Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary by Stefan Fatsis [1] chronicled the author’s time while working as a trainee lexicographer for Merriam-Webster. Fatsis travelled to Springfield, Massachusetts to embed himself inside the world of nerdy logophiles. In addition to writing about his own experiences learning how to research, edit and write definitions for the dictionary, the author also wrote a history of the company and how it changed from Webster to Merriam-Webster and from print to its evolving digital formats.
How I wished I was tailgating the author as he pored over the archives that housed the thousands upon thousands of citation slips that made up the oeuvre of Merriam-Webster dictionaries. I could see myself bent over a file drawer, and never moving, for days at a time. Fatsis spoke to various editors and dictionary staff, including Stephen Perrault, “the editor with the best title in this place or maybe any place–director of defining”. One of the author’s hopes while working within the sanctum of Webster was to write a definition that made it into the dictionary. Fatsis suggested words and expressions for possible inclusion and learned the skills to write unbiased definitions. He even submitted some possible future entries, which were welcomed, but susceptible to the editors’ palette of coloured pencils.
Controversial dictionary topics such as slurs were addressed. I will admit that before I even read the book I looked in the index for the worst of all racial epithets. Surely that word would be discussed in the book, especially within the chapter called slurs. Fatsis wrote that “definers would tinker with the entry as if defusing a bomb.” I was surprised not to find the word in the index, although there was an indexing for “nigga, definition and labeling of”. While Fatsis never used the most offensive term except in quoting others, I nevertheless wish he had used the full word in the index. It was not until I was over halfway through the book and thumbing through the index that I found it, at the end of the N’s, as “n-word, definition and labeling of”. If Fatsis was going to index the word that way, I would have placed the euphemism at the beginning of the N’s where it would have been easier to spot.
Fatsis and I will have to disagree on the subject of gender-neutral pronouns. I side with Merriam-Webster and editor Perrault who have so far not admitted such transient nonsense as xe or ze into the dictionary. The author listed so many examples of genderless third-person singular pronouns that no wonder the dictionary didn’t want to print any of them. They are unpronounceable, faddish and will disappear when this current wave of nonbinary hysteria dissipates. I am a disciple of the Camille Paglia branch of feminism where he, when viewed by that loud lesbian superwoman feminist, is considered totally fine as a third-person singular.
In spite of this viewpoint, as I have said before in past reviews and blog posts, I am fighting a losing battle in regards to the general acceptance of the interdental monstrosity they as a singular pronoun. I won’t go into my arguments here, but I do take issue with Fatsis when he wrote:
“While respondents of all ages generally accepted uses of singular they with generic antecedents (‘Every student tries to write their essay perfectly’), they were less tolerant of they used with proper names.”
No, I do not accept the usage of they in this way with singular antecedents. The example he provides with Every student is flawed. Use a plural subject instead, thus “(All) students try to write their essays perfectly.” which avoids the cacophony of having their tied to its singular antecedent. But I am soapboxing on a topic I just said that I wouldn’t delve into. Yet there were times while reading the chapter on pronouns when I felt my blood get a little too hot for my own veins.
Fatsis and I do indeed have more in common than what we disagree with, and I often laughed out loud while reading. I was reminded of a moment from what is now forty years ago when I read of the author’s time browsing through the Consolidated Files, which are the citation slips for entries collected between roughly 1900 and 1983. Fatsis wrote about the later slips:
“Early computer printouts with truncated tails on the g, j, p, q, and y, which reminded me of an annoyed college professor who, on a paper I submitted in the 1980s, underlined every last one.”
What rekindled so much laughter after four decades is my own university story about professorial pen-wielding. I have not dotted my i’s or j’s since I was about twelve years old. I submitted a paper, printed in my own hand (as opposed to written in cursive) to one of my French literature professors. When I got it back every single i or j was dotted–in red. The whole essay looked as if it was covered in blood droplets.
The final chapters were devoted to artificial intelligence the future of dictionaries. Many publishers have gone out of business or ceased publication in print, including Merriam-Webster for the latest unabridged edition, for example. I was not impressed with the trend now for crowdsourcing new words and definitions and the regard that anyone can be an editor. I confess that I had never seen many of the new words (like skibidi) or new meanings (demure or brat) that Fatsis cited from social media, YouTube or TikTok. Count that up for staying off the time-waster that is social media. But I do feel that professionalism and expertise in dictionary publishing is going downhill without a full-time staff of lexicographers devoted to working on authoritative print (and on-line) editions.
Unabridged contained 307 pages and 68 pages of endnotes, which the author advises “Whether you toggle back and forth from the text, read them chapter by chapter, or save them all for the end, I do hope that you will read them.” I decided to read them after finishing each chapter, and I do recommend that you read them for their wealth of information as well as humour. I wrote just as many personal notes from the endnotes as I did from the main text. Fatsis has given me so many more titles to look for and articles to seek on-line. I did find one typo, however. On page 333, the first note for page 100 misspells the German Jahres in “The government-sponsored Society for the German Language first picked a Wort des Yahres in 1971…”
This is my shelf of English dictionaries, including the enormous Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster tenth edition of the Collegiate:
[1] I am a stickler for accuracy when recording the titles and authors’ names in my reviews and will use whatever forms have been rendered on the formal title page. So with this work I find myself in the same situation as with Let It Snow by Nancy Thayer: both titles and author names are entirely in lowercase on the formal title pages. In Fatsis’s work, lowercase appears on the spine as well. However, the inside flap and each left header renders the title as Unabridged. I will use that form of the title for my review, and thus eschew the stylized dictionary format which shows stress and syllable divisions. I will also refer to the author’s name with capital initial letters.