890. John Kelly, senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com, talks with Mignon about a bunch of fun new words and about how words get added to the dictionary in general.
890. John Kelly, senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com, talks with Mignon about a bunch of fun new words and about how words get added to the dictionary in general.
Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/skrrt-bottle-episode-skeuomorphs
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Mignon
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and yo+u can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. And today we're going to have an especially exciting conversation with John Kelly. He is the senior director of editorial Dictionary.com. Hi, John, thanks for being here with us today.
John
Thanks for having me.
Mignon
Yeah. So what does it mean that you're the senior director of editorial at Dictionary.com. What does your day look like?
John
I get to work with a lot of different words. Let's just put it that way. The words just don't stop coming and what we have to do with them. Well, it keeps us, keeps us in our jobs. I have the great job of getting to oversee our wonderful dictionary at dictionary.com as well as Thesaurus.com surprise, surprise, and all of the hundreds and even thousands of pieces of supporting content we do to help you learn words, connect with words, have fun with words, struggle with words, and it all comes into place under dictionary, and thesarus.com.
Mignon
Right? So talk about that fire hose of words that, you know, is coming at you all the time. How do you, well, first let's say, first, how does a new word get in the dictionary?
John
That is a great question. And a fire hose is a great, great metaphor for that. The vocabulary of the English language is vast. I would argue it's infinite, technically
Mignon
That's such a good point. I mean, there are specialized dictionaries for things like medical terms, and biology terms, and things like that. And you already have me curious: what is hopepunk?
John
Well, hopepunk is a genre of science fiction. I believe, you know what, I don't have, with all the words I have to encounter, I don't have its definition top of mind. I'm sorry. I'm gonna go to dictionary.com
Mignon
And that actually, which just happened, is such a great lesson because you can't know every word that's in the dictionary. And I find myself, you know, people think I'm an expert, but I look things up all the time, sometimes on my own site, because I can't remember, you know, something that I wrote 10 years ago when I want to get it exactly right. I mean, reference guides are so essential, not only for the average person, but even, even for the people making them, we still use them all the time,
John
All the time. That is an excellent point. Especially given that as an online dictionary, we have the ability to see what people are looking up and what, uh, that says about their needs for a reference. And guess what those words are, the words we grapple with every single day: "affect" versus "effect"
Mignon
Yeah. I could not agree more. And, uh, I, I mean, I've talked to English professors who struggle with "affect" versus "effect." It's just, it, it, it is just some, there's so many tiny little things to remember. Yeah. There's absolutely no shame in looking anything up. And so let's talk about how words get updated too. Do you, you know, ... I know sometimes dictionary makers go, just go through the dictionary alphabetically, but then is there a time when, you know, a word will essentially jump the line and, and move to the front because it's important for some reason? Like how, how do you decide when to update specific words?
John
That is a really great question. And the answer in short again, is prioritization. We very much are attuned to where language is changing. Why does that matter? Because that is the words that are top of people's minds. Those are the words that are confusing, and a dictionary has the opportunity to help educate on. And it also is what words people are looking up. So I don't know if we all remember it, but we had a pandemic. We still have a pandemic, and we had a lot of ongoing work. You know, the work of a dictionary, yes, is adding new words. And those are the fun, new words like "forest bathing" or "chair yoga," or, you know, I mentioned "hopepunk" before or "pawternity leave" mm-hmm
And so we have to go back through the records and update senses of words that take on new definitions. We have to go back and look through definitions of words that are outdated, for example, science and medical words. When the state of the art changes, we gotta go back through in that definition and all other definition it touches to change it. We have ongoing work, we prioritize based on what people are looking up, what we think is relevant and useful for our users who are coming to our site. And also things come up like the pandemic where things stop. And we go, oh, wow, here we have this massive influx of new vocabulary. It's scary. It's challenging. It's new. And all of a sudden, we're, we're all talking like epidemiologists. And our team will prioritize those words because that is the information that is of the moment and that people are looking up, and we can be helpful to our users and provide that information.
So we touched up, we updated, you know, tons of new words for COVID. We added new words for COVID. Um, and then another area that can be a little bit more controversial that is top of mind in language change in the culture is around words that deal with identity
Mignon
mm-hmm
John
So a lot of the work that our lexicographers have done in the past, you know, five years or so deal with the changing language of identity labels. Are we doing this because we have an agenda because we're taking political sides? No, we're doing it because that is where language is changing. And that is where we need to be on top of, you know, a lot of the challenges and confusions that result when language does change. So you, so in the past several ...
Mignon
So you're looking at the way people are using these words differently and then updating based on that, right?
John
Yes. The work of a dictionary is ultimately reflective, meaning we're not driving the definition, we're responding to how the word is being used in the wild. And that is something that linguists call descriptive. They're not trying to prescribe — that is, this is how you should use it — they're trying to describe, going, this is how people are using it. And to do that, our lexicographers look at data. They look at loads and loads of written and transcribed speech. They look at large amounts of corporate data. "Corpora "is a fancy Latin word for, you know, a set of texts. And they use that to go, "This is how a word is being used. This is how it is changed. And this is why it is important to capture that." This can be, you know, hot button when it comes to issues of gender identity expression. But it affects so many different areas in our lives.
It deals with race. We've capitalized being Black. It deals with, like I said, gender identity expression in terms of how we refer to the LGBTQIA plus community. But it also deals with how we refer to mental health, addiction, topics of suicide, homelessness, and so on. We're not changing these definitions because we feel like it, or because we have a political agenda, and I understand why it can feel that way because a dictionary is a place people go to for objectivity and authority. We're doing that because that's where the language change is. And it's controversial because change is hard. And we have these negotiations and renegotiations happening through language. And oftentimes it can feel like a dictionary is just going out and deciding to do this because news of the change or experience of the change is happening on social media.
And so if you see a dictionary like dictionary.com announcing a new definition or a new term on say, your Twitter feed, changes are with very few exceptions, that change had been underway 5, 10, 20 years earlier. And that's because oftentimes language change is older than you think.
Mignon
mm-hmm
John
So sometimes what seems like a new word has actually been around for a very long time take for instance, Gen Z slang. Gen Z slang might be, you know, might sound like, you know, alien language to some users. "No cap." "Hits different." "Skrrt." But here's the thing: A lot of those terms have been documented in hip hop lyrics in the 1990s. And it just takes time for the words, the vocabulary, the language of an outgroup of a subculture to trickle into the mainstream bubble up, become widespread, have a common meaning, have stayed, have staying power, and be useful for a general audience to be an a dictionary. And then you experience it though on the other end of it is all of a sudden these young kids these days are making up new words. That's not exactly how it works.
Mignon
John
"Skrrt" is a playful interjection. It's sort of like a younger generation's record scratch. It can be used as an interjection to express surprise, or excellence, or excitement. Uh, "We're having pizza tonight. Skrrt.
Mignon
That's fun. And I know I've heard "no cap," but what exactly does it mean?
John
"No cap" really took off from Black hip hop culture. It is a phrase that essentially means no lie, for real. It's a way to say genuinely, it's a way to intensify the authenticity of something. So "Grammar Girl is the best podcast around no cap."
Mignon
John
Unless people really wanna get up in arms about "no cap" literally meaning without a hat on
Mignon
Yeah. And so I noticed too, it, it sort of makes sense in a different place in the sentence too. Language is so interesting that way. And intensifier, you know, one can go here, one makes more sense there. I love it. And then the other one you mentioned was "hits different." So let's talk about that.
John
"Hits different" is a way to call out how something just sort of stands out to you. If it's a new song that you like a lot, or if it's, uh, a new food item that really, you know, really sated, you, you might say, "Oh, that really hits different." And that's a great example of how words can be funny with that "different" right. "Hits" here means, you know, to, to kind of have an effect on, and "different" is a great example of how we can use things that look like adjectives, but as an adverb, so "hits different." Right, right. So it can be ...Mignon
Like it's a flat adverb.
John
... in Gen Z slang. The flat adverb, yeah.
Mignon
Yeah. Nice, nice. And so I, I want to go back one thing, because I think people will find it interesting. I'm sure everyone imagines that when you're looking for new words, you're reading newspapers and books. But you know, what are some of the sources you look at that might surprise people?
John
I think one thing that might surprise people is the extent to which we have to dive into medical texts, you know, the DSM5 manual. We also dive into a lot of specialized style guides, you know, not just the AP style guide, but Black journalist style guides, uh, radio and TV podcast transcripts, right? So these days, with so many podcast consumers, uh, the, these podcasts, aren't just, you know, a new form of information or entertainment, but they're also a new source of data for language change for our lexicographers. We did some work on a term that is controversial for a variety of reasons, "Latinx," for instance.
Mignon
mm-hmm
John
And this is a great example of how a dictionary isn't just putting a word in the dictionary because it feels like it. It's putting the word in the dictionary because it's trying to document areas of language change. This is also an example of how we have to continue to update our dictionary because usages of new terms can often change faster than we can keep up with. Sometimes dictionaries are a lagging indicator. We're intentionally behind the times.
Mignon
It's better than it used to be now that you're online instead of in print, but still lagging.
John
Absolutely. Absolutely. And in a term like "Latinx," this might surprise people, but we, we called college campuses. "Latinx" is a term that originates very much in a lot of academic usages, and it spreads to the mainstream. And so to get evidence on the pronunciation — "Latin X"? "Latin-echeys"? — our lexicographers would call the experts. So we'd get, we'd hit the phones to get data on, you know, inside knowledge of the pronunciation of a word.
Mignon
Yeah, that's great. That was actually, that was gonna be my next question is, do you consult experts? I was pretty sure you did. And you know, what kind of experts are you consulting? Are you, you know, calling, uh, medical labs to get their input? Are you, you know, yeah ... Who are you talking to?
John
It depends on the term. If it is a science term, a medical term, we're gonna be looking at scientific and medical literature and their experts. If it is a slang term that has, you know, kind of settled on one meaning I say that because slang terms evolve fast and often fade out, and that's why a lot of slang doesn't get into the dictionary because it's always on the move. Um, we look at all sorts of data on the likes of Twitter. So social media again, is in a way we just get our news or have fun or share what we're doing. It's also a very important, uh, feed of data for lexicographers.
Mignon
Yeah, that was one thing I noticed when I was looking up "skrrt" on dictionary.com. I noticed it was in a section that was labeled "slang dictionary." And I was wondering if you could, is that a whole separate thing? Is it just part of it? Like what, what is the slang dictionary?
John
That's a great question. So we have ... we're an online dictionary. We all live our lives online. So two things need to happen as a general dictionary. We need to do a rigorous job to really hit that criteria for the new words we're adding that helps us make sure that we're defining with objectivity that makes sure that we are as accurate with new words or new definitions or new entries as we can convey over time, because we have so many thousands and millions of things to touch that we really need to make sure that we are capturing meanings that are stable and that are a bit more general. However, that's our core dictionary. However, at the same time we know that as an online dictionary, we gotta keep up with language at the pace of change. And so we have the ability to document words in the moment.
And so we have all sorts of articles and blog content and subdictionaries that move towards defining words in context, providing some information on their origin and their usage that allows us to speak to the moment and capture language as it is right now. But for words that might not have the staying power, you know, words that kind of fizzled out after 5 or 10 years that were more of a flash in the plan. So we think that we do a good job of doing both. We can really take care for our core dictionary, you know, the one that you might take to, you know, a desert island. But also we also have the ability to document language as it's changing right now. So I think that ...
Mignon
It almost sounds like a, a farm league. If you think about baseball, you know, is the slang dictionary kinda like the farm league, and some words will make it up into the big time and others will just sort of fade away.
John
Yeah. I, I often use, I, I like that metaphor much better than mine, which is as a way station. Uh, it's our ability to speak to the moment without necessarily prioritizing the wrong work for our core dictionary.
Mignon
That's so interesting. You know, I've still got in the back of my mind: you said that you go to podcasts, and suddenly I realize I could make "fetch" happen.
John
Keep trying.
Mignon
I bet you've heard that joke before. Um, let's talk, you had some other really interesting words that you highlighted for me that I'd like to go through. I thought "bottle episode" was a neat one that I hadn't heard before, but I instantly found useful.
John
So, you know, before, when I had to look up just for the sake of accuracy,
This became a trope in television, and the trope deserved a name. And the name is bottle episode. This is just an episode of television or other such series where all the action takes place in one place as if a ship in the bottle or as if it's bottled up. And so bottle episodes occur often because of budget reasons for studios, maybe either mid-season and the need some more money, and they don't want to do too much on location, or maybe they do it creatively to develop characters in a small space. But the matter is new things happen in the world. New technologies occur, new cultural phenomenon occur, and they deserve names. They get names, and then these names spread, and then they end up in the dictionary. "Bottle episode" is one of them.
Mignon
And it's so useful.
Another one that I instantly thought would be useful is "rage farming." So I, you know, I, um, when I was a professor, I taught graduate level social media, and I taught people about rage farming, but I didn't know it had a name, and maybe it didn't back then maybe, maybe people didn't know, but, um, "rage farming." One, you should avoid it. And two let's tell people what it is.
John
Sure. Rage farming is again, an example of, uh, a term that spread for a phenomenon that we all know too well, which is the ways in which media, especially social media can be used to rile us up, and rage farming put simply is a slang term for a political tactic of intentionally provoking opponents, political opponents in order to create or increase exposure for their cause. And that is often associated with trolling, uh, or other such behaviors that take advantage of our emotions online to spread some, not so good emotions to activate people's political feelings.
Mignon
Yeah. So when you see something that makes you feel outraged, your initial reaction is to respond to dunk on them, to retweet it with a comment saying how horrible it is. You're being rage farmed. Or your rage is. ...
John
You're being rage farmed.
Mignon
...being farmed. And the only thing you're accomplishing, well, pretty much the only thing you're accomplishing is giving them more exposure. So resist that urge. Please, people, resist that urge.
John
Studies after studies show that, you know, negative emotions are much easier to activate online and that repeating negative emotions or untruths or, or false information really sinks deeply in the mind. So let's call back "hope punk." We have a genre of speculative fiction. That's about optimism. Let's take rage farming, you get some hope farming out of it because I think we could all use it these days.
Mignon
Absolutely. And, um, maybe a more fun word related to online that, that you highlighted for me was "bokeh." And this is when you blur ... I think it's when you blur the background and your images, which we're all doing on Zoom now these days, but the spelling was really interesting to me. So I was curious about the, or well, for, I mean, probably not everyone knows the word so you can explain more what it is and then maybe talk about the origin because the spelling is really interesting.
John
Sure. This, this is a word that really grabs my attention to because of the spelling, but also because it is this beautiful little package of two syllables that names, this concept that we're also familiar with in our lives in 2022. Bokeh is the blurry quality in the out of focus parts of a photograph. And it's regarded as an aesthetic effect rendered by a particular lens or it's digital simulation. It could also be practical to in the case of blurring out the background in Zoom, B O K E H is how it's spelled. "Boke-uh" is how it's pronounced. We have evidence for it, uh, at least, you know, the mid 1990s to early 2000s. And it's spelled interestingly because it ultimately comes from Japanese "boke," and that is a word that means fuzziness or blurring. That word itself is shortened from pinboke. A state of being out of focus. Bokeh is a great example of how we get new words. Uh, one way we get new words is through loan words, English especially loves to take, uh, sometimes in good ways, historically sometimes in some very problematic ways, from other languages and make it our own. And now we all have a word to impress our friends, our parents, or teachers for when our zooms blurred out: "bokeh."
Mignon
John
I love this word. It's a fun word. And it's also a very useful word, and it just kind of goes to show how many gaps we still have in our language. You know, I mentioned before that the vocabulary of English has vast, if not infinite, uh, and yet we still find the need for new words or we still find where we don't have words for things. What's the thing here. I've got a niece, I've got a nephew. How do I refer to them collectively? How do I refer to them if I don't need to refer to their gender identity or expression? So nibling is a child of one's sibling, such as a niece or a nephew. It's especially used in the plural. And as a gender neutral term. Here's an example. "I generally get along with kids quite well. My niblings asked me to play whenever I visit my sibling," or "My nibling started their new job last week."
So I'm not specifying that they're a niece or a nephew in the second example. And the other one I can refer to nieces and nephews collectively using the word "nibling." This word has actually been around, uh, a lot longer than we may realize. It was new to me a few years ago. It might be new to many of you right now, but guess what? It goes back to the 1950s. And it's also an example of a word that has been coined. Another way we get new words. That's when one person or a group of people make up a word. This one was by a linguist, Samuel E. Martin. And he took the N and "nephew" and "niece" and blended it with "sibling" to get "nibling." Guess what, what about aunts and uncles? How do we refer to them collectively or in a gender neutral way? "Pibling" — P I B L I N G — is a way to do that. And the P is from the P and "parent."
Mignon
Amazing. And it is astonishing to think that we, we don't regularly, you know, that we don't have words as common as siblings for our niblings or our pilings. Is that right?
John
For our nibling or our pilings. That's an interesting way to look at it. Why don't we have this word? Is it because we have historically not needed as many? We haven't needed the word? Uh, has it been because another word for it, like say "cousin," which historically could refer to any fairly close family member kind of fell off in that sense, huh? Language changes in mysterious ways and it's gaps, uh, sometimes can be surprising and there may not be a good reason for it. It just is.
Mignon
Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting too. I didn't know that about "cousin" — that it could be used more broadly. Of course, that makes sense. That's another way language changes is meanings, broaden or narrow. Um, fascinating. So I think the last,
John
If I, if I …
Mignon
Go ahead.
John
If I recall correctly, I think the word "sibling" itself was, uh, dates back to and was used in Old English. And then it fell away for a very long time until an anthropologist or other such social scientist actually brought it back, uh, and revived it in our vocabulary through their researcher studies. Oh,
Mignon
I love this so much. It's so interesting. I think the last one that we'll talk about, I'm not sure I'm gonna pronounce it right, but I think it's ski-o-morph or skew-o-morph. Let's, let's talk about what that is.
John
Skeuomorph. That is a difficult to spell and pronounce word. That names a concept that we all know so well: This is a design or an element of a design, especially an icon on a digital device, like your cell phone that mimics a real world, a three dimensional and analog look or sound of a physical object. So if you have, um, an Apple watch, and you have turned your setting to make it look like a physical wristwatch with hands and minute hands that are just imitating an original watch, that is an example of a skeuomorph. We have lots of skeuomorphs on the icons of our cell phones: the clock icon, the calculator icon, other things like that. Even the file folder symbol online, you could call a skeuomorph because it's using a, the kind of the original three-dimensional analog object to represent it on the digital form. You know, the floppy disk for save. That's a skeuomorph.
Mignon
Nice. We have learned so many useful words today that, that I think, you know, they, they seem maybe new or unusual, but they describe things that we encounter every day or, you know, at least every month. Um, I love this. Thank you so much, John.
John
Thank you so much.
Mignon
That was fascinating. Our conversation again today was with John Kelly, the senior director of editorial Dictionary.com, best place to find him, best place to find new words, words that have been updated. Thesaurus.com, if you have thesaurus needs. That's all for today. Thanks for listening.