1141. We look at the controversy that caught Stefan Fatsis by surprise when he defined the word "sheeple" for Merriam-Webster, leading to public complaints. We also look at the origin and purpose of the obscure "Backward Index" invented by Webster's Third editor Philip Gove and how quickly Merriam added COVID-related words to the dictionary.
1141. We look at the controversy that caught Stefan Fatsis by surprise when he defined the word "sheeple" for Merriam-Webster, leading to public complaints. We also look at the origin and purpose of the obscure "Backward Index" invented by Webster's Third editor Philip Gove and how quickly Merriam added COVID-related words to the dictionary.
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Mignon: Stefan Fatsis's book "Unabridged" keeps getting accolades, so I thought you'd appreciate this bonus episode I did with him back in October for the Grammarpaloozians who support the show.
[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm here today with Stefan Fatsis, and we just finished talking about his new book, "Unabridged," all about dictionaries. He embedded in Merriam-Webster, which just sounds like a dream to me. And we have just more wonderful things to talk about. Stefan Fatsis, thank you so much for being here.
Stefan Fatsis: Thank you for having me.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet. So, you know, you defined a number of words that got into the dictionary, a bunch more that didn't, but there was one that caused a kerfuffle. I want to hear about the sheeple incident.
Stefan Fatsis: I thought sheeple was kind of a normal word that already would have been in the dictionary, and very often what I would do was, you know, you have a hunch, you go to m-w.com, and I would type it in, and if it was there, it'd be like, oh, somebody got there first. Not surprising. I'm just some rookie lexicographer; what do I know?
But "sheeple" wasn't there, so I immediately was like, I dibsed it, as we say at NPR, I put dibs in on it. And I started researching the history of "sheeple," and it was fascinating. I went into the Merriam archives and did a deep dive, you know, online research about the origins of the word and its history. I had seen it. I think what the trigger was, I had seen it during Trump’s win, uh, when Kara Swisher, the tech journalist, had called out a bunch of the tech CEOs for groveling to Trump after he was elected and called them sheeple. And that was sort of like, oh, okay, I'm going to go look this up. And it wasn't there. So, I did the research.
Mignon Fogarty: How far back does it go?
Stefan Fatsis: Oh, "sheeple" goes back. The OED did enter "sheeple," and the first citation in the OED is from 1945.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, wow.
Stefan Fatsis: So very interesting. And I found the first hit for “sheeple” in the I'm going to, I'm staring off camera now to look at the first hit for "sheeple" in the OED. It was a citation from a journal called "The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular." And the quotation was, "The people, as ever, I spell it, sheeple will stand anything."
Mignon Fogarty: Huh?
Stefan Fatsis: And what they would stand, what he was referring to was how announcers on British radio would use the R, you know, when like the Brits sometimes say. What's a good example of this? And I don't know, I'm not a linguist, so I always forget what this actually means. Like the name Eleanor, there's an Eleanor, right? Like use the R instead of an A.
Mignon Fogarty: "Mark" versus "mock."
Stefan Fatsis: Yes. Something like that.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
Stefan Fatsis: So that's what it was referring to. But anyway, so that was the first hit. Then I found the first U.S. hit I found was from 1949 in an Atlanta newspaper, a columnist named Earnest Rogers. And he, I think, was the first person to use the phrase "we, the sheeple."
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, and so you wrote the definition for “sheeple”?
Stefan Fatsis: I wrote the definition for "sheeple." I accumulated all of these citations. I tracked the history and the evolution of the word from this early usage as, you know, like just people who are docile and submissive, and how it sort of reemerged in the 1980s as the lingo from the sort of far-right anti-American, anti-tax, anti-government groups used the word "sheeple" a lot. I sort of wrote a nice definition and an etymology note and found a bunch of hits, citations for it. And the way definitions at Merriam are crafted, you know, you submit to the editor a group of citations, examples of usage, from fairly recent is best, popular media, mainstream media. I had thought I had a nice balance. I didn't go with weird stuff like, the comic, the comic XKCD, which had a couple of amazing panels that used sheeple that would be a little too arcane for a Merriam definition. So, I picked a couple of quotations I submitted for. One was from the Kara Swisher quote. One was from a quote from the right-wing rocker, Ted Nugent. One was from a New York Times story about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That was when the story was published, and another was from a 2015 review of an Apple iPhone case on CNN.
Steve Perot chose the iPhone case from CNN and the Oklahoma City bombing as the two examples that illustrated the definition when it was published on Merriam-Webster.com.
Mignon Fogarty: And then how long was it before that started attracting attention?
Stefan Fatsis: It wasn't very long at all. It was like a day.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that quick.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah, it was that quick. The Apple review derided the iPhone case. It said that it was not good, and let me find the actual quotation. The Apple quote said “Tthat Apple has debuted a battery case for the juice-sucking iPhone, an ungainly, lumpy case the sheeple will happily shell out $99 for it.” Now, this to me just seemed like an excellent use of the word. Apple users are pretty loyal. In this case, the implication was that even if Apple produced a lousy product, people would still buy it. The public did not agree with my assessment, and the Apple Army kind of rose up against the use of this quotation on Merriam-Webster's website. In the comment section, Merriam still had comments on definitions at that time. It has since disabled those.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Stefan Fatsis: Because they, like every other comment section, you know, devolved into an absolute cesspool of racist and abusive language. And so, there were comments. Then the comment section filled up with people getting mad at Merriam for criticizing Apple. How could you criticize this company?
And then the media picked it up, which was just kind of bizarre. But there were stories like in, I'm just going to list a few here: Fortune Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, CNET, Gizmodo, Yahoo. Morning Edition on NPR did a little snippet at the bottom of the hour.
These little transitionals that they call buttons. Rachel Martin was the host. She said the dictionary takes a dig at one particular tech brand. On and on. It was like multiple languages. It was translated into, so it became this giant headache for Merriam-Webster. And then the question is, what do you do? Merriam is not a newspaper or magazine. You know, it's not a journalistic outlet. So, you know, my journalistic instincts were to back up the reporter like, I didn't do anything wrong here. I just am reporting the facts. This was a good example of the usage of this word.
Mignon Fogarty: You didn’t make up the quotation.
Stefan Fatsis: I certainly did not make up the quotation; someone writing for CNN did. But sadly for me, journalistically, but completely understandably for Merriam, this was not worth the headache. It was not worth the volume of emails that were pouring in. And ultimately, Steve Perrot, the director of defining at Merriam at the time, Steve felt that the example sentence wasn't doing its job; it was detracting from the definition itself. It wasn't a matter of journalistic principle; it was a matter of ensuring that the entry that Merriam has on its website serves the purpose of best defining the word for whoever comes to that page. And the example sentence had become a giant distraction. Merriam took down the example sentence, but I got something to write about. So, it all worked out in the end.
Mignon Fogarty: It's just so unexpected because it is like, you were trying to pick the nonpolitical…
Stefan Fatsis: Correct?
Mignon Fogarty: The non-inflammatory.
Stefan Fatsis: There was no Ted Nugent, right?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Amazing.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah, I mean, it was so great. I mean, my favorite was that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, picked on it.,,
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, no.
Stefan Fatsis: …issuing a press release that said that “sheep were gentle, social, and intelligent animals who are so smart that they listen to and watch the wisest, oldest leaders of the flock and follow them. A common-sense thing to do if you don't know the ropes.” PETA, to be fair, was not criticizing Merriam; it was urging people to boycott wool, not Merriam-Webster. So, yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: They objected to sheep being used in a derogatory way.
Stefan Fatsis: Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, it's also something funny about the thing you said earlier, that basically the sheeple rose up, too.
Stefan Fatsis: Yes. And the sheeple rose up!
Mignon Fogarty: The sheeple mob came after you, which is not what you expect sheep will do, and they're supposed to follow. Oh my gosh. Well, the other, one of the other delightful stories, and this actually was — you have this section in the back, a huge section, like maybe 30 pages of notes.
Stefan Fatsis: I'm sorry, 60 pages.
Mignon Fogarty: So, 60 pages of notes.
Stefan Fatsis: Yes.
Mignon Fogarty: In the back, end notes and buried, not buried in there. Highlighted in there. Lovely to find in there is a story about the Backward Index, which is just so odd.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah, I didn't know anything about the Backward Index until I literally was climbing up the back stairs at Merriam, which is how I would get into the building. I went in through the back loading dock at the back of the parking lot. I had my own key, which I was very proud of, and one — and I was just like, there was stuff, like I said, everywhere in Merriam, right? They didn't — nothing had been thrown out. And there were filing cabinets, like on each landing, and bookshelves and other discarded stuff. And one day I just kind of was looking at these different filing cabinets, and one of them was the Backward Index. And then I asked Peter Sokolowski, Merriam's editor at large, about, you know, what is this thing? I didn't understand it. And the Backward Index was actually a creation of Philip Gove, the editor of Webster's Third, and the point of it was to identify related terms that might be defined the same way, or particular groups of compounds or words that rhymed. And the Backward Index listed words in reverse order.
Mignon Fogarty: So like not from Z to A, but from starting with the spelling, like the spelling is flipped.
Stefan Fatsis: Spelling is backwards. So, the word Mignon would be N-O-G-N-O-N-G-I-M, right? And yeah. Did I do that?
Mignon Fogarty: So why would you ever need that?
Stefan Fatsis: Well, you would need that because, as Peter explained — and Peter ended up writing a post on Merriam's website about the Backward Index — Peter explained, and he explained it to me too, that before the computer era, there was no way to sort of try to figure out certain categorizations of words. And the best way to do that would be to look at the way, you know, the way necessarily that words ended. How could we know, like if we wanted to create a list of words that ended in "ology," was one of the examples Peter used, or words that ended in "GRY," that famous conundrum. What are the only two words in English that end in "GRY"?
Well, the only way to do that would be to look at the words in reverse, look at the letters in reverse order. And that sort of reflected the kind of anality that Philip Gove, sort of the precision that Philip Gove brought to the ideal of lexicography. Like, we want to be able to answer every question that people might have about English.
So, if somebody asks what words end in "GRY," well now we can tell them officially that the only two words that end in "GRY" are "hungry." But there was also an old word, "anhungry," which was an obsolete variant that Shakespeare actually used in "Carus." And now there is a third word that ends in "GRY." Of course, "hangry" has been added. So, the answer to the question is now three words. But "anhungry" is the weird one that always will trip people up.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you have any idea how much time it took to make the Backward Index? That seems like it..
Stefan Fatsis: It seems like a life project, doesn't it?
Mignon Fogarty: Before computers, it seems like it would take forever.
Stefan Fatsis: Exactly. So, I mean, Merriam did have a big staff. They had a giant staff, and among the people that worked at Merriam for decades was a staff of typists, and the typist's main job was to take the citations that editors would come up with.
So, part of the job at Merriam was, and still is to some extent, to read newspapers, magazines, trade journals, cereal boxes, and whatever, and look for interesting uses of language and then flag those. And then they would be typed up into those citation slips that would be put in the consolidated files and the new files, which is another set of filing cabinets at Merriam.
And so, the typist's job was to sort of work through these piles of print documents that editors created. They created these citations, and that was called reading and marking. Reading and marking was something that every editor was required to do for an hour or two every day. And I assume that part of, like, when Philip Gove came up with the idea for the backward files, some set of typists set about taking the dictionary and typing each word onto a card in reverse order. Amazing.
Mignon Fogarty: And you said in the book that when the typists, the four typists finally got laid off, they were only up to the letter D.
Stefan Fatsis: The typists were plowing through the most recent stack of example sentences because there was this transformation. What they were doing was taking the old paper citations and creating digital slips out of the old, more recent paper slips. So, the recent, from the last few decades before they stopped using paper.
So they were trying to add those to Merriam's digital database to sort of create the parallel so they would be searchable because, like, the stuff from the eighties and nineties and early two thousands is still relevant. The older stuff not so relevant if you're writing a definition of a word today.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay. And so, the last topic I want to get to before we go to your book recommendations is the COVID words. And were you — was part of the time that you were there, did that span the, you know, the major first part of COVID?
Stefan Fatsis: No, I was not there at that point. I had already written the first draft of the book by the time COVID started. And the reason this book took 10 years is because, I mean, COVID was part of the reason, and I also switched editors and publishers, and it was sort of a long, drawn-out process. But I'm very happy with the way the book turned out, and I'm really grateful that it's out there in the world.
So, I was gone already from Merriam when COVID hit, and I was working on the manuscript and just writing the book. But what happened was so fascinating that I ended up writing a piece for Slate about Merriam's approach with COVID. And what happened was Merriam never historically seen a volume of interest and lookups, attempted lookups for words as understandably occurred in the first few months of the pandemic.
And so, Merriam had a decision to make. You know, typically, historically, words were allowed to sort of percolate in culture and develop a critical mass before Merriam or other dictionary makers would determine that they were ready to be entered into the dictionary. They were ready to be enshrined permanently in the gatekeeper, in the keeper of language. COVID was so different that, you know, you had to go back to “AIDS” to find an example of a word that was rushed into the dictionary because its use had become so universal, and it took “AIDS” like two years to go from first usage to entered into a print dictionary. This was the 1980s, so there was no digital dictionary yet.
Merriam was pretty slow still in 2019. In the late 2000s, I'm sorry, in 2020. It still took weeks or months to prepare the files and prepare the data sets to get them uploaded online. So, the real hindrance was technological for the pace at which words could be entered. But there was also still this lingering philosophy that words needed time to marinate before we wanted to put them in. And so, the times were not like 10 years anymore, so words were getting into the dictionary after two or three years since first usage. But with COVID, it became this urgent project. And Merriam wound up deciding to do what it had never done before, which was really to act like a newspaper on deadline, is the analogy that I used, to quickly draft a batch of words and get them into the dictionary because hundreds of thousands of people were attempting to find a dictionary definition for COVID, and they were failing.
So, Merriam managed to go from the first usage of “COVID” announced by the head of the World Health Organization to entering the word in the dictionary in 34 days, which was astounding…
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Stefan Fatsis: …for a dictionary company, for Merriam. And I did a piece for Slate that sort of tracked what happened not long after that, after the word was entered. And I think the most amazing and interesting detail of this is like Merriam went through this typical, standard, laborious, studious academic approach to creating a definition. Got it all prepared also because it's also very cumbersome. The data sets for dictionaries have a lot of moving parts, a lot of different parts. So, it takes a lot of editorial work and then backend computer work to prepare a dictionary entry for the website. And what happened was when they hit the button for publishing “COVID” and a group of other COVID-related words, before Merriam had even tweeted it out, it was getting hits.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Stefan Fatsis: Which indicated that people were constantly going to the dictionary and trying to find a definition for “COVID” and COVID-related words. It was really, again, it was another example of how much people turned to the dictionary as an authority to help confirm and help them make sense of the world. And as I wrote in this piece, and write in “Unabridged,” this was a real example of how important lexicography is. It's, you know, it's a matter of, as Kory Stamper said to me, a former Merriam lexicographer, who wrote the great memoir “Word by Word,” Kory said when I interviewed her for the Slate piece, she said, you know, this was like literally a matter of life and death for people trying to understand and parse the differences between all of these new words, all this new terminology about what was safe to do and what this disease meant.
And Merriam's ability to do that was revolutionary for the company and for lexicography, it was really this amazing sort of confluence of like a cultural phenomenon, a giant news event, an unprecedented worldwide sharing of language. And Merriam had to find a way to quickly, like, help make sense of this for people. And it did that; it sort of broke all of its rules and charted a new course.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, they're a trusted source that people turn to for guidance.
Stefan Fatsis: Absolutely.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Wonderful. So interesting. So interesting. And so now we're going to get to what I would normally call my favorite part of the show, but I think all of this has been my favorite part because it's so interesting. Your book recommendations, so we're looking for three b recommendations from you.
Stefan Fatsis: All right. You said it in your email to me; they didn't have to necessarily be related to what we were talking about, but I want to do two books that are related to what I'm talking about. So, the first is — I'm sorry, and people, you know, wordies may have already read at least one of these, but I want to sort of — my favorite novel about lexicography is "The Dictionary of Lost Words" by Pip Williams, which is a wonderful book. It is just, it's about the OED, and it's about the early years of the OED in the early 20th century, and it's set in Oxford. Have you read this?
Mignon Fogarty: No, it's a relatively new book though, isn't it?
Stefan Fatsis: It is. Yeah, it is a relatively new book.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Stefan Fatsis: It is delightful. It's the story of a woman who is at the OED and sort of what happens to her in her sort of secret collection of words and her sort of life in the early 20th century. It is beautiful, beautifully written, and it's so fascinating, and it really is like, sort of for those of us who are deeply into this stuff, like, wow, this is an amazing novel about lexicography. You've got to be kidding me. But it is like a novel that anyone would love. So that's number one. And the second sort of word-related book I'm going to recommend is one that I read while I was writing the manuscript for "Unabridged," while I was writing the book.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Stefan Fatsis: It is by Susan Orlean, "The Library Book." And it is about the history of a library in Los Angeles and a giant fire that occurred there at one point. And it is just wonderful because Susan Orlean, who I was like, I think, life achievement — like, blurbed "Unabridged," so it's like now I can die in peace. Like, what a wonderful, like, for me, honor to have someone as amazing as Susan Orlean blurb your book. But when I was writing "Unabridged," "The Library Book" actually sort of made me feel reenergized about trying to tell the story of words, because her narrative storytelling is just — she's one of my favorite writers.
And it sort of gave me energy like, hey, I can tell a good story about the dictionary, it won't be as accomplished or as literary, maybe, as Susan Orlean in "The Library Book," but it sort of made me feel like this is a book that people will care about and will want to read.
Mignon Fogarty: I read that book too, and nobody's recommended it yet as a guest on the show.
Stefan Fatsis: Oh, cool.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and it reminded me, actually, when you talked about Merriam not having sprinklers, it reminded me of —
Stefan Fatsis: Right.
Mignon Fogarty: — the scenes in the library. They had a flood.
Stefan Fatsis: Yes, right.
Mignon Fogarty: She writes about the flood at the LA Library.
Stefan Fatsis: Right. And I have one more. Okay. So, I’ve got two more. I'm going to go one more. Okay.
Mignon Fogarty: We can do more. Always happy to do more.
Stefan Fatsis: I just read a great discussion of one of my favorite baseball novels on the website Defector, which people should read and subscribe to. They did a staff conversation about "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbaugh. And "The Art of Fielding" is set at a small college in the Midwest and is sort of a coming-of-age story about a baseball player and other characters at this small college. And it is lovely and amazing, like a great novel about baseball. There are a lot of good novels about baseball. This is one of the better ones.
And I just picked up, because I've been meaning to read this for a long time, and the US Open has just started when we’re recording this, Andre Agassi's autobiography, which I've been meaning to read for years. Is this sort of one of the most honest sports biographies ever written. And I'm looking forward to finally diving into Agassi's biography during the Open.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. Yeah. Good timing too. Wonderful. Well, Stefan Fatsis, thank you so much for being here.
Stefan Fatsis: Thank you, Mignon. This was so much fun. I really appreciate your interest in the book and your being supportive of it. And I've had a blast. We barely even talked about Scrabble. Imagine that.
Mignon Fogarty: I know we could do a whole 'nother show. Well, I'm going to hold it up one more time. "Unabridged..."
Stefan Fatsis: I will too.
Mignon Fogarty: “The thrill and threat to the modern dictionary.” Just a fabulous book. I really loved it. Stefan, where can people find you and the book?
Stefan Fatsis: They can find me at bystefanfatsis.com and the book anywhere. And I will be touring in October and November, and a list of stops is on my website, so it's bystefanfatsis.com, and I hope people will turn out and say hi and read the book.
Mignon Fogarty: Fabulous. Thanks again.
Stefan Fatsis: Thank you.