Word Up!

One of the most important points made in Kory Stamper’s book Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, is that there’s a misunderstanding on the part of the public between a word’s meaning and the thing the word represents. The word is not the thing. Dictionaries define words, but they do not define culture, or what particular words mean to particular people.
Yet dictionaries are often seen as authorities on not just words, but also the things those words represent. Dictionaries are used as an argument of last resort — literally, the final place one will go to provide evidentiary support for an argument, especially when the argument becomes a parsing of language, which is sadly where many arguments go when they run out of steam.
But as her book makes abundantly clear, dictionaries are not necessarily the fixed references we think they are; after all, English is a living, changing language, and dictionaries must adapt to it if they want to remain up-to-date. What the dictionary says doesn’t necessarily go.
Students, however, often provide their teachers with sentences which begin “The dictionary says that….” Are they taught this maneuver by well-meaning elementary teachers? Is this a remnant of their early days exploring Language Arts? Is there a textbook somewhere that suggests this approach to essay writing is a good one to take?
Every year I disappoint a new generation of students by red-inking the shit out of that sentence. “There is no such thing as ‘the dictionary’” I write, along with a note about the inherent weakness of such a rhetorical move, and that they should assume their reader already knows the definition of whatever word they seek to illuminate. It’s just one of the many sad moments my students inevitably face in my class when they come to the queasy realization that they don’t in fact, already know everything there is to know about English just because they can read and write.
Of course, the first thing they do is tell me that I am wrong: the dictionary most certainly exists. After all — they held one in their hands, or as is more often the case today, looked it up online.
What they fail to appreciate is that there are many dictionaries, all produced by different companies, with different histories and agendas, different agendas, target demographic, lists of words, and yes, definitions. Students assume there is one dictionary, a sort of Ur-tome from which all definitions spring. So we do an exercise: I give them a word, and several dictionaries and ask them to compare the definitions. The results blow their minds. Some students can’t even find their word in the dictionary they were given because it isn’t in there!
This exercise is a powerful demonstration of reminding them where they stand vis-à-vis our relationship and they never make the same mistake again. Then we can move on to better strategies for writing essays that avoid hanging their thesis (or length requirement) on semantics in lieu of an actual argument.
Once, I got a little carried away with my dictionary lesson and asked them to look up the words that had the closest spelling to their own names, to read the definitions aloud. The idea was to really randomize the results to hear the variety and style of definitions in different dictionaries. One student, however, was named Jack.
Do not do this. Please.
