   As it happens, she works for Merriam-Webster.  That's an American dictionary so it won't be as authoritative as the OED, for example.  I'm sure they wouldn't put up with the heresies she is spouting. 

I'm not even half-way through the book yet, so it might get better but in the meantime, I feel that the best I can say is that her book is drab, dreary, dull, ho-hum, humdrum, mind-numbing, tedious, tiresome and wearisome. (synonyms courtesy of Merriam-Webster Thesaurus)