A visit to the mailbag provides us with a sartorial use of hipster, some schooling on 19th century locomotive technology, and a question about sneaking words into dictionaries.
Hosted by Emily Brewster, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski.
Produced in collaboration with New England Public Media.
Download the episode here.
Transcript
Emily Brewster:
Coming up on Word Matters, corrections, clarifications and grave transgressions. I'm Emily Brewster, and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media. On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Ammon Shea, Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point. A visit to the mailbag provides us with a sartorial use of hipster and some schooling on 19th century locomotive technology.
Ammon Shea:
Listeners will occasionally write us letters with questions, sometimes clarification, et cetera, about recent episodes of our podcast. And if you do and you have a question, we are always happy to entertain the question and answer it if we can. But today, we'd like to shift the focus to a slightly different kind of listener response, and this is a new section of answering mailbag questions that we are going to call "Mistakes Were Made," in which people have pointed out errors that we have made.
And we do, in fact, make mistakes. And thank you to anybody who draws our attention to them. But recently, several people wrote to us about our explanation of jerkwater, in which we refer to the water in jerkwater as a means of cooling steam locomotives. A number of you wrote in to point out, reasonably enough, that water is not used to cool steam locomotives so much as it is used as a fuel for them by means of boiling that water. And so when we explained that jerkwater towns are little towns at which trains stop to cool their engines with water, we were certainly in error. And Peter, we actually had some content written about that, didn't we?
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah, there's a wonderful little paragraph at the entry for jerkwater. And that's what I love about the online dictionary. When it first came out, there was a lot of worry that the romance of dictionaries was going away, that the online dictionaries were sterile. It's certainly true that you lose the serendipity of research. You don't stumble across a word that you weren't looking for work quite so frequently. However, because we have more space in the online dictionary, we're able to add more articles like this to the bottom of this entry for jerkwater.
By the way, the date for jerkwater is 1888, the date of first known use, which does put it in the heart of the steam technology era. And we give this little information as a kind of note at the bottom of the entry: "We owe the colorful Americanism jerkwater to the invention of the steam engine, an advancement that significantly accelerated travel by rail, but also had its drawbacks. One drawback was that the boilers of the early locomotives needed to be refilled with water frequently, and water tanks were few and far to between. As a result, the small trains that ran on rural branch lines often had to stop to take on water from local supplies. Such trains were commonly called jerkwaters, from the motion of jerking the water up in buckets from the supply to the engine. The derogatory use of jerkwater for things unimportant or trivial reflects the fact that these jerkwater trains typically ran on lines connecting small, middle-of-nowhere towns.
Emily Brewster:
Perhaps we should amend your title, Ammon, from "Mistakes Were Made" to "Mistakes Were Made and Omissions Were Committed." Another writer, Carrie, wrote to us saying, "As a teenager of the late '60s, early '70s, I recall the word hipsters referred to a girl's trousers or jeans, usually wide-legged, that sat low on the hips. These are now often referred to as low-rise jeans, although a quick Google indicates the word hipster is still sometimes used for this article of clothing." Of course, I'm familiar with that use also so that was certainly an omission on my part.
These are also called hip-huggers, the hipsters, and I think also women's underwear that sits low on the hips is also called a hipster. I think it's interesting the term low rise is the more common term these days. It's a rather technical term. The rise is the distance between the waist and the crotch of a pair of pants. It's a rather technical way to refer to this. I think hipster, hip-hugger is more evocative. Maybe that's the problem with it.
Ammon Shea:
Maybe we can just rename this section "Mea Culpa."
Emily Brewster:
That works too. You're listening to Word Matters. I'm Emily Brewster. Coming up, transgressive lexicography. Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
Peter Sokolowski:
Word Matters listeners get 25% off all dictionaries and books at shop.merriam-webster.com by using the promo code matters at checkout. That's matters, M-A-T-T-E-R-S at shop.merriam-webster.com.
Ammon Shea:
I'm Ammon Shea. Do you have a question about the origin history or meaning of a word? Email us at wordmatters@m-w.com.
Peter Sokolowski:
I'm Peter Sokolowski. Join me every day for the Word of the Day, a brief look at the history and definition of one word, available at merriam-webster.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more podcasts from New England Public Media, visit the NEPM podcast hub at nepm.org.
Emily Brewster:
A listener asked if any of us has ever tried to sneak a word into the dictionary. And, well, we all have something to say about that. I'll begin.
Listener Katarina writes to us, "In the last episode, What Does It Mean to Be 'At Large'?, Ammon mentions journalists spending years trying to coin words to get them into the Oxford English Dictionary. Have any of you tried to coin words or sneak them onto the desk of a colleague in the hopes of getting it printed?" Katarina also asks what kinds of April Fools' day jokes lexicographers play on each other. I have never tried to sneak a word into the dictionary. Ammon, have you? Peter, have you?
Ammon Shea:
No, not willingly.
Emily Brewster:
Peter?
Peter Sokolowski:
No. There is a lot of judgment, but of course we're using data. We're using the quotations or the citations, the evidence. And when doing the French project in particular, we were making a dictionary from scratch, so we were creating a head word list, which is the closest you can come to a list from scratch. In other words, not just adding a word to an existing dictionary like the Collegiate. We used a corpus that we made ourselves for French to match the English word list that we had for the English-to-French side, and we had to make one up for the French-to-English side.
And what was interesting about that is we did a kind of census and we would count the words and we would see, "Oh, these are very common words." And of course, a lot of them were not surprising at all. Of course, they're going to be in the dictionary. But it did come up with words that I didn't know that I thought, "This seems fairly common and from its context, I understand what it means," and there were a couple words put in.
One that I remember at the time that you're talking about the mid to late 1990s was the word courriel, C-O-U-R-R-I-E-L, which was used in Canada to mean "email." And it wasn't until 2005 that the French Academy declared that it was the official French word it for email. So we were proud that we had put it in the dictionary already, even as a word that I didn't use or know, because the evidence showed that it belonged there. So my point with this long walk is that with some evidence, we can make that call, and that call is really what our job is in part to do.
Emily Brewster:
But that is not what Katarina is-
Peter Sokolowski:
No.
Emily Brewster:
... asking. she-
Peter Sokolowski:
She's saying, "Are you having fun?"
Emily Brewster:
She is asking, do we ever sneak a word in? And there is a name for such words.
Peter Sokolowski:
Oh, yes.
Emily Brewster:
There is a word for a word that is snuck into a reference work. That word is mountweazel.
Peter Sokolowski:
Oh.
Emily Brewster:
And that is because in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, there was an entry for a person named Lillian Virginia Mountweazel. And I'm going to read the entry.
Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-1973, American photographer, born Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris, and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.
Ammon Shea:
That's the giveaway.
Emily Brewster:
That is the giveaway because Ms. Mountweazel was entirely fictional. And the story goes that this entry was put into the New Columbia Encyclopedia specifically to find out if other reference work publishers were copying from the New Columbia Encyclopedia. So I don't know if anybody was taken in.
Ammon Shea:
I would say, color me skeptical about this whole thing. I think that mountweazel is this thing that's taken hold of the educated imagination-
Peter Sokolowski:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ammon Shea:
... in the public that people want it to be true. It's a great story. However, my limited experience working at a different dictionary company that was thought to have a mountweazel, which was New Oxford American Dictionary, was found to have the word esquivalence, which was defined, I think, as the willful avoidance of one's duties or official responsibilities. And it is unique to that dictionary, in the strict sense of unique, and it was referred to as a mountweazel.
My understanding was that it was actually a practical joke that the editors were playing on each other and that they forgot to take it out. And then when they were called on it, they said, "Oh, it's a mountweazel," which is a fine explanation, but it's kind of a post hoc explanation and I don't think it was put there intentionally with that in mind. I could be wrong in that, but I would not be surprised if the original mountweazel in the encyclopedia was the result of some other thing and then afterwards, they discovered, "Oh, this would be great. If somebody copies it, then they've got them."
Emily Brewster:
Interesting. So you think it's just a story, a story to cover up for some horseplay.
Ammon Shea:
April Fools' joke.
Emily Brewster:
Yeah, yeah.
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah, there we go.
Ammon Shea:
I think it's an April fools' joke gone awry.
Emily Brewster:
Interesting. I just want to make a slight correction. It wasn't esquivalence. It's actually esquivalience, or I don't know how-
Ammon Shea:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Brewster:
... you pronounce it actually, but there's an I-E-N-C-E. I think it's got to be esquivalience, but your definition was spot on. That is the definition. It was also given an etymology, "perhaps from French esquiver meaning 'dodge or slink away.'"
Ammon Shea:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Emily Brewster:
I have said in the past when people have asked me about this, have I never entered a fake word into a dictionary, that I would lose my lexicographer's license if I were to do such a thing. In truth, I don't have a license. There is no licensing authority. I just work by the grace of my employers. I would never do it. It seems just completely wrong, and I wouldn't get away with it if I tried.
Ammon Shea:
Of course. Yeah.
Peter Sokolowski:
As Ammon said, there's something attractive about the idea of a copyright trap. It's kind of like a conspiracy theory, but I think conspiracy theories are things that we can make fun of or whatever, but we realize there's an attraction to the unknown. The dictionary represents a kind of ocean of text, and wouldn't it be wonderful if there was one fixed point in that ocean that never moved and that could give this important information, which is to say that the copyright had been infringed or this had been copied by another? And of course, that has probably happened in the sense that information has been copied, but dictionaries are made to be reference tools and they're referenced for each other's work. And it does also strike me as being antithetical to what we do.
First of all, we're not having that much fun. And second of all, I just don't think it's a thing. What maybe has contributed to this also is the idea of these so-called ghost words like dord, famously in Webster's Second, which was a mistake. We admitted that it was a mistake, but it plants the seed that, "Oh, right. You could put an entry in a dictionary that really didn't belong and could sit there for years and not be noticed. And if it's plausible, then it could serve this function."
A very smart person could connect these dots and say, "Well, copyright is a thing. And there's an ocean of text. Why not make one very deliberate entry in it?" And maybe what this reveals is the first rule of copyright traps is there is no copyright trap. Maybe we just don't know. Maybe we're not high enough on the totem pole to know about these things. But my true feeling is that even though before copyright existed, which is to say in the 17th century and 18th century, people like Noah Webster and early lexicographers like Blount and Phillips and Worcester and Webster were constantly accusing each other of plagiarism of one kind or another, but they didn't have a mechanism in place to enforce anything.
Emily Brewster:
In truth, there is a long and storied history of flat out plagiarism-
Peter Sokolowski:
Absolutely.
Emily Brewster:
... in dictionary making going back to the beginning of dictionaries.
Peter Sokolowski:
Dictionaries are lists of words, and sometimes these lexicographers got their list from an already published source.
Ammon Shea:
There are some reference works that do in fact use mountweazels. I just don't think it's a widespread practice, or nearly as widespread as people wish that it were. But in terms of whether we put words into the dictionary, I think this portrays a certain difference of opinion of how dictionaries work in the public's eye and how they work in the eyes of the people that make them. And as somebody who has worked on a number of dictionaries, I certainly don't have the opinion that a word needs to be in a dictionary to have any kind of official imprimatur or sanction.
Any word that you want to be a word is a word if you use it as one. It doesn't need us to say it is so. So to me, it doesn't make a difference whether a word is in a dictionary or not. It's still a word. And so I see nothing to be gained by putting a word into the dictionary. To me, it doesn't change its status in any way. And if you spend any time at all looking at dictionaries, or certainly working on them, you quickly realize how many errors every one-
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah.
Ammon Shea:
... of them has. So there's no mystique, really, in putting in yet another error into the dictionary. There are plenty of them there already. This is just a different kind of error. It's an intentional one.
We're all trying to fix this hodgepodge of the language. We're trying to not fix the language as in make it set. We're trying to fix our attempts of keeping up with it, and it's always this uphill Sisyphean battle of, we get the word defined and then, oh, the stone rolls to the bottom of the hill because those damn teenagers got their hands on it and then the poets as well. And now, it means something totally different and we have to go back and revise the whole entry again. It's already completely out of date. Saying to a lexicographer, "Do you want add a fake word in the dictionary?" is like saying to Sisyphus, "Do you want just roll over another hill with that rock? You want to go a little higher?" It's already what he's doing.
Peter Sokolowski:
Fred Mish was the editor-in-chief Merriam-Webster for many years. He used to say, a little bit in a jocular sense, that lexicography was the art of the possible, which is of course a play on the old saw about politics. And his point was it'll never be done. It'll never be finished. It'll never be perfect. It'll never be right to everyone's satisfaction, and that's why it's never-ending battle of rolling a rock up a hill.
Emily Brewster:
I have to say that even in a case like esquivalience, there would have to be so much collusion-
Peter Sokolowski:
Sure.
Emily Brewster:
... to get it through with our process. Everybody would have to be in on it, or not everybody, but multiple editors would have to all be convinced that this was a good thing to do. We got other rocks to roll up hills.
Let us know what you think about Word Matters. Review us wherever you get your podcasts or email us at wordmatters@m-w.com. You can also visit us at nepm.org. And for the Word of the Day and all your general dictionary needs, visit merriam-webster.com.
Our theme music is by Tobias Voigt. Artwork by Annie Jacobson. Word Matters is produced by John Voci. For Ammon Shea and Peter Sokolowski, I'm Emily Brewster. Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
