I once bought a book about the dictionary. Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made by Jonathon Green is still unread on my shelf like many books I own, waiting patiently for need or fancy to call. Perhaps today is the day! So I read with interest Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary by Stefan Fatsis. While I have never found dictionaries thrilling, exactly, the review reminded me they are a species of authority file: a repository of everything it’s possible to say in a particular language.

Menand describes how Fatsis probes this claim, exploring how dictionaries have adapted to the Wikipedia age (with varying degrees of success) and questioning whether they are relevant anymore in an era where language morphs faster than ever and neologisms crop up and fade away before they can even be definitively defined. Isn’t being a lexicographer — always a thankless task — nearly impossible now? (And indeed, the ranks of the profession in the US have shrunk from an estimated 200 in the early 2000s to more like 30.)

More importantly, the review describes how different dictionaries do not agree on what terms to include. Apparently this situation really took root with Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Web. III), which came out in 1961. It was the first to be “descriptivist” (a neologism I love) in that it included words that people actually used, not only those they were supposed use (would that be “prescriptivist?”). One big controversy was that it included the contraction “ain’t.” Predictably, critics (a group I also love) came out against it. Menand writes, “The war over Web. III was, in short, a culture war, and culture wars are really class wars.” Historian Jacques Barzun, of the scholarly “upper” classes, complained that “whatever ‘the people’ utter is a ‘linguistic fact’ to be recorded, cherished, preferred.”

To me, that sounds less like a complaint and more like a maxim. It also aligns with my position as a non-academic art critic who wrote for a mainstream newspaper for many years. One of my guiding principles was to make sure Auntie Irene (an artist not of the “art world”) could understand what I wrote, even though many of the artists I was interested in spoke an arcane language inflected with French theory and postcolonial studies. In some ways, I served as a translator, but that service was rooted in a sincere belief that complex ideas can be expressed in language used by “the people.”

For Menand, the answer is not that we no longer need the dictionary, but that we need many more than one. I would go further: it’s not only that we need multiple standards — as most information professionals know, we already have plenty. What is needed is the skillful selection and use of language (authoritative or otherwise) to express, not just the reality we live in now, but the world we want to see. In this new year, I wish for you the power and resolve to use whatever authority you have to make that happen.

A New Year’s Offering

Inspired by the Buddhist concept of dana or generous giving, I’m offering three, 50-minute, Zoom consultation sessions on Friday, February 6 between 9am and 12pm PST. You can “ask me anything” related to my professional life — archives, art, metadata, writing, consulting, criticism, research — and give what you wish: in-kind services, money, or absolutely nothing. Sessions are scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis. (Unfortunately, I am unable to review documents or other materials in advance.) Sign up here.