When people don’t understand something in the news, they no longer wait for the Sunday talk shows to tell them what it means, or the next issue of Time, or even the Daily Show. With just a click, they look it up in the dictionary.
For several years, dictionaries like Merriam-Webster have tracked trending words, reporting spikes in look-ups on their websites, trying to understand exactly what’s driving this sudden search for meaning. Sometimes it’s a lying politician setting off a word alarm, or a public figure with a bad case of foot-in-mouth, or a celebrity gaffe. Or a line from Saturday Night Live.
Now dictionaries themselves are trending. The online versions of the heavy books we once used for pressing flowers, hiding money, or helping small children reach the table have become our new talking heads and late-night comics rolled into one.
Today’s lexicographers are definitely woke. Inspired by the chaotic 2016 presidential election, where far too many of the far too many candidates played fast-and-loose not just with the facts—that’s just politics as usual—but with the very meaning of our words, they started trolling politicians to expose their camouflage of empty signifiers.
When look-ups for misogyny spiked after Donald Trump’s® victory, Merriam-Webster tweeted a definition of the word, illustrated with an image of tic-tacs®:
And when Trump®-talker Kellyanne Conway called lies “alternative facts,” the dictionary tweeted this definition: “a fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality,” together with a link to the story about Conway’s feeble attempt at spin.
Facts are facts: dictionaries are kicking ass and taking names, and there’s nothing that the alt-right fascists can do about it. As Steve Kleinedler, of the American Heritage Dictionary, warned, “If you get on the bad side of @Kory Stamper (an editor at Merriam-Webster) and me, we WILL make snarky anagrams out of your name.”
Today’s politically-aware dictionary makers—who keep the legal department happy by insisting they’re politically neutral—have become overnight celebrities, media darlings featured in the press and on the news, followed by massive crowds on Twitter, even doing AMAs on Reddit. When before in history could stodgy old dictionaries be marketed with an “As Seen on TV” sticker?
But wait, there’s more. These snarky tweets show us that today’s lexicographers are not the harmless drudges that Samuel Johnson said they were.
In his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson defined lexicographer as “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.” Johnson, no harmless drudge he, was the first lexicographer to introduce snark to the dictionary. In addition to his self-snark about harmless drudgery, he defined oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people,” and he introduced the art of circular definitions—if you look up one word, its definition contains a word requiring yet another look up, and that look up brings you back to where you started. Johnson defines network as “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” So you look up reticulated only to find that it’s “made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities.” A picture of a net would have sufficed.
In addition to writing a dictionary, Johnson was a well-known writer, wit, and bon-vivant. Ambrose Bierce, a turn-of-the-century journalist and wit, also tried his hand at satiric definitions, collecting them in the Devil’s Dictionary (1911). Like today’s lexicographers, Bierce took great pleasure in skewering politicians. He defined president as
The leading figure in a small group of men of whom— and of whom only— it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
If Twitter was a thing in 1911, tweeting Bierce’s definition of executive would throw major shade considering the reactions to Trump’s® Muslim ban and the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court:
An officer of the Government, whose duty it is to enforce the wishes of the legislative power until such time as the judicial department shall be pleased to pronounce them invalid and of no effect.
And if Twitter had been around in 1998, imagine what fun dictionaries would have had with the meaning of the word “is.” Asked by the Starr Committee what he meant when he testified about his dalliance with an intern, "There's nothing going on between us," it took Bill Clinton only eleven words to respond, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." But it takes the Oxford English Dictionary about 20,000 words to define be. Twitter is great for definitions, but it has its limits. Imagine condensing the meaning of "is," along with a snide comment, into 140 characters.
Still, Twitter has earned the dictionary a new respect as an authority on the state of the world. And in case you’re one of those pre-Twitter luddites who miss the special things that only a hefty print dictionary can do, here’s a reminder that digital dictionaries can press a flower too:
