Mark Oppenheimer: You’re looking for a word that you can research to get into the dictionary because the way it works is people sort of take various lists of words and you try to nudge one in by researching it. And you had one, and I want you to pronounce it, the one for having a remarkably slappable face. What is that word again?

Stefan Fatsis: It’s backpfeifengesicht.

MO: And is it a noun? Is it an adjective? Is Ted Cruz backpfeifengesicht or is he a backpfeifengesicht?

SF: It is a noun. It is a noun. I defined it and this did not make it into Merriam’s dictionary.

MO: Hey friends, it’s Arc: The Podcast. Arc with Mark. I’m Mark Oppenheimer and Arc is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. We’re also the audio companion, the close audio buddy, the audio sidekick, the audio sidecar, the audio faithful friend, like a dog, of our web magazine, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is online at arcmag.org.

This week, my guest is Stefan Fatsis. He is the author of a new book about the dictionary. He embedded with Merriam-Webster’s Dictionaries for a long time. I, of course, am a particular fan of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionaries because, as some of my longtime listeners through multiple podcasts know, I am from Springfield, Massachusetts, which is, in fact, the home of Webster’s Dictionaries.

People will often say to me like, “What was it like growing up in this community of extraordinary lexicographers? Were you going to school with the children of lexicographers? Was there a lot of word stuff in the air?” And the answer, alas, is no. I don’t think a soul that I went to public school with or private school with knew that we were in the home of Webster’s Dictionaries. In fact, I’m not even sure where in the city the building is. I think it’s somewhere in the north end, just north of downtown, but I’m not sure.

What we knew growing up in Springfield was that we were the home of basketball, the birthplace of basketball. And lots of people have been to the Basketball Hall of Fame and it’s visible from I-91 passing through downtown. If you’re heading south, then the MGM Grand Casino will now be on your left. The casino, they plopped right on the village green and the Hall of Fame will be on your right. So we knew we were the birthplace of basketball. I was very excited to be from the home of Friendly’s restaurants, which are still limping along. So the home of the Fribble Milkshake, the home of the Fishamajig, and so forth and so on. And we were the home of Dr. Seuss, but almost nobody, I don’t think a soul knew that we were the home of Webster’s Dictionaries.

But Stefan Fatsis knew, and it’s the basis of his new book, “Unabridged,” about the history of the dictionary and how you get a word into Webster’s Dictionaries. How do they choose their new words? Very cool book. Stefan, of course, was a longtime NPR correspondent focusing on sports. And he was also the author of “Word Freak” about the crazy Scrabble subculture.

Before I get to my interview with Stefan, I want to do a little bit of listener mail. I got a note yesterday from my listener, Andy, who is a Quaker, who wanted to offer a corrective to the discussion I was having with Kelsey Osgood, in which she opined, or I opined and she agreed, that whereas evangelical or Mormon or Orthodox Jewish communities are very aggressive about keeping their people in the fold, like if you convert but then drift away, they’ll call you. They’ll say, “Why haven’t you been in church lately?” That Quakers are a little bit less likely to do that because they have a stronger sense that it’s not their business to tell you that you have to keep coming, that they have a more libertarian view of membership. And if you want to drift away, well, that’s your business to drift away. And Andy said, “Au contraire.” In fact, because Quaker communities can be so small and they need every member, that if you’re very involved and then you start drifting away, you do get a phone call, perhaps as much as you might from a megachurch.

And I take the point and I do wonder if there’s a little bit of a difference between say a Quaker community that is really tiny and small and needs every member and where everyone knows everyone and maybe the one that was being written about in Kelsey Osgood’s book, which was set in Brooklyn. They probably have a few hundred members. There are probably lots of hipster seekers passing through and they probably don’t keep as close track of every last person who walks through the doors. So I don’t know, but I did want to offer that corrective. And while I’m at it, let me give a shout out to some of my regular listeners. I’ve heard from a whole bunch of them lately. I’ve heard from Yair, I’ve heard from Andy, I’ve heard from Liam.

The podcast audience has doubled in the last six months or so, and we’re really, really proud. So please keep spreading the word. And a good episode you could send them would be this one. Here’s my discussion with Stefan Fatsis.

Stefan Fatsis, thanks for joining me.

SF: Hey, Mark. Great to be here.

MO: Before we get going, I have to say, as I’ve said to you before, that your showing up at my book reading at the Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, Maryland twenty-five years ago was still the nicest thing anyone I didn’t know has ever done for me. Got to get that on the record.

SF: Wow, that is a low bar, my friend.

MO: Well, okay, maybe I’m sure someone has lent me a dollar and a pinch when my car was broken down before the age of cell phone, but it was an awfully sweet thing that you did. It was for my book, “Wisenheimer,” about high school debate.

SF: Which I blurbed.

MO: Which you blurbed, which was also nice thing you did.

SF: It was just a sort of return the favor and actually purchase a copy of the book as opposed to getting the free one that you sent to me.

MO: But I have to say, I have tried to pay that forward so many times in terms of showing up at readings, in terms of blurbing, in terms … It was not just a mitzvah, but it was like a lesson taught and you don’t forget those things.

SF: And I feel the same way. I think you should pay it forward. We’re in a business where we have to help each other.

MO: One person who just offered to … I have this forthcoming biography of Judy Bloom and one person who nicely said that she would blurb it, said to my agent, “I’ll do it because I don’t know him. I have a policy of not blurbing books by people I know.”

SF: Wow.

MO: And on the one hand, I thought that was actually quite lovely, that she was going to put her efforts toward people whom she didn’t know. And on the other hand, I thought, so that means you say no to all your good friends who need your blurb because I thought that’s kind of what friends are for also.

SF: Well, I really didn’t know you when I blurbed “Wisenheimer.” I guess I was operating in that spirit, but I will blurb my friend’s books because I want them to blurb mine.

MO: Right, exactly.

SF: I mean, on this new book, “Abridged,” I know everyone on the back cover except for one. I’m not friends with Susan Orlean, but getting Susan Orlean’s blurb was the kind of mitzvah that an author does for another author. I did not know her at all, but it was really a now I can die in peace moment because Susan Orlean. Oh my God, like who do we admire more than Susan Orlean as non-fiction writers?

MO: So you know Ken Jennings?

SF: I blurbed Ken’s book, his first book after he was Jeopardy champion, “Brainiac.” He reached out to me because “Word Freak” had been published not too long before that. So in the spirit of fellow geek game lover, people, experts, he asked me kindly to blurb them. So we’ve sort of stayed in touch.

MO: So “Unabridged” is, if I had to generalize about it, I would say it’s about the time you spent embedded at Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, trying to get a word in the dictionary and to learn the history of it and you have detours into the OED and Funk & Wagnalls and the history of lexicography, the difference between dictionaries, collections, corpora, corpuses, and lexicons, et cetera. It’s about dictionary making and the history of it overall. But I would say the narrative engine is you actually hung out in my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. So I don’t think you knew that I’m from Springfield. And I mean, Springfield, Springfield, not tony suburbs like Long Meadow, not Wilbraham, certainly not Amherst and North Hampton, snooty ass places that they are from Springfield. And it’s so funny to me, growing up, I had no idea that Webster’s Dictionaries was in Springfield.

SF: Seriously?

MO: The public schools do not take field trips there, at least in my day. My parents never said, “Let’s drive by.” I don’t think any of the lexicographers live in Springfield. I think they do live up in Amherst, Northampton.

SF: They mostly do, yeah.

MO: Academic climbs. I never went to school with a kid who said, “Yeah, my mom works at Webster.” It was like, you knew you were from the hometown of Dr. Seuss, you knew you were from the birthplace of basketball. I knew that I was from the birthplace of Friendly’s restaurants, but I had no idea that I was from the birthplace, but the American home of dictionaries. So of course, before we get into the dictionary stuff, I got to ask, where did you stay? Where did you eat? Did you go candle pin bowling? When you were bored at night and missing your wife, did you go to the movies out in West Springfield? What did you do, man?

SF: I sadly will admit, and this might disappoint you, Mark, but I stayed with friends who lived like forty-five minutes away from Springfield.

MO: Of course you did. Yeah.

SF: Yeah. I mean, I wanted to see them and I sort of just went back and forth whenever I was up there.

MO: You didn’t get to know the field.

SF: I really did not get to experience Springfield. I drove past the Fifth Alarm Lounge, the nudie bar next to the fire station, but I did not hang out in Springfield very much. You knew about the armory when you were growing up. Did you know about the armory growing up?

MO: I knew there was an armory. It’s not an active armory, right? They don’t keep arms there. I think I always remember hearing they might were going to redevelop it into housing or something. I mean, but what do you know about it?

SF: Not much, of the modern. I couldn’t tell you right now what’s in the old armory building. I mean, I walked by it a bunch of times. It’s right down the block from Springfield. But thinking about Springfield in the time of the Merriams, who moved there in the 1830s, early 40s, to establish their publishing business from farther west in Massachusetts. Now this was like big city outpost and this was a huge move for these brothers to set up their own shop in this rising town. So the-

MO: And they’d left Worcester, right? Which was, hadn’t they been in Worcester right before?

SF: I think maybe right before they were in Worcester and then other brothers and family members were from other smaller places in Western Mass. I mean, there was really a publishing family, a printing press, and publishing family. And Springfield for them was like a step up to the big leagues. This was where they were going to carve out their fortune.

MO: I mean, Springfield is always the second or third biggest city in the state. It’s kind of flipped with Worcester sometimes. And yet, I always joked when people said, “Oh, are you from Boston?” I was like, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. Politicians don’t even campaign in my part of the state because we don’t have enough votes.” We had never seen … William Weld’s never been to Springfield. I mean, I might be exaggerating somewhat, but it was such a backwater. And of course, now that I don’t live there anymore and it’s nostalgic for me, I think I should just move back into my parents’ house and just go boating on the Connecticut River or whatever.

But well, listen, I’m sorry you didn’t get to go candlepin bowling. I was thrilled to see that one of the lexicographers, you said they all have their hobbies. A beekeeper or whatever. I mean, from your sports background, have you ever encountered-

SF: I’ve candlepin bowelled.

MO: You have candlepin bowlled. Okay, good. It’s awesome. And it’s slow demise breaks my heart because it’s actually a better sport because little kids can do it and ten pin bowling, the ball is so heavy, most people can-

SF: And the gutter, right?

MO: Yeah. Well, most people can’t do it well. It’s too heavy. And candlepin bowling, anyone can get good at. So it’s …
Anyway, all right, we should talk about words. You’re looking for a word that you can research to get into the dictionary because the way it works is people sort of take various lists of words and you try to nudge one in by researching it. And you had one, and I want you to pronounce it, the one for having a remarkably slappable face. I think Ted Cruz was … What is that word again?

SF: It’s backpfeifengesicht.

MO: And is it a noun? Is it an adjective? Is Ted Cruz backpfeifengesicht or is he a backpfeifengesicht?

SF: It is a noun. It is a noun. I defined it, and this did not make it into Merriam’s dictionary, online dictionary, and I will explain why. I defined it as a face that deserves to be slapped or punched, which is kind of how is like a literal derivation from the German. Backpfeif means slap or punch and gesicht is face, backpfeifengesicht, slap or punch face that deserves to slap. And I saw it, the first time I saw it was during the 2016 presidential campaign. Ted Cruz’s roommate tweeted when I met Ted in 1988, I didn’t have a word to describe him. That’s because I didn’t speak German. Thank you Germans for backpfeifengesicht.

MO: It feels like a German analog. Of course, German does these things better because it has so many compound words, but it feels like an analog to just saying someone has a shit-eating grin. I feel like that makes their face-

SF: But you need to add the, that I want to wipe off of his face.

MO: Right, right, right.

SF: Right.

MO: Exactly.

SF: This really combines it beautifully. And the reason I defined it is because yeah, when I got to Merriam, the way that definers, lexicographers work is that they find words in the wild by reading. They’re always looking for new uses or new words that haven’t been entered into the dictionary and they enter them into a giant spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet when I got there was something like, I don’t know, two thousand something words long and you have their boxes that you have to fill in with frequency of use. So you like do Google searches and newspaper database searches and nexus searches and you sort of create a little profile for a word with a sort of a mock up definition, how much it’s used, and then you give it a rating, like a one to five scale of should it be in the dictionaries like five, alarm fire put it in right away, we should have this, or is it something that can wait?

So you have to be kind of honest. So I was just looking for anything when I got to Merriam-Webster because I wanted to not only try to define words that might get into the dictionary after being edited by experts, but also just that I wanted to build up some tonnage so that I have stuff to write about. I had this sort of dual journalistic/lexicographic interest. I was there to write a book, but at the same time, I wanted to demonstrate that I had the ability to be an actual lexicographer and learn the tools of the trade. And one of the way to learn the tools of the trade is to just start defining and researching. And it can be something as unlikely to make the dictionary as backpfeifengesicht or something more likely to make it, which I also defined microaggression and safe space. So I knew those who would get in and something like backpfeifengesicht, I just knew it didn’t have the usage, but it was funny. So I knew that I could write a paragraph about it and it would be funny and it would make the book, which it did.

MO: So, okay. So what are the criteria for what … First of all, what did you end up getting into the dictionary? What are the Fatsis, the ones that should have your name?

SF: All right, spoiler alert. Yeah, we’ll cut to the end. I mean, I defined about ninety words, some new, some new senses, some revisions, and fourteen as of the end of the book had made it into Merriam’s online dictionary, and I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head I could look it up.

MO: Which one are you most proud of?

SF: That’s a great question. I mean, the political ones were interesting. I love the political ones because they are of the moment and they’re words people use, like people are going to look up microaggression and safe space and alt-right. But the one that I’m weirdly … And another word I’m super proud of was sheeple, which had been overlooked and was super funny and ended up going viral because of a quotation that I selected to use that would accompany the definition, more on that another time or not. Read the book to find that story.

But I think the entry that I’m most proud of, Mark, was a new sense of the word run, the verb run. And run along with set are two of the longest entries in Merriam-Webster and in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, because they have so many uses. So I, air quotes, discovered a new transitive verb sense of the word run.

And I say discovered incredibly loosely because it’s not like nobody had seen this word before and it’s not like it hadn’t been defined elsewhere before, but it’s a baseball term. And as a sports guy, I was always on the hunt for baseball words and run in a baseball sense means to throw out of a game. So like the umpire ran the manager because he was arguing balls and strikes. So I stumbled across run somewhere and it was like, “Oh, I got to check and see if that’s in the dictionary in Merriam.” And lo and behold, it was not.

MO: You’ve got it added.

SF: And there were citations for it that I took citations from the seventies. There were some in the card file at Merriam, it’s called the citation files, the consolidated files, has sixteen million slips that definers, lexicographers over the year have amassed, which is how lexicographers in the pre-electronic age would draft definitions and run just nobody had done it.

So I entered the thirty-first verb sense of run in Merriam and my favorite little fact about run is that the editor at Oxford, at the Oxford English Dictionary, a lovely guy named Peter Gilliver, he spent nine months revising run.

MO: Run. That’s insane.

SF: I think it’s eighty-two senses and 230 subsenses, and he missed the baseball sense, but he missed the baseball sense probably because he’s British.

MO: And you’ve probably missed the cricket sense of something. Yeah. Speaking of baseball, do I have it in the back of my mind from reading your book that a word that didn’t make it in, that in the seventies, somebody was pushing designated homer?

SF: Yeah. Designated homer.

MO: What was that? I mean, I know baseball. Is that when the designated hitter hit the homer?

SF: When the designated hitter hit a home run. Yeah. That was in language journal called American Speech, which does, and still does, a feature called Among the New Words, and they just sort of … The difference between … Among the new words is sort of like an early warning system for language.

MO: Got it.

SF: And they’re amassing anything that looks new, some of it never makes any dictionary because it doesn’t have any staying power. And some of the words you go back and look and they last forever and they become accepted part of the language, like normal, frequently used parts of the language. Designated homer was one of those words that appeared probably somewhere a few times and fled by some baseball writer and thankfully it didn’t catch on.

MO: One of the interesting things, and it’s intuitive once you read about it, but it’s initially surprising, is that of course words are let go. They have to cut words, which means … And I think about this in terms of Scrabble. If there’s some word that I can say, well, Shakespeare used it, but it’s not … I mean, I guess the convention in Scrabble is you do follow the Scrabble dictionary now, but you can actually be overeducated, right? You can be plucking words from the Elizabethan era that actually no dictionary … I mean, the OED would … Do they keep everything or?

SF: Nothing gets cut anymore because we live in a digital age. It’s all online.

MO: So does that mean that the breadth of words I can use, say, in Scrabble is actually going to start growing or has been growing substantially because online stuff’s not getting cut. So for people who know antique words, it’s like happy days right

SF: Now. Yeah. I mean, in Scrabble, which is an incredibly narrow subset of the field of dictionaries, the tendency is to not cut words. And not because words don’t fall out of favor or because we should get rid of archaic words that happened to sneak into the Scrabble dictionary in the 1970s and 80s when the lexicon was first compiled, but more that players don’t want to unlearn words. So my favorite example was like “aal” in Scrabble is like some kind of tree. It appeared in like one dictionary, it appeared like Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary, and I’m guessing, in like the 1970s, made it onto the first Scrabble list and it’s never disappeared. And you cannot find aal anywhere else. There’s the more expansive international English lexicon for Scrabble that is used outside of North America and in North America in some tournaments. So there are two word lists in Scrabble.

One is governed by the Collins dictionary, which is a British dictionary. The other is based on Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary and other dictionaries North America-

MO: Which they’re letting fall out of there … They’re never revising in collegiate, right?

SF: There’s a lot more … Well, actually, we’ll get to that in one second, but there are a lot more words in Collins and in British English because they’re grabbing more dialectical English from around the world, South Africa.

MO: India, yeah.

SF: So it’s a fatter dictionary. And in the digital age though, there’s no imperative to get rid of words. So for the first 200 years of dictionary making or more millennia of dictionary making, but particularly in the modern age where it became a competitive business starting with the Merriams, in order to update your dictionary, you wanted to add new words. So you could advertise a thousand new words or 5,000 new words, but there was only so big, right? There’s only so many words you can cram between the bindings of a book. So when dictionaries would update, they had limits on how many words could be in there. So if you added 10,000 words for the next edition, you had to find stuff to cut. So words were cut.

Now, the exception here, Mark, is that weirdly enough, just a few weeks ago, Merriam-Webster announced that after 22 years, it was issuing a new edition of its collegiate dictionary. And the collegiate dictionary was the most widely selling dictionary in America. Merriam used to brag that was the top selling hardcover book in the United States, except for the Bible. It routinely sold well over a million copies a year. And after the last edition was published in 2003, the imperative to do another one in 2013, and then in 2023, because they would update it every ten years, was zero because the market for books had declined and the usage rate for online dictionaries was extremely high. So the notion of publishing a new edition, which would suck up resources and be expensive and yield maybe not much of a return kind of vanished. And then Merriam, like two, three weeks ago, surprised all of us lexicography geeks by announcing that they were going to publish a twelfth edition and it would be out in November. So they’ve been working on this like clandestinely. It’s like literally the Manhattan project of dictionaries.

MO: I would say Bletchley Park. It’s like Foodbreakers or something.

SF: Springfield is now Bledsley Park. Yeah.

MO: Springfield’s Bletchley Park.

SF: And so for that actually, so they did have to eliminate some content from the book. A lot of ancillary content, like encyclopedic content that used to be in the collegiate dictionary. So they added more than five thousand words to this. So you’ve got this editorial balance. I mean, some of these dictionaries were so big, Mark. The unabridged dictionaries that Merriam-Webster published, the Webster second unabridged, which was published in 1934, literally was as fat as a book could be. I think I described it as a double wide of dictionaries.

MO: You get, especially in the later part of the book when you’re talking about pronouns and also slurs into a lot of the ethics around this. And it seems, I mean, I’ll just put my cards to the table. I’m the most sort of, when it comes to language, the most reactionary, fuddy-duddy, I mean, when it comes to writing, not speaking, but I’m hopeless and I’d be bad at your job and bad at their job because I’m too judgmental. And I mean, my general view is that everything should have been frozen in 1996, the year I graduated from college. So anything that was acceptable then, even if it offended old language mavens from the fifties, that was fine because that was the moment in time when civilization peaked. But any innovation since then, I’m against. So that makes me bad at my job, but those are my cards on the table. So you can imagine where I stand on all sorts of things having to do with slurs, pronouns, et cetera.

Your general view, if I could say, is that you’re not very prescriptivist. You seem to be, you think these things describe language, they don’t rap people on the knuckles and tell them what has to be. And in that way, you’re kind of sort of a populist, I would say. Those seem to be your leanings. Are there any interesting ethical dilemmas where you think maybe Webster’s people have gotten it wrong or maybe they’ve been too liberal or too forward looking or too quick to cave to the sensibilities of 2020 and not held fast enough that they’ve gotten out actually ahead of the usage.

I’m thinking with pronouns here, for example, like you talk at great length, I think it was Leslie Feinberg was one of the people who brought the pronouns ze into the language and there have been other people have tried and you were saying, “Well, it seems to be popping up.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t know a soul who goes by ze.” Now, of course, I don’t have to know a soul. If there’s a few thousand people who do, it might be time for a dictionary entry. But I guess I’m curious, what are the moments where you thought, “I wonder if they’re not stiffening their spine enough?”

SF: There weren’t that many, to be honest, and that’s because Merriam has really stuck to its sort of traditional academic, scholarly, sophisticated approach toward the admission of words into a lexicon. And the admission of words into the lexicon doesn’t mean that something isn’t a word. I mean, I write about ze because nobody had defined ze as a gender neutral pronoun, a neopronoun, and there were, as you said, you saw it popping up. So I decided to take it on largely because I knew I could write about it and it was an interesting edge case. Should this word be admitted to the dictionary and what does it matter? Ze you will find in other dictionaries, including, I think, dictionary.com, possibly Oxford. I don’t know. I don’t think actually the OED, but the ze is playable in international Scrabble, so it’s in the Collins dictionary. So with Merriam, I found in my time there that you’d think that the permissiveness would have ratcheted up over time, that Merriam would be eager to … And let’s be clear here, Merriam really is the last American traditional commercial American dictionary standing.

Everyone else has either gone out of business or they do these token updates by freelancers every few years. The only fully staffed dictionary in America is Merriam-Webster. So you’d think that as the internet has sort of aggressively speeded up the timeline for words to be dispersed and used and accepted, that Merriam would follow suit and be like, “Oh, we got to get like rizz into the dictionary right away.” And rizz is now in Merriam’s online dictionary and in the new print edition of the collegiate. But what I found was that Merriam really hasn’t relaxed its standards. They’ve relaxed slightly, but that’s mostly because the adoption of words is much quicker now than it was in the print only era. So a word can spread in a matter of days or weeks and become ingrained in culture. Merriam’s criteria for word entry into the dictionary has always been pretty consistent, sustained usage over some non-specific period of time in professionally edited publications.

That’s been relaxed because of the prevalence of social media and the way that we write and communicate has changed. So you’ll see like citations, quotations from social media sites now in Merriam. And when definers gather information, they are trolling social media sites and looking for usage. So, but Merriam has tried to sort of stay true to the belief that a word really does need to be ingrained and demonstrate its permanence before we’ll stick it in the dictionary.

MO: So let’s talk for a moment about sustained usage. Can you think of, and I hate to put you on the spot, but can you think of a couple words that seemed like they were going to be eternal and it turned out they were flashes in the pan and maybe the dictionary adopt took them up too soon or never did and that was wise. But like what are some words from say the past fifty years that had their moment and we thought, “Oh, it’s going to be like rizz or well, we don’t know yet.” It’s going to be big and then it turned out not to be big. It turned out to be very temporary and evanescent.

SF: Yeah. And if something is evanescent, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be in trying either. A moment is a moment and I may stumble across it and want to look it up. I mean, this isn’t like a competition, it is a chronicle.

I mean, I can even look at some of the words I defined or tried to define. Alt-right looked like it was going to be a super important political word for generations to come. And I wrote the definition probably in the late 2010s and the late, not probably 2016, 2017, 2018 was when it got into the dictionary. And it looked like at the time like, whoa, this is going to stick around. It wasn’t that old. So the criteria for like … At one point for Merriam, it was like ten years, not like a set number, but words tended to sort of gather quotations in the consolidated files, those little slips of paper, and Merriam editors were sort of instructed to let words marinate until they were established. We see less of that. It’s a shorter window now, but I don’t think there’s as much concern like, “Oh, we admitted something on fleek that had a moment and maybe isn’t going to be around in fifty years.” But the fact that it had a moment is worth recognizing.

I thought actually Merriam needed to be more inclusive because the internet dictionary is bottomless. And so what’s the big deal? If I am a user and I type in a word into my Google search bar, I want to get something. And if I get something, I might stick around on the website longer. And if I stick around on the website longer, that’s more usage, that’s more clicks, that’s a higher ad rate that Merriam can charge to advertisers to support their business. I mean, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this is a media company struggling to survive in the digital age. And I thought like, why not just admit more things? And well, the reason is like only so many editors and so many words and so little time and editors highlight decisions on what to add and whatnot.

MO: All right. So quickly, what’s a word that they haven’t admitted that you just think, “Come on guys, it’s time.”

SF: Oh, but I will say that they make really good editorial decisions. I mean, I found I was overwhelmingly kind of blown away by just how logical the process was and how rational the decision making was. As a journalist, I was like, “Get it in there now and put my name on it.” You’re used to seeing your words with a byline and in print and I want to see it right away. And the sort of the deliberative process, I mean, it really is like working there is kind of like working in a library or working as an academic.

MO: No, it sounds very beautiful. I mean, not for me, but because I’m not a detail-oriented person, so they drive me insane, but it sounds very, very beautiful.

SF: Yeah. And it kind of is. And I was blown away by the work ethic and the commitment to the craft. For me, it was like, I was just so impressed at the intellectual integrity of the work-

MO: Yeah, except they did stick in those two words from the Simpsons just to have fun, right? They stuck in cromulent and what was the other one?

SF: Embiggen.

MO: Embiggen. Okay. Speaking of it, and am I right? Did you say that they actually put those in just because they wanted to and that pissed off a lot of people?

SF: I mean, I don’t think they’ve-

MO: Wait, what does cromulent mean?

SF: Cromulent means good, perfectly acceptable, right? That’s a perfectly cromulent word was the usage on the Simpons. And I talked to one of the Simpsons writers, Dan Greaney, who coined embiggen.

MO: I have to editorialize for a little bit. So first of all, cromulent reminds me of … remember the one was the … what was the old Saturday Night Live skit where someone played behind the actors studio, inside the actor’s studio and who … I never saw the original show, so whoever the host was who was being parodied at one point … No, it was Leonard Pinth-Garnell from the old seventies, the Dan Ackroyd. One of their pompous presenter or movie critic characters said, “This is so beautiful. It exceeds words, it’s scrumtrulescent,” and I always wanted scrumtrulescent to capture in a way that-

Cromulent is the updated scrumtrulescent. But speaking of embiggen, I want to go back to bigly, which you render as, this is Donald Trump’s famous bigly. No one could tell if he was saying bigly or big league. So, and maybe you did the research here. I don’t think it’s in your footnotes, but not everything makes it to a book. You pretty confidently say it’s bigly, B-I-G-L-Y.

SF: Yeah.

MO: Now I remember there being a lot of internet debate at the time about what he had said and people kind of breaking down the phonemes. I swear with God, however you construe them as my witness, that as a kid growing up in New England, big league was among twelve year old boys in 1986, big league was an adjective like, “Oh dude, those sneakers, those are like big league sneakers.”

SF: Right, sure.

MO: And big league did not have any sort of history, I think. I was convinced Trump obviously picked it up from adolescent boy speak the way he would probably say bro, speaking on the bro beat in the book, bromance, bro shake, brosif, whatever. How did I not win that? How did people decide it was big league?

SF: I think we slowed down the video and listened to what he actually said.

Donald Trump: Bigly. Bigly. Bigly. Bigly. Bigly. Bigly. And I think we’re going to make it bigly. Bigly. Bigly. And that’s what’s happened. Bigly. Bigly. Bigly. And we’re going to win bigly. Bigly. Bigly.

SF: And there was nothing. I mean, the great irony here is that there was nothing wrong with bigly. Bigly is a word.

MO: I was just convinced … I remember trying to persuade people. No, no, no, we used to say big league and I couldn’t find anyone who remembered that we said it. And so I mean, otherwise I think obviously I would have won with my massive national following.

SF: Of course you would have, yes.

MO: You’ve been listening to Arc: The Podcast. I’ve been talking with Stefan Fatsics. I’m Mark Oppenheimer. The podcast has so much good stuff coming up. I will be talking with Christopher Beha. I will nail down the pronunciation when I talk to him. He is the former editor of Harper’s Magazine and he has a new book out about not being an atheist, about being a skeptical believer. And I’m really excited to talk with him.

Also coming up, we’re going to be playing a recent interview I did with R.R. Reno, known as Rusty Reno to those in the know. He’s the editor of the conservative Christian magazine First Things. And we had a pretty spicy conversation. There were some elbows thrown. We talked about Trump, we talked about immigration, we talked about Catholicism, and it was really a good time. It went on about an hour and a half and felt half as long.

More conversations coming up, I’ll be talking with Arielle Angel, who is stepping down as editor of the left-wing Jewish magazine, Jewish Currents, and so, so much more. By the way, if there’s somebody you think I should talk to, I can usually twist people’s arms into saying yes. So I would love listener suggestions for future guests. I’m at mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s W-U-S-T-L dot E-D-U. And now back to my conversation with Stefan Fatsis.

I was going through some old letters of my grandfather’s. I found a letter to him from my uncle, his son, writing home from Penn State in the fiftes, and he said he used the word feature to mean have a crush on or to be sort of courting or eyeing. So he was talking about, “Well, there’s this girl at the sorority for the mixer and I think I feature her, but I’m not sure.”

SF: Wow.

MO: And I eventually realized after several uses of this that feature meant have a crush on, be tickled by or something. And I find no usage of it in popular culture ever, but it obviously was something that was being said on the Penn State campus in 1953. How many of those are there? How many flashes in the pan that like … I think this must have had a moment. I mean, I don’t think my uncle invented a word. And it was obviously frat slang and it obviously was probably several thousands of people would have understood it if not used it and then it vanished entirely.

SF: Right.

MO: How common is this?

SF: Very. There was a professor at the University of North Carolina named Connie Ebley, who for forty years, her entire teaching career, every semester she would hand out index cards to students in one of her linguistics classes and she would ask them to write down the most current, potentially evanescent, just whatever the current slang was the kids were using. Dozens of those words made it as citations in an online slang dictionary and called Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which is excellent, and also into the OED as citations. So youth culture remains a-

MO: But dozens didn’t. I mean-

SF: But dozens, hundreds, thousands. Hundreds didn’t, right? Yeah, didn’t. Tighty whities did, but feature didn’t.

MO: Tighty whites. That’s a great one. I remember when I first heard that, because I was mocked for wearing them. In high school, I didn’t get the memo that we were supposed to switch to boxers, and I had to change backstage during a play. And one of the senior older girls was like, “Oh, look at Mark in his tighty whities.”

SF: Okay, that’s a humiliating moment, Mark. Thank you for sharing.

MO: You’re welcome. And all the sort of tougher broier, jockish actors had on … You were supposed to wear boxers. Yeah.

SF: Let me find, I’m going to actually look this up because I love this. So Connie Ebley, here’s my end note on this, amassed more than 20,000 examples of college slang, which provided first citations in the OED, in the Oxford English dictionary for wuss, wuss out, lose one’s shit, freakazoid, walk of shame, and others. And I mentioned Green’s Dictionary of Slang includes more than a thousand first citations from her students, including weird out, 1972; talk to ralph on the big white telephone, meaning to vomit, 1977; and tighty whities.

MO: Tighty whities.

SF: 1985.

MO: And I was accused of wearing them. You were ground zero for tighty whities. I was there in 88. Yeah.

SF: There might be a picture of you next to tighty whities in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Mark. Yeah. So wuss and wuss, out 1976; lose one shit, 1983; freakazoid, 1984; walk of shame, 1990.

MO: I know that it was a trend among urban blacks in say, I think it was the forties. I think in the sort of zoot suit era to speak in very ornate language, right? I think you get some of this in the autobiography of Malcolm X when he moved to Harlem and to sort of be loquacious and use words like loquacious, that was the sort of the hip thing to do and that was to expand syllables. Now, of course, my daughter, I realized recently when she talks about a ship, she just means relationship. She’s just taken the word, I mean particularly as a noun. The verb is new to ship characters in a book, to think they should get together. But the noun ship just means relationship, and it’s just a pure shortening. And is there a trend over time that stuff is getting … I mean, I now know that freshmen counselors at Yale, they were freshman counselors, they’re now frocos, and that’s ubiquitous. Everything is shorter.

SF: Right.

MO: Is stuff going to get longer again, or are we just partly because of internet and acronyms and something? Is the trend-

SF: It’s mostly social media at this point. And a lot of it I think is written. As part of my reporting, I went to the annual linguistics conference at which the American Dialect Society selects the word of the year, and I participated as word of the year votes. And I went to this great talk about lengthening and how on social media, kids mostly, stress words. And you’d think that normally if you were going to say something like, “Cool,” you would stress the o and write eight os between a c and an l. Instead, on social media, the tendency is to actually write it like coollllllll extending at the end. So I think every call, but every generation has different adaptations for how they truncate or elongate words. And this is sort of like, I’m sure Connie Ebley’s little card slips would indicate which was in vogue in different eras in the seventies, eighties, nineties, zeros.

MO: What would you point people to in your book, which is terrifically readable and appropriately lengthed and just long enough, but not too long, that we haven’t talked about that really delights you?

SF: I mean, reporters, Mark, you know this, you sort of delight in the things that you liked reporting on and you want people to sort of pay extra attention to that because I did all this work and it was really cool and I hope I managed to make it interesting enough that you will remember it because I remember it incredibly, it’s incredibly important to me. And I think that there are two parts of the book that make me happy when I think about them because they’re wonderful stories and the reporting was so much fun. And one is kind of sad. It’s about Madeline Kripke, the dictionary collector. She had 20,000-

MO: And younger sister of Saul, the philosopher-

SF: Correct, younger sister.

MO: An insane fact.

SF: Two brilliant people from the same family.

And so Madeline was like the preeminent private dictionary collector, probably ever. She had at least 20,000 books in her Greenwich Village Loft. Before that, she lived in like a 350 square foot apartment in the Village and had thousands and thousands of books in there, books and storage. Her apartment was like, you’d think it was like a hoarder’s paradise. You literally had to weave your way down the hall because there were stacks on either side of you. There were books on her bed, literally every surface was covered with books and papers and ephemera and Madeline was an obsessive. She was an obsessive collector. She probably spent well over a million dollars over time, way more on her collection.

MO: Since her father was an early investor with Warren Buffett, she had the money.

SF: It’s the craziest story, right? She grew up in Omaha. Her father was a rabbi in Omaha.

MO: But one of Warren Buffett’s buddies.

SF: And became like the families befriended each other and in like 1965-

MO: I know, it’s a great story.

SF: He invested $65,000 or $70,000 with Warren Buffett and it turned into tens of millions of dollars. And he was a philanthropist and gave money to, particularly to a Jewish theological seminary in New York where he had studied, but then his children inherited some of that money and Madeline spent hers as a life-

MO: On dictionaries.

SF: Life as a dictionary collector. So I love that story and it has a sad ending because Madeline died of COVID at the very beginning of the pandemic. And then the happy outcome for her collection is that it was acquired by Indiana University, which has a big dictionary collection and people that care about dictionaries. They shipped it all. They bought it at auction, shipped it all out there. They are cataloging it now. And the first Madeline Kripke conference is going to be in February of 2026. So her legacy, her life’s work was preserved, intact, and will be there for scholars and others to appreciate going forward. So that was my one thing. The other thing that I really love is I spent time at Yale in the Beinecke Library where Merriam-Webster’s papers from the second half of the nineteenth century are collected. And I just like looking through these papers, like these letters that the Merriam brothers wrote to the heads of state and to members of Congress and to famous writers to try to get them to endorse their dictionaries are in there.

And there’s this correspondence among Noah Webster’s descendants and the editors of the dictionary, the descendants are peeved about the way that they’re treating Noah. And there’s this wonderful sort of narrative about how these seminal dictionaries from the 1840s and fifties and sixties were created by this group of scholars at Yale under the business management of George and Charles Merriam, the Merriam brothers up in Springfield. And looking through these papers was just so much fun trying to decipher the penmanship and then stumbling across, oh, look at this. There’s a letter from Walter Whitman, asking for Walter Whitman, who’s the editor of a newspaper in Brooklyn, asking for the Merriams to send them a copy of the dictionary, which he had written about. So Walt Whitman, before he wrote “Leaves of Grass” and became famous. So I love that reporting and I hope that as a writer, you want that reporting to resonate with readers and I hope it does.

MO: Totally. Well, it did with me. And it just occurred to me, your book is basically about Springfield and New Haven, the two cities I’ve lived in the longest. So well done, sir.

SF: I wrote it for you.

MO: Thanks for looking out for me. Favorite word?

SF: What? Like ever?

MO: I’m going to give you a second to think about it.

SF: Go ahead.

MO: Here’s a word that I want to happen. Years ago, I was sitting with some friends over milkshake somewhere and a couple of us had gone to prep school and were trying to describe a certain kind of preppy to someone who hadn’t gone to prep school. And I said, “He’s like a lacrosse player. He could be Jewish, but he’s probably a WASP. He’s probably like a lacrosse WASP. “And my friend Seth Lopez said, “He’s a lacrossp.”

SF: Oh my God.

MO: And a lacrossp, if you know, and you’re from Maryland, I mean, you’re from this world too-

SF: I grew up in Westchester in New York.

MO: Yeah, you grew up in Westchester, now you live in D.C. It’s like the lacrossp is a type and that I haven’t been able to make that word happen in the past twenty-five, years breaks my heart.

SF: Maybe because WASP is kind of on the descendancy. It requires-

MO: You have to know what that is.

SF: Yeah. I think my favorite word remains, and I write about it in the book sportocrat, which I tried desperately. This is another word that I tried to get into Merriam and a sportocrat is someone who is a aristocratic sports ruler, one of the people that run FIFA or the International Olympic Committee and I came across it because a colleague of mine at the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s used it in a story in a quotation from Phil Knight, the chairman of Nike. And then I picked it up and used it many times in stories in writing about FIFA particularly and the IOC uncovering the Olympics, covering the World Cup. It is the perfect word to describe the sort of nose in the air, blueblazer, privileged aristocrats who run international sports.

MO: They tried to play themselves. They peaked at a sort of middling level, but they had a lot of money. So then they went into the administration of polo or the Olympics or-

SF: Right. And it gives them access to heads of state and tons of market collected through bribery or other means. And so sportocrat, I felt like sportocrat was right on the cusp of not quite accepted enough though plenty of sports writers of a certain mentality have used it in stories in the last twenty years of twenty-five years, but really didn’t clear the bar at Merriam, but it is one of the words that I hope that …

MO: Well, let’s work on sportocrat and lacrossp together.

SF: Absolutely. I’d be glad to help.

MO: Stefan, thanks for writing “Unabridged” and thanks for talking to me. I really appreciate it.

SF: Thanks a lot, Mark. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks a lot. Talk to you soon.

MO: That was my conversation with Stefan Fatsis, author of the terrific new book, “Unabridged.” Hey, lots of religious holidays coming up as we escape the doldrums of winter. Maha Shivaratri, the Hindu holiday, which honors lord Shiva is February 15, 2026, also my brother’s birthday. So a very, very important day. In many religious traditions, the Lunar New Year will be celebrated February 17 and also on February 17, this year Ramadan begins and it goes until March 19. So Muslims will be fasting from sunup to sundown. Ash Wednesday is February 18. And looking ahead, the Jewish holiday of Purim is March 2 and 3.

You know what else is coming up? The birthdays of some people you didn’t know were still alive. Former nightline anchor, Ted Koppel will turn 86 on February 8. Nick Nolte, 85. Mary Steenburgen, well, we know she’s alive, 73. Motley Crue musician, Vince Neil, will turn 65 on February 8. Michael Jordan turns 39 on February 9. Laura Dern has her birthday coming up the following week. So does Peter Gabriel, who will be turning 76 and February 16th, birthday of Ice-T. Finally, I want to point out that February 22 is the birthday of Drew Barrymore, who will turn 50. I don’t know why, but I always was aware, well, she was a child actress, and I used to see Drew Barrymore in movies like “Firestarter” or “Irreconcilable Differences.” And I was aware that she and I were basically at the same age, that there was this other person who was pretty much the identical age to me who was in Hollywood movies. And when I had dreams of being a child actor, I remember even telling my mother once, “Can’t I go to auditions in New York? Drew Barrymore’s my age and she’s famous and she’s in the pages of People Magazine and why can’t I be Drew Barrymore?” And my mother gently patted me on the head and explained that there were a lot of reasons I couldn’t be Drew Barrymore. But happy birthday, February 22 to Drew Barrymore.

Thanks for listening to Arc with Mark. I am Mark Oppenheimer. Our podcast is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. I am ablely supported by colleagues like Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen and Mark Valeri. Our editor is David Sugarman. The interns are Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther, and we are always available on all your major platforms. Please do rate and subscribe and recommend us to friends. Till next time, this has been Arc.

Trump: We’re going to start winning again and we’re going to win bigly.