1123. This week, we talk with author and self-described “word freak” Stefan Fatsis about his book "Unabridged." He shares his experience embedding at Merriam-Webster to become a lexicographer, sharing the contrast between the company's 1940s headquarters and the modern digital business. We look at the tension between updating old words (like the surprising original meaning of "pompom girl") and the need to add new, "sexy" words to generate web traffic.
1123. This week, we talk with author and self-described “word freak” Stefan Fatsis about his book "Unabridged." He shares his experience embedding at Merriam-Webster to become a lexicographer, sharing the contrast between the company's 1940s headquarters and the modern digital business. We look at the tension between updating old words (like the surprising original meaning of "pompom girl") and the need to add new, "sexy" words to generate web traffic.
Find Stefan Fatsis on his website, Bluesky or Facebook.
Get the book, Unabridged.
🔗 Share your familect recording in a WhatsApp chat.
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook.Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm talking with Stefan Fatas, journalist and author about his new book, “Unabridged, the Thrill and Threat to the Modern Dictionary.” Stefan takes us inside Merriam Webster, how words get chosen, defined, debated and even retired. He embedded with lexicographers sifted through archival citation slips and voted on Word of the Year. It's a behind the scenes trip. We're gonna talk about precision language change and how the digital world is changing everything. If getting a peek inside a dictionary office sounds like a thrill, or if you've dreamed of getting a job with words, I think you'll find our talk really interesting, but also maybe a little bit unsettling.
Stephan Fatsis, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Stefan Fatsis: Oh my God. So great to be here, Mignon. Thank you so much.
Mignon Fogarty: I know it's great to see you. I think the last time I saw you was at the Reno Scrabble Competition.
Stefan Fatsis: It was a national championship in Reno, and we had a great chat. I can't remember how I did at that tournament. Probably not that well, given my track record at national championships, but it was always fun to compete and I still compete. So, I just got back from this year's nationals, which were outside of Baltimore.
Mignon Fogarty: Great. And I loved your book "Word Freak," all about Scrabble. Today we're going to talk about your new book all about dictionaries, "Unabridged," and you embedded at Merriam-Webster, which just sounds like a dream to me. Tell me how that came about.
Stefan Fatsis: Well, this is like more than a decade ago now this project started; Merriam had just begun revising the "Unabridged Webster's Third." It was the first time since publication in 1961 that the company had undertaken a full-on revision of that landmark and controversial book, and I wanted to write about it.
So, I wrote a long magazine piece for "Slate."About 10,000 words. And then after that was published, I approached John Morse, who was the publisher of Merriam-Webster at the time. I went back to John and I said, "You know, I kind of would like to do a book, but if I did a book, I would want to embed and become a lexicographer and try to write definitions." And John got approval for me to do that. So, in late 2015, early 2016, I started going up to Merriam-Webster pretty regularly and kind of de facto joined the staff. It was amazing.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. So actually, I'm so curious. What was the first definition that you tried to write?
Stefan Fatsis: Oh my God. The very first definition that I tried to write, I did a bunch of sorts of sample trying to just craft a draft definition for a bunch of sports words like "deplete" and "slew foot," which was a hockey term, but the first word that I really sort of sunk my teeth into and spent weeks and weeks researching and writing was, oddly enough, the word "pompom girl."
And that happened because I was sitting one day with the director of defining at Merriam, Steve Perot, and he said, "You got to see this.” In the "Unabridge" he had discovered that "pompom girl" was defined this way: "pickup prostitute." There was no mention of cheerleaders or fluffy balls that you wave over your head.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh my.
Stefan Fatsis: It was a relic. It was a World War II word used by soldiers. And there was evidence for this definition, but not much. And it was sort of a classic example of how old-school lexicography had holes. So, whoever sort of took citations for the word "pompom girl" at Merriam-Webster in the 1940s and 1950s didn't find the modern usage, which existed already, of "pompom girls" as cheerleaders. And it got into the dictionary with just this one sense. So, I did this; I spent weeks pouring through Merriam's old archives, which were the consolidated files, the 16 million slips of paper, and then doing modern digital database research.
And I wrote this incredibly long definition of "pompom girl," and it never made the dictionary. So, if you go to the “Unabridged,” it actually still says "pickup prostitute." It does, yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh my gosh. Why didn't it make it in?
Stefan Fatsis: Good question. It didn’t get in partly because the "Unabridged" revision was—and I'm checking right now to make sure that I am not misspeaking and that they haven't updated it—yeah, I'm afraid that is the only definition in Merriam-Webster. It remains "pickup prostitute." It didn't get in partly because not long after I arrived at Merriam, the project was put on hold. Merriam's business fortunes had sort of declined. There was a drop in clicks, a drop in revenue. So, the company decided to pivot from this sort of grand ambitious project to overhaul the “Unabridged” and go back to the bread-and-butter website, you know, the which is based on the collegiate dictionary, the free Merriam website, merriam-webster.com. And with that, a lot of the work that I had done kind of went sort of like words like that did not become priority definitions. It wouldn't have been a priority definition anyway; obviously, it was sort of something that's probably not looked up very often.
So, I also had to pivot when they pivoted. At first, my reaction was, "Oh no, like, now what am I going to do? This project on which I based this book proposal has bitten the dust. What do I do?" And I just decided to stay and keep defining and keep hanging out at Merriam. And hopefully, I would find a narrative through line that wasn't dependent on the revision of the "Unabridged." And that's what I did.
Mignon Fogarty: I would be like that. Once they let me in the door, I wouldn't leave.
Stefan Fatsis: I kind of didn't want to. I mean, I ended up hanging out at Merriam for like close to three years. I sort of just commuted; you know, every month or two I would go up to Springfield, Massachusetts, to Merriam's 1940s brick headquarters that were sort of unchanged from, you know, World War II, and go up for four or five days and do more work and do more research and go down into the basement where all of Merriam's archives are located and sort of open up these creaky metal filing cabinets and go back into this dungeon, this fenced-off metal fence gate.
Where Merriam kept like all of, or most of the books that were used to create definitions for Webster's Third were still in the basement and so much more. It was like this wonderful sort of scavenger hunt. Every time you go into the basement and pull up a drawer, you are uncovering some wonderful hidden bauble of the history of language in America. And it was just so much fun. I could have kept doing it forever.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. What does it smell like? Does it smell like a library?
Stefan Fatsis: Oh, it smells—well, the basement smells like a musty old basement in your house, like your unrenovated basement where it’s just used as storage. So, I would go down there for a couple of hours, and I would literally come up and be like a little bit wheezy because it is so musty and dank down there. But I love the smell of this stuff too. I'm like the kind of person that opens a book and smells it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Stefan Fatsis: And like the consolidated files, which are in these sort of shoulder-high filing cabinets all around the main editorial floor at Merriam on the second floor of the building, those also have their sort of multi-sensory thrill. I love, and I write about this in "Unabridged," I love the paper. The paper was like one of my favorite things about this project, like connecting with the history and seeing sort of the way words and language were recorded on these three-by-five slips of paper through the decades from the beginning of the 20th century until they stopped using paper near the end of the 20th century.
And you see sort of the way typewriters evolved, and you see handwriting from the early years and how that changed. And then into the computer age where printouts were pasted onto these little slips. And you know, you get those early computer printouts that didn't have any tails on the Js or Gs or Ys and Qs. And I just love that sort of sensory aspect of it. And it really did make me feel nostalgic for what is lost. And it does raise questions for how we sort of caretake language and what we do with the history, so much of which is recorded on paper.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. I mean, in some ways digital files feel more fragile than the paper files.
Stefan Fatsis: I think that's a fair assessment. I mean, the Merriam files are, I mean, they are works of art in my humble opinion, and Merriam treats them that way still. One of the funny little quirks of the place is that Merriam doesn't have sprinklers in the ceiling on the editorial floor, and the reason is that the risk of water getting into the filing cabinets was worse than fire getting into the filing cabinets. So, the notion of preserving and protecting this stuff is still pretty important to the people who care about it. That doesn't mean that it's going to be protected and preserved. And the further we get along in the digital age, the greater the risk every day is that someone will just say, "We can't possibly keep all this stuff anymore. Let's send some of it to the Smithsonian. Or let's see if we can raise the money to start a Museum of Lexicography.” Good luck with that. But I do worry that some of this will be lost the way that newspaper bound volumes were lost and library card catalogs were lost.This stuff, because there isn't as much of it as there were newspapers and library card catalogs. So, to me, you have to find a way to save this stuff because it is such a critical piece of the history of American language.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, absolutely. When you are thinking back to the pom-pom girl, you know, being a word in there that hasn't been updated, one of the things you talked about in “Unabridged” is sort of the tension between updating the older words and adding new words because the new words are so much more exciting to people. Talk about that a little bit.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah, I mean, the new words are sort of the foundation for clicks, for publicity. I mean, the few remaining dictionary publishers in North America, and it's really just Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com, now to a much lesser extent since the company was bought out in 2024, and the experienced lexicographers who had been hired to revise and update and sort of overhaul the website were laid off. So, the new words are kind of the lifeblood of generating publicity. You know, Merriam does two or three or four, it’d down to probably two now, updates a year, and those get a lot of hits. Oxford does the same. Cambridge came out with its most recent update recently. Dictionary.com still does them, but those rely on new words because new words are sexy and they're fun, and they help us understand concurrent culture and the way that the internet is reshaping language and the way that kids are reshaping language. But the bulk of clicks for Merriam-Webster and other websites aren't new words. Nobody's really going to go to Merriam to click on "riz," but they are going to go to click on "pragmatic." They're going to go to click on words that are difficult to understand, that remain confusing and complicated to readers, and also are in the news and require a kind of refinement and nuance. So, people look up "fascism" a lot and have been looking up "fascism" a lot for the last decade, for obvious reasons.
"Insurrection" was a top hit for a very long time on Merriam's website. And of course, COVID words dominated lookups. So, there is this tension between the publicity that we can generate by letting people know about all the fun new words that we have added to the dictionary. But at the same time, the real traction for a dictionary like Merriam, the bulk of the lookups and what keeps numbers up and keeps advertisers interested is the bread-and-butter stuff that we need to look up because we need to understand what words mean.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and I mean, the internet has just changed everything for dictionaries. I was so stunned to learn that Merriam-Webster missed getting the domain name dictionary.com by just six weeks.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah, it's a great little story, and oddly enough, John Morris, who was the publisher at the time, never was really upset that it happened. It seemed like a disaster in 1995 because the way people looked up words was to type in "dictionary" and a word, or type in a website specifically. And having dictionary.com initially seemed like a disaster. Merriam at the time was having its own internal debate about how to handle the internet. It was whether to just put the entire collegiate dictionary online and make it free and hope that people went there, or to license the file for the collegiate dictionary to other websites that would then instantly generate revenue for Merriam. Merriam chose to put it up for free, and it was risky because the crazy thing about dictionaries is that it was a product that nobody really knew how much people used. Everybody bought a dictionary because you want your kid to have a dictionary, or you're going to college, or you're working at a desk job and you need to look up words. But no one could be really sure how often people actually cracked the binding and looked up words. And what Merriam's initial foray online showed was that people used the dictionary, and they used it a lot, and they cared about it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So, what are some of the other words that you defined that got into the dictionary that you are most proud of?
Stefan Fatsis: Great question. I got in the end, spoiler alert, I defined about 90 words, drafted about 90 definitions for Merriam over the few years that I was involved. And more than a dozen have gotten into the dictionary. I think the sexiest ones were topical in the late 2010s, which is when I did the bulk of this defining—”microaggression,” “safe space,” “alt-right.”
But I think my favorite, it's like picking your favorite child, right? I think my favorite word was nothing new. It was actually a new sense of a word. I added a 31st sense of the transitive verb "run."
Mignon Fogarty: That's one of the longer entries in a dictionary, isn't it?
Stefan Fatsis: It is actually, yeah. “Set” in Merriam is the longest entry. There are 36 senses, and "run" is right behind it at now 31.
Mignon Fogarty: And what is the new addition?
Stefan Fatsis: Yes, my addition was a baseball sense of "run," meaning, and I'll just read the definition that I wrote: to eject a player, coach, or manager from a game.
Mignon Fogarty: Use that in a sentence, please.
Stefan Fatsis: The umpire was so pissed off at Earl Weaver, the Baltimore Orioles manager from the 1970s, that he ran him in the third inning when he was arguing balls and strikes. And I used Earl Weaver there because that was one of the citations that I used, the example citations that I found in my draft definition.
Mignon Fogarty: Interesting.
Stefan Fatsis: The "run" in the OED is even longer. There are 82 senses, 230 subsenses, and they used 130 phrases to illustrate the use of the word. But even the OED missed my baseball sense. So, I think I'm proudest of that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, there's probably not as much overlap between sports people and word people as there could be. I'm not saying word people don't like sports, but...
Stefan Fatsis: I think sports people like words, you know? Sports has a lot of its own lingo.
Mignon Fogarty: It does. You were the host of the Hang-Up and Listen podcast for Slate for 15 years, and I think you worked on some other words too for the...
Stefan Fatsis: Oh, I did. Yeah, I did. Let's see, some of the sports words I got into, among my definitions, included "dogpile," when players jump on one another after celebrating a victory. "Headbutt" Classic wasn't in the dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: That wasn’t in there?
Stefan Fatsis: No. Crazy, right? And "posterize." I added a second sense of "posterize." The first sense of "posterize" is literally to put on a poster. The sports sense is to dunk over someone fiercely in a basketball game.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Stefan Fatsis: Like, I have posterized you. I’ve dunked over you, Mignon, and slammed it through the hoop. Now posturized you because the picture of me abusing you is good enough to put on a poster.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, fascinating. That’s cool.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: So, what did you learn about defining during this whole process?
Stefan Fatsis: That it's way harder than it looks, as are most things that you think look simple. You know, it's like, "Hey, I'm an author, right? I've written books. I've been a journalist for my whole career. How hard can writing a few lines actually be?" And it turns out that, you know, it is. So, it’s so complex trying to take this sea of information, of usage of a particular word, and refine it and distill it to a few words that absolutely capture the essence of its meaning, often in one sense, sometimes in more than one sense, is really hard.
And I learned from some amazing definers at Merriam-Webster, Emily Brewster and Steve Perot, and others who were incredibly gracious with their time and let me try to do this in teaching me how to do this. But the thing that impressed me the most about professional lexicographers is the speed with which they can do this. You know, I was sort of spending days and weeks in LexisNexis and on Twitter and online elsewhere and in other sources, and reading through all of the print citations, trying to come up with the perfect group of sites, as they're known at Merriam, that reflect usage, and then drafting over and over and over again what I thought would be like the perfect definition. And meanwhile, like Emily was doing like, you know, three a day, and it's taken me like three weeks to do one, and then Steve Perot would edit my work, and it would be like, "Oh yeah, why didn't I think of that?" It's like, "Wow, maybe I'm not such a good writer after all."
Mignon Fogarty: It's a very precise kind of writing.
Stefan Fatsis: It is a precise kind of writing, and it's also a very precise kind of researching too. You really have to know how to target and where to look, and to really be able to throw out the chaff quickly and indiscriminately, and really be able to sort of zoom in on what matters and where the essence of a word's meaning lies.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, the first part of the book is a little bit about the history of dictionaries in unabridged here. And, you know, I was, Gove, Philip Gove sort of changed the way that dictionaries are written.
Stefan Fatsis: He did. So, Gove was the editor of Webster's third. He was hired in the early 1950s. He didn't have a lexicographic background, and he was more a student of modern linguistic theory. He wasn't a professional. But he had always wanted to work at the dictionary. And he just cold wrote a letter to Merriam-Webster, saying that he would like to apply for a job there. He said that he had about as much knowledge as an outsider could acquire about dictionaries. And for several years, I have wished that I were connected with the printing of Webster's Dictionary, and they hired him as a low-level editor.
The main way that Gove and Merriam helped change the idea of modern lexicography was that it was this pivot away from the idea of the dictionary as this sort of magisterial document that belonged on a pedestal, crafted by learned men, and then handed down like the tablets to the public. Gove and the people that he surrounded himself with viewed lexicography and the dictionary much more democratically. It wasn't supposed to be this unassailable document that defined how elites thought about language. It was meant to be something that reflected the way normal people used language. And that was a real shift for Merriam-Webster. Merriam had always had an academic or some other elite as the titular leader of the dictionary, the titular editor of the dictionary.
The editor in chief of the 1909 dictionary was a philosopher who headed the U.S. Office of Education. Noah Porter, who edited the 1890 dictionary, was the president of Yale when he did that. The chief editor of the 1934 Merriam-Webster was William Allen Nielsen, who was president of Smith College, and he would kind of show up every couple of weeks and go to the editorial meeting. But he wasn't involved in the nitty-gritty of lexicography. Gove helped shift the dictionary away from that. And both in terms of the management of the dictionary, his bosses initially hired a Brown professor who they thought would be the next sort of academic figurehead. And that guy said, after a few months at Merriam, "You don't need me. You've got the smartest people when it comes to lexicography here in the building. You don't need some tweed blazer figurehead anymore." And they promoted Philip Gove, and Gove's approach to lexicography, as I said, was much more democratic. So, his idea was to make the dictionary reflect the way that people use language, to have it be descriptive as opposed to the old notion of dictionaries as prescriptive. Sort of an instruction manual for readers and speakers of American English.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and space was a real issue back then in print. I mean, I love this part where you said he conducted a violent war on commas.
Stefan Fatsis: I was so happy when I found that quote in a letter from Gove to one of his former editors. Yeah, Gove, the Webster's second was like, I call it the double wide of dictionaries. It was as big as a dictionary could be before a book bindery just couldn't handle any more pages. And the reason it was so big was in part because it was encyclopedic, the dictionary in that era, as part of its mission to be everything to everyone intellectually, it had hundreds and hundreds of pages of lists and charts, you know, characters from novels, biblical figures, place names, and famous people. It was just like section after section of this encyclopedic material. Gove wanted to focus more on the words. So, he asked, you know, the vast majority of this encyclopedic stuff, which gave him more space for new words, but he also cut out a lot of literally like a couple hundred thousand words from the dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Stefan Fatsis: In order to save space so the book could be slightly narrower, but also so that it could be more contemporary and comprehensive.
So, Gove, that was sort of the overarching structural way to approach the girth of the dictionary. The other thing that Gove did, the main thing that Gove did, and his probably his biggest lasting legacy to American lexicography was that he came up with the idea of the single statement replaceable definition. You can take the definition and substitute it for the word in a sentence. So, no more periods. He tried to get rid of as many clauses as possible in definitions. He didn't always succeed. Some definitions in the third are hilariously long. But, in doing so, Gove said that, yeah, he wanted to get rid of as many commas as possible, and he claimed later, and this seems to stretch the boundaries of imagination or reality, but he claimed to have saved 80 pages by ridding commas from the dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: That's amazing. Yeah, how many pages were there to start with?
Stefan Fatsis: That book was like 2,600 pages. Webster's third wound up being
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Stefan Fatsis: 13 and something pounds. Yeah, it's amazing.
Mignon Fogarty: So maybe 80 pages of commas.
Stefan Fatsis: It's possible, right? It seems plausible. I'm going to give Philip Gove the benefit of the doubt here.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, well, you know, reading the book, it did make me a little sad at the end, you know, because it does document you. You talk about the thrill and threat to the modern dictionary. That's the subtitle, and there is a huge threat to the modern dictionary.
Stefan Fatsis: Yeah, there is sadly. I mean, and it's, there are two factors. One is Google, and the other is AI. Google has been the biggest threat for a long time. You know, going back to the 1990s and the 2000s. I mean, this has been a constant game of trying to figure out Google's algorithm to keep your dictionary, the link for a definition is near the top so that people will click on it as opposed to clicking on something else. And when Google started adding its knowledge boxes or, you know, knowledge panels, that was a problem for dictionaries. That was what, when I was there, triggered the first sort of panic at Merriam-Webster that led to layoffs, which were unprecedented for the company. And then more recently, you know, AI on Google has again raised this giant risk of never getting to the link for the definition and fewer people clicking on the actual definition.
So, what Merriam has done and done very well to sort of save the business in recent years is done what a lot of modern media companies have done, which is try to find ways around this. So, if I type in "pragmatic" into my search bar and I get, you know, the AI information and my Merriam definition is below the scroll, is way down. How is Merriam going to get eyeballs and keep them on the website? Well, they've done what a lot of people have done. They have added games and they've added content that will get you there and keep you on the website.
And if that's what it takes, fantastic. Merriam has done a much better job in recent years of sort of beefing up its technology, getting smarter about how to deal with Google's algorithms, and then done these other sort of ancillary expansions that will attract viewers' eyeballs to the website. You know, it's not what people typically sign up for. One lexicographer, I remember at Merriam saying, "Look, I didn't sign up for this to become famous." You know, doing, you know, videos and other written content that, you know, the goal for lexicographers is to do lexicography. But the only way to do lexicography now is for a company like Merriam to find ways to get people to the site and keep them there. And that's not just going to be through looking up words, even though looking up words remains incredibly robust because our news cycle is so fraught and there are so many words that bubble up just in our sort of daily doom scrolling and other realities of modern life that people still want to look up words. There is always going to be this hunger to understand the world better and this understanding that the best place to be able to do that is a respectable household name, this 200-year-old-plus brand like Merriam-Webster.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. Yeah. You and I both know so many lexicographers who've lost their jobs. Is Merriam-Webster, am I remembering right that they're the last American dictionary with full-time lexicographers?
Stefan Fatsis: I mean, dictionary.com does have a few, but that's about it. Yeah, I mean, it has been a slow bleed on all of the names that we grew up with, American Heritage and Webster's New World and other dictionaries, over the last, I mean, it's, at this point it's more like 30 years that this has been declining. It's been since the 1990s. Random House got out of the dictionary business in the 1990s, early 2000s. So, it's been this slow bleed.
So, I found this piece that Erin McKean wrote the lexicographer who runs Wordnik. Erin wrote this on language column 20 years ago in the New York Times Magazine, which said that there are more than 200 full-time working lexicographers in America. And now it's probably 30, maybe certainly less than 50, might be less than 30. You know, I mean, it's mostly people at Merriam. So, Oxford, of course, still has a full, robust staff, and that's partly because Oxford has this sinecure from the university. Oxford boasts that it sort of never made money through the dictionary, but it is a giant sprawling company that is able to subsidize the dictionary as a kind of loss leader.
So, Oxford remains committed, and Europe has a different sort of approach to dictionaries than we do in the United States, where it's always been sort of a cutthroat competitive business. And that over the last 30 years has started to rear its ugly head with a sort of inevitable decline in the success and stability of dictionary publishers.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, dictionary.com is also leaning into games and things like that. So, yeah, I think that we should all do our part and play word games more on the dictionary sites. That's a good way to do good in the world.
Stefan Fatsis: And look up more and more words.
Mignon Fogarty: Look up more and more words. The book is "Unabridged" by Stefan Fatsis. Stefan, I loved this. I don't know if people can see, but I dog-eared a whole...
Stefan Fatsis: Oh, awesome.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Like there's, and I under, I'm a book defacer, so I've like written in it. It's like there was so much to love in here. I think if you love dictionaries and words, you will love this book, and it makes a great gift for a word lover.
Stefan Fatsis: I have the final copy. Woo hoo. I just got it. We're recording this a few weeks before the release date of the book, but I'm very excited.
Mignon Fogarty: But this will come out after the book is released.
Stefan Fatsis: Will be okay. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Is that a hardback?
Stefan Fatsis: That is a hardback. This is the real deal.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. Very light.
Stefan Fatsis: Very psyched. Yes.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So where can people find you online?
Stefan Fatsis: They can find me at my website, byStefanfatsis.com, and I'm on Blue Sky and Facebook, and I am happy to answer questions about the book and excited to get it in people's hands. And I will be traveling around. You can check out my event stops on my website, and I look forward to meeting people out there and talking about words and talking about this book.