Stefan Fatsis went 17 years between books, but you wouldn't say that he was taking it easy. He was on NPR and co-hosted Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast for many years, and was writing big feature stories on a fairly regular cadence, but there was no new book until Unabridged, his excellent new history of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, American lexicography, and his experience while embedded with the dictionary's staff of lexicographers, came out last month. That it took nearly a month to get him on the podcast is a reflection of how busily he has been out there spreading the good word since that publication date. But we got him:
If you read the book, which you absolutely should do, it will instantly become clear where all that time went. Unabridged is meticulous in illuminating the actual work of lexicography, the language obsessives who do that work and have done it in the past, and the strangely vibrant business of words. It's great fun to read, too, with lavish descriptions of filing cabinets, weird cluttered spaces, and the various true-blue American Freaks who have shared this particular fixation. I had never really thought about the dictionary in this way until I read it for the reading series I do in Brooklyn, but I've thought about it, and the questions it raises about where American language is going, a great deal since.
Drew loved the book as well, and we spent most of the episode talking to Stefan about what he did there, and what the dictionary does. There's a lot there to talk about: the longstanding human urge to put a bunch of words together in alphabetical order, how long it took for that to turn into the comprehensive dictionary we know today, and the grandiosity and genius of the early American weirdos who were obsessed with this work, but also what that work amounts to in this moment.
Stefan walked us through the journalistic task of getting a word into the dictionary—we used his experience in getting the word "sheeple" into the dictionary—and the singular literary challenge of writing a comprehensive definition. We talked about the long history of people getting upset about pronouns and Stefan's failed attempt to get some contemporary neopronouns into the dictionary, and the ways in which a dictionary must grow not just to reflect the changes in American language but the realities of a cretinous and increasingly online business environment.
And there was all the other stuff: the Moneyball revolution in the game of Scrabble, best practices in optimizing the "K ball" that NFL kickers use in games, the human yearning for a 70-yard field goal, and the legacy of barefoot placekicking icon Rich Karlis. All that and a Funbag question that let me say "At the end of the day, it is what it is," into a podcast mic. Maybe not an episode worth waiting 17 years for, all in all, but definitely a decent week's work.
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