What’s the path that led you to lexicography [the practice of compiling dictionaries]?
Even as a little kid, I was a big reader. All through middle school and high school, books were where I found myself. I was the first in my family to go to college. When I went to college, I was supposed to be pre-med, because that’s what you do when you’re the first one in your family to go to college. I did a year of the pre-med track and burned out. I came back for my sophomore year, took a literature class on the Medieval Icelandic family saga, and fell in love with it. After the class, I went up to the professor asking, “I want to do this. How do I do this?” And he said, “Well, you could become an English major or you could get a degree in Medieval Studies.” I got a degree in Medieval Studies with a focus on language and literature. When I graduated, I had the background to do etymology. I had all of these dead languages, all the building blocks of English. I worked an office job for a couple of years, and then I literally answered a want ad in the paper for an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster. I assumed I’d be getting coffee. I was hired initially to do a little bit of etymology, but very quickly began defining. That was in 1998, and that’s how I started lexicography just by chance.
Do you possess a philosophy of lexicography, as so many of the real-life characters in your book True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink, do?
Maybe not a philosophy per se, but two enduring lessons that might be the groundwork for a philosophy… First, you never know what someone will need to look up, or what word will suddenly become salient, so nothing is beneath your notice. And second, you will never, ever be able to define it all.
When did you realize you’re a word person?
It didn’t hit me until my senior year of college. Language learning had always been very easy for me, and I just assumed it was easy for everybody. My senior year, I took a translation seminar where we translated Beowulf. The process of translating made me realize I care a lot about the rhythm of words, how words sound when you string them together. That’s what Old English poetry does. There’s this fixed meter, a very particular sonic scheme to it. It’s not a rhyme, but it has to have these kinds of consonants in these spots. When I got to Merriam-Webster, it was mind-blowing to me that you could sit down with a word and trace it back. I’d done that in my head anyway as I was taking Latin and Old English and Old Norse and Middle High German. “This looks like that word, and this looks like that word.” There is so much history and richness in individual words—even really boring words. That’s what sucked me in.
Were you juggling your research and writing for True Color with your day job?
The research for True Color began in earnest in 2016, but I had done a little poking around from 2014 on. What I initially thought was, I wanted to tell the story of these weird color definitions, and that story is probably just at the Merriam-Webster archives. I worked remotely for a lot of it, but when I was up in the office, I would shut down my computer, push my desk in and move my coat, my bag, my purse to under the desk so it looked like I wasn’t there. I had a very firm firewall between I’m doing work and I’m doing research.
I left Merriam-Webster in 2018. By that point, the shape of the book had changed because I had discovered [19th-century color scientist] I.H. Godlove. It was like lily pads, leapfrogging from one lily pad of research to another lily pad of research. The way that I did research was immersive. I was still doing lexicography, for Cambridge University Press. My hours shifted, so I had a lot of the afternoon. I’d say, “I want to find out more about this I.H. Godlove guy.” And I would start a little research. What does Wikipedia say? Nothing? Let’s broaden that. He was a member of the Optical Society of America. Okay, what’s there? Oh, he wrote a ton of papers for them. Oh, there’s a necrology. There’s an in memoriam.
I’d resource hoard, basically. I discovered that the Hagley Librarian Museum, which is in Wilmington, Delaware and very easy for me to get to, held the archives for the Inter-Society Color Council and a lot of color-adjacent groups. DuPont’s archives are there. I would take three days and drive down, and they got really sick of seeing me: “Hi, I’m back. I would like this many linear feet of this archive.” I would collect and collect and collect and collect.
The organic “throw it together and see where there’s overlap or connections between lily pads” is what led to me finding Margaret, [I.H. Godlove’s] wife, and little hints of her in all of these archives. At home, I took pictures and scans of everything that I could. I initially had them organized in a free research program that then crashed.
Oh, no.
It was fine. But I went old school and wrote note cards. I had this very specific coding system. At the end, I had this huge shoebox of index cards that then was really helpful in terms of structuring the book. I could pull my index cards and be like, “Here are all the different timelines I’m keeping track of, here’s how they intersect, here’s how I want the arc of the book to go.” I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to do it, but that’s how it happened. I’m a high-information person. I like a lot of information. I did so much more research than ended up in the book, but I don’t consider any of that lost or wasted time. I’m an immersive, hungry researcher. I want to know everything that I can about something. Some of that is because I’m genuinely curious, but some of it is wanting to make sure that whatever I’m writing about, I’m representing as much of it accurately as I can.
As someone who defines words, and has a writing practice separate from that, what is your approach to language? I imagine you have inside your head a huge arsenal of all possible synonyms for a word, and all of the different correct usages.
There’s good usage, bad usage, and there’s word choice. Good usage, bad usage—I try to follow what is going to rile the least number of feathers and what’s consistent with common usage. But word choice goes back to the translation work. The rhythm of words, the sound of words, how something feels with the pacing of a sentence is really important to me. I love mixing high-register and low-register words—really formal words and really informal words.
When it comes to how I, as an author, interface with my copy editor, the sound and feel of a word always, always trumps correct usage. The sound and the pacing of clauses and sentences is more important than adhering to what I’d consider to be an optional copy editing rule, or even sometimes a hard and fast grammar rule. What people consider to be a hard and fast grammar rule is pretty broad. I adhere to those more than not, but there are times that it doesn’t sound right, and it’s not going to sound right to the person who’s reading it. Copy editors sometimes are a little nervous about saying something is wrong because I’m a lexicographer, so I must know. Those are two separate parts of my brain. They only kiss when it comes to, like, “I really love the feel of this weird word.” Fusty. I love that word. How’s the meaning of it going to interact in this sentence?
Did writing this book change your relationship to color?
Before I started writing this book, I did not think at all about color apart from finding definitions. It was the lexical whimsy of the definitions that drew me in. It wasn’t the idea that defining color was hard, because it’s no harder than anything else. How do you describe the word idea, or justice? [Describing color is] also amorphous. The more I researched the history of color science, color perception, and color biology, and the more I talked to people, the more I realized that everything I knew about color was totally wrong. And color is everywhere in the built environment. Everything around you, everything on the bookshelf behind me, everything on my computer, everything on my desk has a color that someone chose, tested, manufactured, synthesized, retested, remanufactured. It’s not just some person in a room who’s like, “I think computers should be silver.” There’s market testing and materials testing. How does color look on different textures, and how do two colors interact together, and what does gloss do to color? What does matte do? It’s tens of thousands of people whose work is invisible—but without it, our lives would be materially worse off.
Finding out about the color famine during World War I was shocking to me. It makes sense when you read about it; of course, dye works are a billion-dollar industry. But the idea that having to use unpainted wooden buttons is a mark of decline, that opened my eyes to how important color is to us. Our color perception is so tied to our language, and we cannot conceive of a world without color. I appreciate color so much more, and how individual our experiences of color are—not just how we feel about them, but how we see them. It is like language. Everyone’s got slightly different takes on what justice means. Everyone has a different take on what color magenta really is. But in all of this diversity, we somehow manage to coalesce into one group without discussing it among ourselves. We don’t have a global magenta conference where we’re all like, “Okay, guys, is it pink or is it purple?” We amass toward this center of gravity, for both the meanings of words and for how we perceive colors, and which colors are what. It’s fascinating, and so powerful to me.
Do you have a project that you’re working on now?
I do, actually. I have a third book. The first two didn’t kill me, so we’ll do this again. It is a book about how women made the English language.
Something I found really interesting in True Color is this idea that there are certain people who influence the way that we use language. Color me intrigued…
So much of dictionary work is not collaborative but communal. It’s shared work under a company rubric. No one gets to sign their definitions. No one gets credit. Nobody reads the staff page on a print dictionary. There are barely print dictionaries left. All of this work that gets done in sorting, organizing, cataloging, and setting down the meaning of the English language is done by anonymous people. And for a lot of modern history, women’s contributions to that work—no one cares. It was fascinating to read corporate histories and oral histories of different color companies in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, where the lab assistants, patent clerks, the supporting class of workers were mostly women. Obviously, their names aren’t going on papers. They’re not the ones who are getting Director of Physical Chemistry jobs. It was important to me to underline that there’s this whole community of people doing foundational work, and you don’t know anything about them.
How is the research going so far?
I get to go back to my roots a little bit, looking at some Medieval ladies and doing some analysis. When you’re trying to find something that’s not not there, but it’s not top-line text, you can’t go to the Library of Congress and be like, “Give me all the information on this random woman who wrote this one thing that changed the whole course of rock and roll history.” But it’s the kind of research I really love doing. The trick is, am I gonna be able to do it well enough that I’m representing these women as well as I can? You can never really know. You can really only do your best.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into lexicography?
Commercial lexicography, like what I write about in both my books, is shrinking. Language is a growth industry, but reference publishing is not. So, do lexicography in a niche. Find an area or hobby or field of study that interests you, and start keeping an informal glossary of its terms. Hang out with other nerds in that field or hobby and talk shop. Find online forums or wikis to help edit. Listen, watch, read, rinse, repeat. The best lexicographers are ones that indiscriminately soak up language like the greediest sponge. And most of all, keep your delight in language alive no matter what you have to do. The last thing the world needs is more language police and doomy naysayers. Joy! Always joy!
Kory Stamper recommends:
The Pretender by Jo Harkin. The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy by Hilary Mantel is my comfort bedtime re-read; Harkin’s historical novel is like Mantel with a dopey and tender protagonist. And a goat.
Two-in-one: Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight paired with A24’s 2021 film The Green Knight. It’s heading into colder months here, which scratches awake my ancestral urge to tell stories by a fire. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of those medieval Arthurian tales that people start to read and then abandon because it’s just weird. But pair it with the film, and you get a sense of how lush weirdness can be. Also: great use of color throughout the film.
Tomato-peach salad. But before we get to storytelling season, the best summer salad, courtesy of an old Mark Bittman column I printed out (and which is spattered with about 15 summers’ worth of tomato juice). Fresh tomatoes, peaches, red onion, cilantro (if you want), crushed red pepper, a little olive oil and some lemon juice as dressing. Eat by the bucketful.
Anguish Languish, by H.L. Chace. One of those joke books published in the mid-1950s that appeals to the New Yorker set, Anguish Languish is a book of well-known nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and songs set phonetically. To understand the story, you have to read a series of unconnected words aloud. The book is long out of print, but you can find excerpts online. I especially commend to you “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut,” or “Little Red Riding Hood,” which begins “Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock florist.” Read it aloud. Again. Ridiculous! Joy.
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Leah Mandel.