From The New York Times:
Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in America, has turned itself into a social media powerhouse over the past few years. Its editors star in online videos on hot-button topics like the serial comma, gender pronouns and the dreaded “irregardless.” Its Twitter feed has become a viral sensation, offering witty — and sometimes pointedly political — commentary on the news of the day.
Kory Stamper, a lexicographer here, is very much part of the vanguard of word-nerd celebrities. Her witty “Ask the Editor” video contributions, like a classic on the plural of octopus, and personal blog, Harmless Drudgery, have inspired a Kory Stamper Fan Club on Facebook. One online admirer has carefully tracked minute changes in her hair (which, for one thing, is purple).
But the company remains very much a bricks-and-mortar operation, still based in this small New England city where the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Noah Webster’s dictionary in the 1840s and carried on his idea of a distinctly American language. And this month, Ms. Stamper, the author of the new book “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” was more than happy to offer a tour of some of the distinctly analog oddities in the basement.
. . . .
But the real jaw-dropper was the Backward Index, which includes some 315,000 cards listing words spelled … backward.
“It was conceived of as another way of shuffling information,” Ms. Stamper said of the index, which seems to have been produced intermittently from the 1930s to the ’70s. “Basically, someone sat here and typed up all the entries backwards. And then went crazy.”
Craziness is a bit of a leitmotif in “Word by Word.” The book, published last week by Pantheon, mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries. The Atlantic called it “an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the English language” that’s also “a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.”
Ms. Stamper calls it “a love letter to dictionaries in English,” if one that allows for some mixed feelings.
“People have so many fears about what their use of language says about them,” she said. “When you talk to people about dictionaries, they often start talking about other things, like which words they love, and which words they hate. And it’s perfectly fine to hate parts of the language.”
Link to the rest at The New York Times
[blinks] I’m pretty sure I could write a script to automatically flip all words in a list to a background spelling in far less time than it would take to type that.
You could write the script, but in the 1930s what would you run it on and against what database?
Oh, was that the pub date? I wasn’t seeing it. I wondered if something like that was what had happened. Thanks. 🙂
A Jacquard loom?
Actually, it would have been pretty easy on an IBM punch-card reader. Just flip the cards right to left before feeding them into the machine. After that, it’s mostly a matter of setting up the machine (‘programming’ in modern terminology) to read the requisite field from different columns on the card. (If the word was occupying columns 1–20 before, it will now be in columns 61–80, right justified.)
But I’d be a bit surprised if dictionary chaps were allowing their premises to be polluted with IBM machines in those days, because Dark Satanic Mills and all that.