The Dictionary Wars! with Gabe Henry

Remember being a teen and coming up with “cool” ways of spelling common words? Well, just like the teenager it was, the United States in the 18th century was annoying their mom, England, with the hip words that were being edited and added to their lexicon. The antagonistic pair of nations on the brink of the Revolutionary War were always competing to prove their superiority and independence in small cultural battles, and words themselves were no different. Fellow word-nerd Gabe Henry, author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, joins Sarah as they chummily pun their way through the story of the 18th century Dictionary Wars, the story of the publishing battles fought between a handful of eccentric word-lovers in The US and England, all vying for the future supremacy of their own spellings. Digressions include crop circles from Unsolved Mysteries, dishonest detergent marketing, and old fashioned sock puppet accounts. More Gabe Henry: gabehenry.com Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More You're Wrong About: linktr.ee/ywapod Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  That sounds like a country song, doesn't it? I ain't yet quite right for your orthography.

• 0:15Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we talk about all of our favorite words. And with me today is our guest du jour, Gabe Henry, who is here to talk about the dictionary wars, which are not as violent as they might sound, but very petty, which is better. Gabe has a book out now called Enough Is Enough. That second N-F is spelled E-N-U-F. You'll know why soon. The subtitle is Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. And this is a book that recently made me chortle in an Ikea food court, where I like to go to relax. As you know, or maybe you don't know, I have another show coming out right now from CBC Podcasts. It's a mini-series called The Devil You Know.

• 1:00Sarah Marshall?

  It's about what else the Satanic Panic. And episode four is out this week. I really hope you check it out. I hope that you can find some comfort in history and in learning about the courageous people who have been living through moral panics a long time before this current one. And I'm so happy to get to share this show with you. Speaking of things I'm excited to share with you, we also have a fabulous bonus episode on the word origins of bimbos. See, we're getting really wordy this month with our favorite bimbologist and our favorite podcaster, Jamie Loftus.

• 1:38Sarah Marshall?

  And coming up, we have the first of our Survivalism Q and A episodes with our survival correspondent, the amazing Blair Braverman. And this is the show where we had people on Patreon ask their burning questions about how to survive in every connotation of the word. And yes, we are going to talk about whether you can drink your own pee. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for journeying with us into the holidays. Here's your episode.

• 2:14Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where, in my opinion, you can just do the best job you can spelling your own name and then try again with a different spelling next time, because that's what Shakespeare did. And with me today is Gabe Henry. Gabe, how are you?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  I'm doing great. How are you, Sarah?

• 2:36Sarah Marshall?

  I'm, you know, just slip sliding into the fall. They're about to take all of our daylight away.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Now, I wanted to note that we're recording this a few days after Noah Webster's birthday, which is National Dictionary Day.

• 2:49Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  So I know this is belated, but I just wanted to wish you a very happy National Dictionary Day.

• 2:54Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you. I don't have a single dictionary in this house, but I do have a thesaurus, which I think is pretty good.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  That's, that's close enough.

• 3:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm working my way up to a dictionary. And you have a new book out. Tell us about that.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  My book is called Enough is Enough: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. And when you see the title, you'll see the second enough is spelled E-N-U-F. And it's about the long, strange, little-known history of something called the Simplified Spelling Movement, which was this effort over hundreds of years to shorten and streamline how we spell words, like spelling laugh, L-A-F, or love, L-U-V. And this movement has been supported by people like Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Charles Darwin, all in this effort to make our spelling a little bit more logical.

• 3:46Sarah Marshall?

  Do you feel differently about the practicality of this idea than you did when you started? Like, where are you on the, on the spectrum of enthusiasts to, no?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  I've become a little bit more enthusiastic about it. Maybe enthusiastic is too strong of a word, but I think where I land is, I think spelling should be simpler. I think that it's a little absurd that we have eight different ways of pronouncing O-U-G-H, you know, through, though, tough, cough.

• 4:15Sarah Marshall?

  That's too many ways.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  It's too many. I think two is too many. If you look at some more phonetic languages like Spanish or German, most of them are very phonetic. But where I land on the actual reform part of it all is I don't think it's really practical for us to go in and kind of artificially tweak the language in this conscious way. I don't think we can really push the language forward into the future. Just like, I don't really think it's practical to try to pull it back into the past. I think you just kind of let it evolve how it's supposed to evolve.

• 4:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the way language evolves is so fascinating and anyone who tries to, I don't know, police correctness in the English language, there's a special kind of irony to that, which your book certainly illustrates about just the idea that like, I mean, how would you describe, you know, you got into this so much in your book, but maybe a little briefly to start us off. Where did we get this language we are speaking? From where did we get this language in which we are speaking? I'm avoiding ending with a preposition, which nobody does, which starts us off well.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I guess the simple answer is from everywhere.

• 5:23Sarah Marshall?

  Wherever we could get it.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Wherever we could. We were eating at the buffet of global languages.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Really, a lot has to do with England's history. You know, for hundreds of years, it was pummeled by invaders from all over. The Romans who spoke Latin, the Vikings who spoke Norse, which is similar to Danish, the Germans, the French, and then over time, all these languages merged and mingled into this very messy thing that we call English. And I think a lot of people think of English as this singular language, but I tend to think of it more as like eight languages in a trench coat.

• 6:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And sometimes we fight under the trench coat and

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Sarah Marshall?

  that's what creates interesting lumps or whatever.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's a big Tasmanian devil whirlwind going on under there.

• 6:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, I don't know, there's something about the history of language specifically that I just find to be, I don't know, because it oozes into all other history into such a way, or I guess, or oozes out of it, I guess, maybe. It's oozing in some kind of direction. It's not in a directional ooze. And I feel like the path that that takes you on. I don't know. Yes, they're fantastic and very fun to me. And so our topic today is The Dictionary Wars, which is an amazing title. And I want to just have you take us, take us to the dictionary wars, please.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I'd be happy to. So I wanted to start by just reading you a quote. And I just want to hear your first organic reaction to it. Does that make sense? So for some context, this quote is from 1787. It comes from a London magazine, and the quote is in reference to Thomas Jefferson.

• 7:08Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Here it is. "Belittle, what an expression. This word may be an elegant one in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible. But for our part, all we can do is guess at its meaning. Belittle? For shame, Mr. Jefferson. Why, after trampling upon the honor of our country, and representing it as little better than a land of barbarism, why, we say, perpetually trample also upon our language? Oh, spare we beseech you, our mother tongue."

• 7:38Sarah Marshall?

  Love how people criticized Thomas Jefferson back in the day, but almost never for the things he should have gotten criticized for. That's so funny to me, because I feel like belittle, like, when you put it like that, it is kind of like a Simpsons word, like "embiggen." Like, you can hear it, the sort of like, the newness of it, maybe, if you, like, tune your ear to the 1700s. But it feels like a college word now. It's like the kind of thing that you would hear in a political debate. And so the idea, it just makes me think that, like, a piece of junk only has to hang around for, like, a few decades to become like a mid-century modern classic, and for me to pay too much for it. It feels like that kind of thing.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Right. Belittle has definitely reached its vintage era.

• 8:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Now.

• 8:26Sarah Marshall?

  It's tasty.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  And it's, it's kind of one of these words that, I guess, around the time, it's, it's an adjective, little, that's being turned into a verb. And it's one of many words that are being verbified. So there's words like,

• 8:40Sarah Marshall?

  I like that.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  interview, which is a noun, but around this time, it's being used as a verb for the first time.

• 8:46Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, man, these kids.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Or the word process. It's being used as a verb, or notice. So when this quote comes out in 1787, the word belittle is considered a kind of unsophisticated, uncouth word. It's a new word coming out of America, and it's frowned upon by the British elite who don't believe it to be part of true English.

• 9:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I feel like this is not quite the right comparison because when people do this now, I feel like they're trying to pander to the youths in a way that I find mortifying as someone who definitely also does that. But it feels like maybe if Thomas Jefferson is like talking about riz, you know?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I think that's a great comparison. I mean, every slang is laughable in its first iteration.

• 9:34Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I think it sounds right when it's used correctly, but as someone who is never going to use it quite right, as a 37 year old, I guess need to concentrate on murder she wrote.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  But I think the thing about a word like riz or belittle is we don't really know what, how it will be accepted in the future. You know, belittle is considered part of traditional English now. It's part of high class thesaurus dictionary, English authoritative usage and riz in 40 years might be the same. We really don't know the path it's going to take, or it could drop off and become some kind of laughable nostalgic slang that we pretend we never said, but, but we all know we did.

• 10:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, we did a bonus episode last month with the irreplaceable Jamie Loftus and talked about the derivation of the word bimbo because that one is interesting to me because it doesn't seem to have any one derivation. It seems to have sort of wandered in through the windows of American culture through a few different ways. Like it exists as a last name and, you know, Italian for baby, but to have just like bounced around being applied to kind of everybody for a while until it made its way to hot women. And I don't know, I like that one too, where it's like, people are like, we just know we love saying it. We're just not sure what we want to mainly be saying it about. So we're going to take some time to decide.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  The way a word feels coming out of your mouth, or the way it sounds coming into your ears could have a lot to do with whether it catches on. Belittle is a fun word to say.

• 11:07Sarah Marshall?

  It is.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So is bimbo.

• 11:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. And yet belittling bimbos is a terrible thing to do.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So this word belittle is just one of many new words and slangs that are bubbling up in America at the time, which the British are dismissing as Americanisms. And I have a short list here of a few other Americanisms that the British are railing against. So words like skunk and canoe, which are indigenous words and therefore considered uncultured and uncivilized.

• 11:38Sarah Marshall?

  Great.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Abriged words like gents instead of gentleman and pants instead of pantaloons.

• 11:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Sorry, that was amazing.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I agree. Also, compound words like eggnog, which comes from an English slang word grog, meaning rum, and noggin, which means a wooden cup.

• 12:00Sarah Marshall?

  We could be calling it grognoggin. I just don't know.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Groggin, grognoggin, nogginrog. I think the British would have had a hard time with any of those, but I think there's there's some riz in calling it grogin.

• 12:18Sarah Marshall?

  It is funny to me that like, it feels like this interesting kind of proprietary jealousy of like, they're not using the language right, we're using it right. And it's like, well, you're using it for your needs and their British needs.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. Another word that's starting to become popular in America is the word cookie, which derives from a Dutch word. And you know, you've really offended the British when you start saying cookie instead of biscuit.

• 12:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. That is probably when culturally we became a different country.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. So these are just some of the hundreds of new Americanized words that the British are taking offense to. And they're not just taking offense to the words themselves, but kind of to what the words represent. You know, they represent that America is growing away from England. They represent that the English language is separating from its roots and it's seen as a threat to England.

• 13:11Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. It's almost like the language is like going through an adolescent rebellion in a way.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like politically, they were seeing America go through an adolescent rebellion too. They wanted their

• 13:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that too.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Their political independence as much as their linguistic independence. So this kind of Americanized English, or many were calling it barbaric English. It had been growing and spreading for much of the 1700s. And back in 1746, this is 30 years before the American Revolution. A British poet named Samuel Johnson decides that he wants to actually do something about it, to actually fight back against this American influence on English. So in 1746, Samuel Johnson is 37 years old, as you are, as I am.

• 13:56Sarah Marshall?

  I'm 37. Oh, my God. We're gonna choose some weird life plans this year, I bet. I can't wait.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like Samuel Johnson did. So Samuel Johnson, he's 37, he's living in England, he's restless, he's underworked, he's trying to make a name for himself as a poet. He's picking up whatever teaching and tutoring jobs he can find. You know, it's a pain that all my fellow freelancers probably know very well. And he's also a staunch Tory, which means he's politically conservative. He loves tradition and authority, and he's distrustful of reformers and radicals of any kind, but especially Americans. In fact, he actively hates Americans. I have a quote.

• 14:40Sarah Marshall?

  Fair enough, but not for the right reasons.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  I have a quote here from Johnson. He says, "I am willing to love all mankind except an American." He also called them, quote, "a race of convicts who ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging."

• 14:56Sarah Marshall?

  Hey, that's Australia.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  So clearly, there are many things at play here with him and his disgust for America. I mean, and what it represents runs very deep. So to him, proper English is a mark of civilization and order, and every new Americanism threatens to unravel it.

• 15:16Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  So he takes up this mission to save English, to preserve it from American decay. And his plan is to compile a huge authoritative English dictionary. And he hopes this will both standardize the English language and also defend it against America's influence. He kind of sees himself as this guardian of the language. And he wants to draw a clear line between England and America. So in seventeen forty six, he begins this monumental task of creating a dictionary and it ends up taking the next nine years of his life.

• 15:50Sarah Marshall?

  Which is honestly like an impressively short amount of time to write a dictionary in, you know?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:55Sarah Marshall?

  Especially the first. And there's also, I mean, I'm having two thoughts. A, that it's very charming to me to believe you can change the world by writing a book. And B, that in the mid to late eighteenth century, that probably is about as true as it's ever gonna be. I mean, is that correct in your opinion?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, there were some dictionaries around. None of them were thorough, comprehensive, authoritative dictionaries of the language. So in a time before there was, you know, these thousand page dictionaries. It was actually practical and sensible to think that you could change the language or change the world or change your national identity by creating a dictionary.

• 16:41Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And to be fair, that did happen, you know, because now we spell things a certain way.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:46Sarah Marshall?

  Man.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I don't know how many people alive today, if any, will ever truly understand what it must have been like to compile a dictionary by yourself from scratch before the existence of a true authoritative dictionary.

• 17:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, what was it like?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it required years and years of working essentially alone. You know, maybe you're lucky to have the help of some assistance, but it's slow tedious work. I mean, if you finish two entries a day, that's probably a really good day. And I actually have some information on how, what Samuel Johnson's process was like, so.

• 17:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  This is his process. He starts working 1746. He starts by taking a book off his shelf, and he underlines all the words and quotations that he wants to include in his dictionary. Then he passes the book to an assistant to transcribe his selections onto paper cards, which Johnson later alphabetizes and then defines. Then he continues on to another book and another. Eventually, he runs out of books, so he starts borrowing books from friends. In fact, some friends later report that when the books are finally returned to them, they'd been so heavily marked and underlined as to be, quote, "so defaced as to be scarce worth owning." And he did this for nine years.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And it's also, I guess, interesting to note the temperament of some of these early lexicographers. A lot of them have been diagnosed posthumously by historians as having OCD. They're obsessive compulsive. When Samuel Johnson was anxious or bored, he would obsessively count lines of Latin poetry. You know, just a very repetitive, pedantic little hobby he would do. Peter Mark Roget, who wrote Roget's Thesaurus, he would obsessively count his steps to school every day when he was a kid. And Noah Webster, who published Webster's Dictionary, and we'll get to him soon, he would obsessively count the houses of every new city that he visited.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I actually have a tally here. During one of his lecture tours in 1785, he counted that Salem had 730 houses, New York had 3,340, and Philadelphia had around 4,500.

• 19:02Sarah Marshall?

  Man. I mean, it's funny, it's charming to think that like, the human desire to quantify information has been with us, you know, probably since we've been around. And that, I don't know, that we're surrounded by so much sinister information technology that it's nice to remember that like, some of us built it because we just wanted to count all the houses in Philadelphia.

• 19:28Sarah Marshall?

  Which is harder to do now.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  It is. There's not many things you can count that haven't already been counted. There's no novel counting projects you can pick up right now, let's say.

• 19:37Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. It is fun to count steps, though, I gotta say.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Well, we have technology that does that for us. I don't think anyone's counting their 10,000 steps by hand.

• 19:48Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I, look, sometimes you leave your phone at home and you can't let it be for nothing.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  It's true. It's also interesting to note that when Samuel Johnson is doing this, this is the scientific revolution. And there's this push among many industries to count and quantify and classify a lot of things. So while Johnson is cataloging English, this man Carl Linnaeus is in Sweden. He's a Swedish botanist and he's writing his first major catalog of plants. The first major work to catalog them according to binomial nomenclature. And so both of these writers, both of these minds are right in the middle of the scientific revolution. And they're trying to classify and organize the world around them to bring about more scientific understanding.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  I think it was kind of a trend or an interest among many people to want to quantify their world.

• 20:46Sarah Marshall?

  And then, of course, there's, you know, the desire held by some to quantify the world in a way that proves that white men are superior to everybody else inevitably. But I don't know, it feels like information, it's like the myth of Prometheus. Like you want to offer a flame to the people and some of them will use it for warmth and to heat up their hot pockets and some of them will use it for racism. And that's information, baby.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  That's information, baby.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  So, well, as long as we're quantifying things, let me give you a few numbers on Samuel Johnson's dictionary. When it finally comes out in 1755, so this thing is massive. It has more than 40,000 entries. It spans more than 2,000 pages and the two volumes of it together weigh about 20 pounds, which, just to give a real world point of reference, 20 pounds is about as much as a car tire. So that's what we're dealing with.

• 21:41Sarah Marshall?

  So once he's written it, he can flip it over to do one of those NFL exercises.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the the first weightlifting machine also, not just the first dictionary. Yeah, he was jacked.

• 21:56Sarah Marshall?

  You have to assume. Yeah, what a thing to have produced.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just as he planned, you know, his dictionary does become this symbol of English nationalistic pride. It serves as a wall against the New World and it promotes England's superiority over not just America, but also England's neighbors like Scotland and France. Actually, a lot of his entries are kind of full of these political biases. I have a few here. He famously defines the word oats as a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

• 22:33Sarah Marshall?

  Burn, insult them for being thrifty. They'll hate that. It's not like they take pride in it.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And he frequently degrades Americans as a barbaric, crude people. Usually he's degrading them in his example sentences. So, for example, for the word fertile, he posits that 10 acres of land in England are about as fertile as 1,000 acres in the uncultivated waste of America.

• 22:59Sarah Marshall?

  Well.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  For the term endwise, which means to set something upright, as when you hammer a pole into the ground, Johnson references the wooden sticks of teepees, which you would find in the quote, rude and unpolished America peopled with slothful and naked Indians. And for the term lizard, he provides this annotation. There are several sorts of lizards, some in Arabia of a cubit long. In America, they eat lizards.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  So, everything in reference to America is is kind of to cast them as this primitive, barbaric, ignorant, uncivilized people. Everything in reference to England is refined and civilized.

• 23:38Sarah Marshall?

  And to imply that European settlers are taking their cultural cues from indigenous people, which could not be farther from the truth, unfortunately.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Right. Not at all. Linguistically, the languages are merging in America. They're trading some words they're sharing.

• 23:56Sarah Marshall?

  Although, did we, we took the word squash too, didn't we?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yep. Squash, canoe, tomahawk, bluff, in the sense of a cliff.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I think squirrel, maybe chowder. Yeah, there are quite a few.

• 24:09Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. When you're feeling cozy during, you know, having your squash chowder in your canoe this fall, just remember that language is also a thief.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  I also, if you don't mind a brief tangent here.

• 24:24Sarah Marshall?

  I never mind a brief tangent.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Johnson's dictionary was also known for containing some really wonderfully bizarre entries and definitions. So can I read you a few of these?

• 24:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Oh, my gosh, please.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  All right. Tarantula, an insect whose bite is said to be only cured by music. Lunch, as much food as one's hand can hold.

• 24:49Sarah Marshall?

  I really like that. That's not that much lunch.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Only one hand?

• 24:55Sarah Marshall?

  That's like a large pair, like a little, I guess that's why we invented the Caesar salad wrap because of how Johnson's dictionary defined lunch. You have to fit a whole salad in your hand.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  And I wonder if he's writing before the invention of the cafeteria tray because clearly you can hold a lot more food in one hand on that.

• 25:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You have to balance it. We've circumvented that one.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Here's one, mouth friend, which is a word he might have coined, a mouth friend, is one who professes friendship without intending it.

• 25:30Sarah Marshall?

  That's when he, he surprised his mother and his tutor once. And she said, oh, don't worry, Samuel, we're only mouth friends. And he was like, oh.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And then I have one more. I think this one is the best. This word is belly god. He defines it as a glutton, one who makes a god of his belly.

• 25:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, belly god. Oh, that's good.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  I need that on a T-shirt.

• 25:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Sarah Marshall?

  It is like, there's a charming amount of voice in it, but it's just like, it's interesting to be like, I don't know, there's this like, pure quest for information that seems like it's made possible by like, the sheer power of spite.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  That's why it's the dictionary wars.

• 26:19Sarah Marshall?

  It's not the dictionary picnic.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  It's the dictionary mouth friends. So, I mean, there's, there's a lot of political biases that are going into these early grammar books, school books, textbooks, dictionaries, because when it's a novel creation, when you don't have centuries of these books already, you can move the needle quite a bit in the direction of your country over another's if you get there first.

• 26:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah, it's kind of the same principle that like, if you decide what goes in school textbooks in the United States or any other country, but you know, as a belittlesaying American, that's what I know. If you control what goes in textbooks, you control what people believe to be true and what they perceive and the world as it is policed and created. So I mean, there's such an interesting tension generally, and it feels like we're in this period of the standardization of knowledge that's making it true in a, in a deeper way than it has been before maybe, that there's the power of learning and discovering new information, and then the power of what you relay to the people and that those can be

• 27:26Sarah Marshall?

  different things and that it can be different because you have an agenda and it can just be different because every person is imperfect as a vessel for the things that they are trying to understand. And sometimes I really hate Scottish people.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And I guess if, if history is written by the winners, then the lexicon is written also by the winners or by just the people who get to that finish line first.

• 27:52Sarah Marshall?

  Right. The language we write the books in.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. So Johnson publishes this dictionary in 1755, and it immediately becomes the, the gold standard of dictionaries. Again, it's technically not the first English dictionary, but it's definitely the longest and the most meticulous and exhaustive. And as Johnson hoped, it kind of draws this line in the sand between British English and American English, and it enshrines British English as just the default standard.

• 28:22Sarah Marshall?

  I was just watching, as I do last night, an episode of Unsolved Mysteries where they were talking about like, the crop circles around Stonehenge, which are like a newer phenomenon that I think we tend to think, and I don't know, I should do an episode on that one day, get to talk about signs. But it was like, a lot of British men with two, to me as an American, very fancy sounding accents, and that as an American, you tend to think, like, even now, right, you hear, you know, like an Oxbridge type of an English accent, and you're like, well, that guy knows what he's talking about. And then he's talking about crop circles. And you're like, no, maybe he doesn't know.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, Samuel Johnson was probably on to something in that the Oxford British accent really is the best vehicle to convey any kind of information and have it believed by the most number of people.

• 29:21Sarah Marshall?

  Even if it's just, you know, so you know how in Unsolved Mysteries, they do the update, you know, they're like, who could ever solve this unsolved mystery? And then it's a guy being like, there's simply no way. It could just be two gents from the pub. And then they're like, update, it was two guys from the pub. And you're like, well, sometimes it's two guys from the pub.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that should be the name of a, of a collection of unsolved mysteries, or just the title of the next biography of American histories. It was just two guys at the pub, after all.

• 29:56Sarah Marshall?

  It so often is, yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  So, this book comes out, and then fast forward a few decades to the late 1700s. The American colonies have won their independence, the Revolutionary War is over, and now there's this question that hangs over America. What will its identity be? What will this new American culture look like? And it's at this time that America starts rejecting anything and everything British. Not just its government, not just its kings, but also its culture and its language.

• 30:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which is tough to do, because we do speak it.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yourself in their shoes, here they are. They had just won independence from England, and yet they're still speaking English, the language of their former oppressors. So for a brief period during this wave of anti-British sentiment, America considers replacing English with an entirely different language. There's a few people that nominate Greek as a replacement. Others suggest French. There's even this brief campaign to have Hebrew substituted for English, kind of as a way to symbolically unite Americans as a chosen people.

• 31:06Sarah Marshall?

  And then we realize that it's really, really hard to learn to speak Hebrew, and also a modern version of it won't be created for 200 years. And we're like, hmm, no.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And also that whole right to left thing.

• 31:19Sarah Marshall?

  Does anyone suggest Dutch? Because that seems somewhat reasonable, sort of.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Many languages are floated, and Dutch would be reasonable. It is a Germanic language like English.

• 31:29Sarah Marshall?

  We like to say cookie. We can just start with that and work our way out and consolidate circles.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Listen, if you give a language a cookie.

• 31:39Sarah Marshall?

  They'll ask for a cup of tea.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So it's around this time that this man Noah Webster comes in. So

• 31:45Sarah Marshall?

  Hello.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So Noah Webster, he's this young 25-year-old Connecticut school teacher, and he's just starting to gain notoriety for a school book he's published earlier that year titled The American Spelling Book. It quickly becomes this popular textbook in American schools, and it gives Webster a bit of an ego. He starts thinking of himself not only as a language authority, but also as a language savior, someone who's going to save English while also making it something wholly American. And he comes up with this idea that instead of replacing English entirely with French or Greek or Hebrew, he develops a plan for an American spelling.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  So he respells laugh as L-A-F. He respells tough as T-U-F, and tongue is T-U-N-G, and women as W-I-M-M-E-N. And he goes through the English language, removing silent letters and superfluous letters everywhere he can. And he publishes this proposal in 1789 in a piece titled An Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling. And needless to say, no one really takes Webster's new spelling seriously. It looks silly. It looks dumb. One reviewer writes, "We are sorry to observe this very peculiar and unsightly mode of spelling." Webster's own friend, a man named Ezra Stiles, writes to him, saying, "I suspect you have

• 33:09Speaker 01

  put in the pruning knife too freely." Even Webster's brother-in-law can't get on board. He writes to Webster, saying, "I ain't yet quite right for your orthography." So, no one really, no one's buying this, this simplified, short spelling.

• 33:22Sarah Marshall?

  That sounds like a country song, doesn't it? "I ain't yet quite right for your orthography."

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could see Willie Nelson singing that.

• 33:30Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  So, he can't get support. These spellings, they look uneducated, uncivilized, and childlike. And some historians have suspected that there's another reason Webster can't really get anyone on board, and that is, most of his peers don't like him.

• 33:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's hard.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  It's true. Webster could be pompous, and arrogant, and condescending, and he just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. In fact, I have a list here of some of the things that his contemporaries called him during his lifetime. Are you ready for this?

• 34:04Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  "A half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot, a great fool, and a bare-faced liar, a deceitful newsmonger, a spiteful viper, a maniacal pedant, a dung-hill cock of faction."

• 34:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Don't ask me what that is.

• 34:20Sarah Marshall?

  I like that.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  "An incurable lunatic, and a prostitute wretch."

• 34:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, in this economy, we're all flirting with that, but I can't get over "half-begotten," where it sounds like he didn't finish getting born. He's like, he's only like, birthed up to the waist. This all makes me think of, there was a New Yorker article about the Kushner family shortly before the 2016 election, I think, where someone who knew Jared Kushner at Harvard called him "a snaky motherfucker." And I think that every time I see him, and have for nine years.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Well, unlike Webster, Kushner is a fully-formed, snaky motherfucker, not a half-formed.

• 35:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, he managed to slither all the way out, which is, you know, good for him.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that dung-hill cock of faction.

• 35:14Sarah Marshall?

  It is because I do think that like the insults were quite good in the 18th century. You know, like I wouldn't want, it's like, I don't know. It's like what tourists said about New York in the 90s. It's like, great century, but I wouldn't want to live there. Like, I don't want to get the pox. I don't want to deal with the lack of painkillers. Don't get me wrong, but like the insults, the coffee shops, the beadwork, you know, there's, there's appealing stuff.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I think you could probably put together a colonial insult dictionary composed entirely of what people called Noah Webster.

• 35:48Sarah Marshall?

  That can be, you can have a supplement, a sequel book to this book. This is called What People Called Noah Webster.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so about a decade after trying to push America to adopt these simpler spellings, Webster basically gives up and in 1800, he announces his new project, An Authoritative American Dictionary. He figures if he can't persuade Americans to spell differently, he can at least elevate American English in another way. So he can create this dictionary that will give credence to all those Americanisms and slang that Samuel Johnson had railed against, all those indigenous words like tomahawk and moose and squash, all those words like eggnog.

• 36:33Sarah Marshall?

  So I don't know, I like this. I also, I feel like we need to hear more when we are growing up about the extremely bad ideas of people whose good ideas we hear about because it makes it seem like history is just a long procession of people having one good idea and then dying, when in fact the bad ideas that brought them to the good ones are kind of the most interesting.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hate to plug my book. It's called Enough is Enough, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, and it's available everywhere. But it really is a biography of failures. It's a biography of all these people who, whose names we know in these elevated senses, whose names we know on statues like Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. But it's talking about periods of their lives where they failed and they had really preposterous ideas that didn't catch on and they were humiliated in many ways. And I think I'm really drawn to that side of history, the side of history that doesn't come through in the bullet pointed textbooks, but the kind that's like, you know, Charles Darwin would have preferred that you didn't know this part about his life.

• 37:36Sarah Marshall?

  Right, or the idea that like, I don't know, the sort of the dream that I understand why some people hold it because we're all so embarrassing as human beings and it's hard to deal with that sometimes. But like, what if I have good ideas and I contribute to society and then no one ever talks about my sex life? And it's like, oh no, we're going to, and we probably have to. So, yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in the future, all our biographies will be researched by our search history, and that scares me.

• 38:04Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God. I, mm, mm, that's, you know, I mean, there is a lot of information there, you know, it can't be denied. Okay, so Noah Webster kind of, and I agree, by the way, with his critics at the time, where, and you get into the reasons why this wouldn't work in your book, but what I recall and what sticks out to me is that it would actually take a really long time to teach people to spell this way. And so it seems like, do you think that he's giving in to the more practical objections? Or is he just kind of like, oh, whatever, I'll do this new thing?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Well, he does give in to the practical objections. He realizes that his radical spelling reform is too much, too fast. People don't like changing their language all at once, being forced to do it by some authority. People are really tied, they tie their language to tradition and identity, and these are things that people just don't like changing. So any kind of big radical reform wasn't going to work. But he does have some ideas later on of how to slip these simplifications into the lexicon anyway, and I'll get to that. So he announces this big dictionary project in 1800, and he starts working alphabetically

• 39:22Speaker 01

  from A to Z. And just to give you a sense of how long and cumbersome this project is, it takes Webster six years just to reach the letter C.

• 39:31Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  It takes him seven more years to reach H, another two years to reach R, and at last, he finishes in 1825, after 25 years working on the project.

• 39:42Sarah Marshall?

  My God.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  His final word that he works on is zymome, and he later described the feeling of finishing the project. He writes, "When I had come to the last word, I was seized with a trembling which made it somewhat difficult to hold my pen steady for the writing. But I summoned strength to finish the last word, and then, walking about the room a few minutes, I recovered."

• 40:05Sarah Marshall?

  That is, how does that compare in your experience to finishing, uh, writing a book?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  It's very similar.

• 40:11Sarah Marshall?

  That didn't take as long. Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  I've never worked on a book for 25 years, but it's very similar. There is a feeling of unsteady hand, a feeling of your heart beating, your heart racing, uh, you, you feel a little flushed, maybe, and, and a great joy. And I, I'm sorry to say, it doesn't last that long because the nature of, I don't know, certain writers and artists is that you're, you're looking for the next thing pretty quickly after.

• 40:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, like with slot machines.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Like the slot machines. You can't get off the cycle, but there is a moment and it's a really beautiful moment. And, um, and I guess when you're a book author and you only have, you know, a few books that you write in your lifetime, then you only experience that joy a few times. So it's very precious.

• 40:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I, I feel like it's also, like, I've never finished a book that went on to be published, but in, in my youth, I, I, you know, had a lot of projects that will never see the sun. And two of them were finished book-length manuscripts. And I remember the feeling of finishing, but it was like, I remember that feeling now in combination with all of the kind of, the things that I loved about the whole project over time and the feeling of like, ending the day and starting the next day with the feeling of an idea still to be expressed and still, and sort of taking shape.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:37Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like there is this kind of, you know, not that making something or, you know, researching or just, you know, work generally on any kind of large project. Like, it's obviously very difficult at times and there are times that you don't want to be doing it. Like, nothing worth doing can be fun all the time, I think. But it feels like, to me, the joy of finishing is so much smaller than the joy of doing something if you're doing the thing that... That you need to be doing.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I started to feel the same way recently. The joy of being in the process of knowing what you're doing every morning.

• 42:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Having a goal, often a singular goal, just one project, one intention, and living in that day to day, waking up and knowing what you're gonna do. That is a more subtle joy, but a more enduring joy than that dopamine rush of finishing it.

• 42:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So I've tried to teach myself, tried to learn how to settle into that joy a little bit more.

• 42:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I love that. All right, Noah Webster.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  All right, Noah.

• 42:36Sarah Marshall?

  What's next for you?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  So this book is published three years later in 1828 as an American Dictionary of the English Language. And this is nearly twice as big as Samuel Johnson's, whereas Johnson's had around 40,000 entries. Webster's dictionary contains around 70,000.

• 42:53Sarah Marshall?

  Honey.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yep, it includes indigenous words like skunk and canoe. It introduces some distinctly American food staples such as applesauce and squash.

• 43:03Sarah Marshall?

  What were they feeding babies in England, I ask you? Because, you know, it's more gruel.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:11Sarah Marshall?

  And opium, of course.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  And his book also includes some new hyphenated words that are cropping up in America, words like savings bank and reorganize.

• 43:25Sarah Marshall?

  The most American word of all. Compound interest.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  So as inclusive as this book was with all these new Americanisms, it's also noted for what it doesn't include. And it doesn't include the U in color and honor. It doesn't include the final K at the end of public and picnic, which was very typical in English back then. And Webster, in fact, cuts out dozens of silent letters and Latin suffixes and superfluous vowels. You know, these changes that he had tried to implement decades earlier in his spelling reform, but which never caught on. And because he's slipping them in as part of this much larger lexicon, you know, 70,000 entries, they don't set off alarm bells. They don't really get noticed and therefore he's able to smuggle them into American English quietly.

• 44:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. It's like when the White House releases 70,000 pages of documents and it takes a while to realize how much they're spending on pens.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a big bill designed to create new housing, but it ends up taking away healthcare and food from everybody.

• 44:39Sarah Marshall?

  Just quietly.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Just quietly.

• 44:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  So here's just a short list of some of Webster's simplified spellings that were in his dictionary and have since been adopted in American English. We have theater and center ending er rather than re.

• 44:52Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Of course, we have honor, color, neighbor, favorite without the U. We have program with one M, wagon with one G. We have plow spelled P L O W rather than P L O U G H. And we have draft spelled D R A F T rather than D R A U G H T.

• 45:16Sarah Marshall?

  It's so funny because so many of these spellings either kind of still exist, right? Where you're like, come with me to the theater. I love theater and seeing it in the theater, you know, when they're having, when they have like a theater downtown that they still spell re. So you're like seeing live theater in the theater.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Or a mom and pop gift shop called ye olde shop. And it's old with a E at the end and shop with two P's.

• 45:42Sarah Marshall?

  I love the shopa. Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  It's like this indication that you're somehow genuine or nostalgic about an earlier, simpler time.

• 45:52Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's like, well, look, this saltwater taffy store on the Oregon coast has been here since before I know Webster's dictionary, honey.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And I think spelling theater ending in re has that same effect on the American psyche as hearing a British accent try to explain something to you.

• 46:12Sarah Marshall?

  That's true. It really does.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  It automatically comes with more authority.

• 46:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. Couldn't just be two guys from the pub.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  So I have a couple of examples of words that he spelled in his dictionary that didn't catch on. Spelling tongue, T U N G.

• 46:28Sarah Marshall?

  I do like that spelling.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  I do too. And then also the word ache spelled A K E.

• 46:33Sarah Marshall?

  That's cute. Yeah. It's so funny, the stuff that works and that doesn't. But that apparently we were like, yeah, we don't need you and stuff. We were, a lot of us weren't even doing that anyway, to be honest. So, yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I have a few other fun and bizarre definitions, kind of like Johnson's.

• 46:50Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  In Webster's dictionary, he includes the term kissing crust.

• 46:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Do you want to guess what that means?

• 46:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:59Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, all I can think of is when you're kissing someone and their lips have a crust. What is it?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  So it's actually the crust of a loaf that touches another.

• 47:11Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's so cute.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  So when you're baking loaves of bread in the oven, or cookies or muffins, and they expand so much that they touch, that is the kissing crust.

• 47:20Sarah Marshall?

  And when cookies do it, it's the cookie crust. Oh, no, it's still the kissing crust. But I wanted to get the word cookie in there to honor the Dutch. Yeah.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  We can call it the cookie crust.

• 47:30Sarah Marshall?

  The cookie's kissing crust.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And then we have the word vernate, which means to become young again. And it's derived from the Latin word for spring.

• 47:38Sarah Marshall?

  Incredible. Yeah, this is so good. I also feel like if you can't keep up with today's slang, like, don't try, just like, get old fashioned and make up your own weird words and then say it with conviction. This is why, do you remember this was kind of a popular book in the late 90s? There's a children's book called Frindle. Do you remember this?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  I do.

• 47:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Where like a kid decided to start calling pens frindles and then it caught on and like adults tried to suppress it, but it didn't work. And then at the end of the book, frindle is in the dictionary. That was a good book.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think this should be your next big project then. You know, you're 37, the same age as Samuel Johnson. You can start a nine year project of just words that you make up that have

• 48:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  very believable definitions.

• 48:23Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, this is also the age at which Julia Child learned how to cook. Which just I like is kind of an example of like, you know how, I don't know. I think maybe this is kind of an American thing, too. Like, we want to call it on our lives as early as possible. We want to be like 25 in this country and be like, I know what the whole rest of my life is going to look like, based on what the first part has looked like. It's like, clearly, we have no idea, because if you ask Julia Child at 36, they'd be like, how much cooking have you done? And she'd be like, oh, my God, like, none. I don't imagine that's going to come up later, but she would. Be incorrect.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually, um, I have a couple of friends that wrote a book. I'll give them a little plug. They wrote a book called The Swayze Year. And it's basically about people who hit their peak or got their break later in life. Patrick Swayze got his big break in Dirty Dancing.

• 49:17Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  At the age of 35.

• 49:19Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Far too old to be surviving on juju bees.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  So Samuel Johnson, he's the language authority in England. Webster, he's now the language authority in America. And this is where these dictionary wars start to take a turn. So.

• 49:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, rock'em, sock'em, pedants.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  And what, so what began as these grand nation building projects, you know, two lexicographers trying to establish their country's identity and culture. It starts becoming a little bit more like high school drama. And that's where this guy, Joseph Worcester, comes in.

• 49:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  So Joseph Worcester, he's a teacher from New Hampshire. He's in his 40s and he specializes in writing school textbooks. He's written a few on geography, a couple on history. And in 1828, he's hired to work on an abridged edition of Webster's dictionary. But while he's working on this abridgement, Worcester is also putting together his own American dictionary, a competitor to Webster's. He's literally editing one dictionary and writing another simultaneously.

• 50:22Sarah Marshall?

  And does he spell his name Worcester like Worcestershire Sauce or like the College of Worcester in Ohio? Cause I feel like that would place him on a certain side.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Like Worcestershire Sauce.

• 50:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  W O R C E S T E R.

• 50:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. I don't know. I love that even his name is like, you know, in America, we could take some of those letters out for you. Just do a little talk.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  And maybe that accounts for a little bit of the feud that does arise between him and Webster. So the thing about Worcester is he's more of a Samuel Johnson guy. He likes Johnson's British spellings. He believes British English is the true and proper English. And he thinks Webster has been a little too reckless with his spellings and his Americanisms. So this abridged Webster's dictionary comes out in 1820. Nine, Worcester's dictionary comes out in eighteen thirty. And even though Worcester has taken this more traditional British approach, critics start accusing him of plagiarizing Webster. A Massachusetts newspaper called The Palladium prints an anonymous letter that reads,

• 51:25Speaker 01

  quote, "A gross plagiarism has been committed by Mr. Worcester on the literary property of Noah Webster." "Mr. Worcester, having become acquainted with Mr. Webster's plan, immediately set about appropriating to his benefit the valuable labors, acquisitions, and productions of Mr. Webster. Mr. Worcester has pilfered the products of the mind as readily as the common thief." And it sparked some controversy. Everyone starts pointing their fingers at Worcester. But here's the thing about the letter. Although it can't be proven, it's entirely possible that the anonymous author is Noah Webster himself.

• 52:03Sarah Marshall?

  Noah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Webster was known to publish rave reviews of his own work under anonymous authorship.

• 52:11Sarah Marshall?

  No, I don't do that. So basically, back in the day, if you needed a sock puppet, you would just like, go to your friend's printing press or something, I guess.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, Walt Whitman, when Leaves of Grass came out, he actually published this rave anonymous review of the book. I mean, he used such larger-than-life language to describe himself. He says of himself, "Finally, an American bard at last." And it wasn't until many years later that people started realizing, like, looking through this letter and seeing all the earmarks of his rhythm and his language. I think it was very common then to publish rave reviews of yourself anonymously, and also rave criticisms of others anonymously.

• 52:55Sarah Marshall?

  Well, naturally. I mean, it was, you know, life before the alt-dot news groups. To be fair, Walt Whitman did warn us that he contained multitudes. He just didn't say that one of those multitudes liked to give him rave reviews.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  You know, everyone has an inner critic. Some people also have that outer critic that just is biased toward themselves.

• 53:19Sarah Marshall?

  I saw like a TikTok or something once where somebody was talking about like trying to learn to make their inner voice sound like NBA player post-game interviews or to respond to it that way, you know, where it's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why'd you do that? And you're like, you know, I just tried to get out there and do my best, play my best for my team. And, you know.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  You know, I think at the end of a writing day, now I'm gonna do a little personal press conference for myself. I'm gonna turn on the selfie camera, look in, sit at a desk and say, hey, we tried our best. You know, at the end of the day, we all play as a team and we'll get them tomorrow.

• 53:57Sarah Marshall?

  And you know what? Houston's got a good team, too. Sometimes that's the way it goes.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

• 54:03Sarah Marshall?

  Some are born to sing the blues. So anyway, okay, so no Webster's. You know, I guess if you're, you've got such a strong dictionary writing hand, the bad reviews of others just fly off the page.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  And the thing is, now that this controversy is out in public, Webster publishes another letter under his own name in the Palladium, the same Massachusetts newspaper.

• 54:28Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, I agree.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. He endorses this theory that Worcester has stolen his words and his definitions.

• 54:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. He actually doesn't upcarrot and says this.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  And he actually specifies exactly 121 entries from Worcester's book that he claims can't be found in any other dictionary except his own. And he challenges Worcester to prove him wrong. So Worcester does prove him wrong. He publishes a letter in the Palladium citing other dictionaries that do include these 121 words. So Webster publishes another letter in the Palladium alleging various other breaches and violations. Worcester replies, and this letter war goes on for a year.

• 55:11Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Petty accusations, public takedowns, lexical snobbery. It's just the dictionary wars are in full swing now.

• 55:20Sarah Marshall?

  Don't you think like, you know, I mean, we're, we are where we are. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. But like, it does feel like. The speed that things happen at, like, I just think that most human beings are better equipped to like be in this kind of debate like over the course of a year with like, you know, you write something and then you put it in an envelope and then you seal it with wax and then you give it to a guy on a horse and then eventually it gets to the right person as opposed to just like going back and forth in like an online comment section over the course of like an hour while you're making dinner and then just going through so many like going through the number of emotions that you would normally get to

• 56:02Sarah Marshall?

  spin out for like weeks or months and also just like having no time to make sure you understand something correctly. I don't know, I just, again, I don't want to go back to the past, but the timeframes seem kind of nice.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Right. Literary feud back then took time. You had to put effort into it. You had to sleep on it. You had to write the letter and then write the rest tomorrow. You had to use a thesaurus.

• 56:26Sarah Marshall?

  You had to sharpen your quill.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  You had to sharpen your quill, you know, it was padded out. So there was, it was spread out. I think what Twitter has done is expedited our literary feuds, all our feuds in general.

• 56:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  And condensed them from a year into three minutes.

• 56:41Sarah Marshall?

  The feuds are too fast now. I mean, even in the 90s, you know, Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia had to wait to both get on TV to talk about how much they hated each other.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe.

• 56:51Sarah Marshall?

  That was a fun one.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Maybe the problem is not that we feud, but that feuds are too fast.

• 56:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let's get, let's romanticize our feuds.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  I mean, feuds are as American as skunk and canoe.

• 57:06Sarah Marshall?

  There you go.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  All right. So these dictionary wars are continuing, these petty feuds in this, in this newspaper. Then in 1843, Webster dies and his estate sells his dictionary rights to two siblings, Charles and George Miriam, who print and sell books in Massachusetts. And the Miriam's not only carry on the Webster name, they also carry on Webster's feud with Worcester.

• 57:32Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, that's nice.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  So, three years after Webster dies, in 1846, Worcester publishes a new, more comprehensive dictionary titled A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language, which contains around 83,000 words, so about 10,000 more than Webster's. And the Miriam's scour this new dictionary for examples of plagiarism, which they don't find. So they ask a friend, a man named Noah Porter, to write a negative review of Worcester's book, basically a hit piece. And it gets published in this journal, American Review, and it accuses Worcester of including tens of thousands of absurd and extraneous words just to inflate his total entry count, because in those days, a big selling point for a dictionary

• 58:18Speaker 01

  was the number of entries included. The more, the better.

• 58:21Sarah Marshall?

  Now with 20% more words. Don't you love it when you're buying detergent? And they're like, now with 10% more detergent, but that doesn't say than before. It just says more. And you're like, you didn't say what it was more than. I feel like you're lying to me. But anyway, it's just an issue I have.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  You also didn't mention that the inflation rate of detergent quantity is lower than the inflation rate of the detergent price.

• 58:48Sarah Marshall?

  Exact, right. Yeah. Shrinkflation is a concern. Another great new made up word that feels like it has to be American, because boy, do we do a lot of that here.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yes, very true. Again, I think you should put together your own lexicon.

• 59:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm right on the, on the cusp. Okay, so he's accused of putting linguistic sawdust in his dictionary.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. The previous accusations of plagiarism are still hounding him, and his name is being sullied. And now, at this point, I want to point out that Worcester has done nothing provably wrong. There's no evidence that he plagiarized Webster or inflated his book's pages to help market it. He's kind of the victim of this PR hit campaign waged by Webster and his estate. In fact, Worcester is generally considered to be a very kind and gentle guy. He's shy and quiet and a little socially awkward, but he's not pompous and arrogant like Webster. One contemporary said that in social situations, Worcester was, quote, "Want to sit silent, literally by the hour, a slumbering volcano of facts and statistics

• 59:55Speaker 01

  while others talked." He would join the conversation occasionally, but then he would go back to being quiet. So he was the opposite of Webster in a lot of ways. It's kind of unfair that he gets,

• 1:00:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  His name gets, you know, dragged through the mud like this.

• 1:00:09Sarah Marshall?

  Well, he dared to be second and, you know, yeah, sometimes that doesn't go so well if the first guy is still around. I also love that, like, the Miriam's, rather than returning the unused portion of the feud, decided to just keep running with it. I mean, I guess it's like if you are the owner of the legacy or the steward of the legacy, then it's sort of, it makes sense to have more of an interest in doing that. But I don't know, it's just very charmingly petty. I mean, it's, I, I don't think that like we produce more or better information if everyone is fighting the whole time. But it's, I just like that it took this long for two guys to hate each other back then, that it passed on to like inheritors.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Right. Well, when you're talking about your typical novel or your typical nonfiction book, there's plenty of room in the world for books that overlap with that subject. But I guess in this world of early dictionaries, there really is only room for one authoritative version of something.

• 1:01:11Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  The American dictionary, the English dictionary. And I think the Miriam's really see that it's important that they stomp out Worcester and they raise up the Webster name and they continue to do this.

• 1:01:25Sarah Marshall?

  It's like the restaurants in LA that are all competing to have invented the French dip as if anyone cares. I care a little, but come on.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  No, it's exactly the same thing. So a few years after Worcester publishes his Universal and Critical Dictionary, a publisher in London puts out an unauthorized edition of it that essentially lists Worcester and Webster as co-authors.

• 1:01:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  It's unclear why, but Worcester likely suspects that the Miriam's have something to do with it. So Worcester publishes a pamphlet titled, "A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed", relating to the publication of Worcester's dictionary in London, which blames the London publisher and other unspecified parties for conspiring to lower Worcester's standing. So what do the Miriam's do? They publish a pamphlet with the exact same title. "A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed, Relating to the Publication of Worcester's Dictionary in London", but this one is in defense of Webster, and its effect is essentially to sully the waters, because now no one will know which pamphlet is Worcester's, which one is the Miriam's, and who to trust at all.

• 1:02:35Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that was pretty sneaky.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  It's pretty, it's pretty smart. So Worcester, no matter what he does, he's just always under this shadow of suspicion that he's, at worst, a plagiarist, or at best, a knockoff Noah Webster.

• 1:02:49Sarah Marshall?

  Man.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  And this goes on for years and years. The Miriam's continue to publish pieces against Worcester, degrading his scholarship, boosting Webster's name. And at one point in the 1850s, the Miriam's hear through the grapevine that Worcester is planning to publish an illustrated dictionary, which was kind of a novel thing then. So the Miriam's rush out a hastily published illustrated Webster's dictionary just to beat Worcester to market. It's all petty as fuck.

• 1:03:20Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my god, and is there like, is there like big dictionary money to fight over, or is this more personal?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  There's a lot of dictionary money.

• 1:03:29Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  I think it's estimated that in the 1800s, Webster's dictionary sells, tens of millions of copies. And especially if you're considered the one true authoritative version of something, then you're gonna be in every school classroom, you're gonna be in every desk, you're gonna be in every home. So yeah, there is a lot of money in this. And I think Webster's original dictionary in 1828 sells for $20, which is a huge price back then. So yeah, they're, they're raking in the money.

• 1:04:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  So the Miriam's, they finally win this fight in 1865 when Worcester dies. And at last, they're free to market Webster's dictionary without any competition. And in the end, I guess Webster not only wins these wars, but he obliterates all competition. He obliterates Worcester, he obliterates Johnson.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  And it eventually reaches the point that today, the name Webster is practically synonymous with the word dictionary. You know, no one says, "Look it up in Worcester's," or "Look it up in Johnson's," but most people wouldn't know what I meant if I said, "Look it up in Webster's."

• 1:04:35Sarah Marshall?

  But the joke's on him because he's dead by the time he wins that one.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  So there's a little addendum to all this, and it's that in 1889, the Miriam Brothers lose their copyright on the Webster name, and a surge of knockoff Webster dictionaries pollute the market, to the point where Miriam Webster, which is still considered the official Webster's, is eventually forced to come up with a tagline to distinguish themselves. So their tagline that they still use today is "Not just Webster, Miriam Webster."

• 1:05:09Sarah Marshall?

  That's a terrible tagline.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  And yet, this is what they have had to resort to. And interestingly, today, the term Webster's dictionary is considered a genericized trademark, which means it is still not protected by copyright. So technically, anyone can publish their own dictionary and call it Webster's. Which, again, brings me to the reason I'm here today, Sarah. I think that you need to publish Sarah Marshall's Webster's Dictionary of Made-Up Words, and I think it should take you nine years.

• 1:05:43Sarah Marshall?

  And 18th century insults, yeah. And then I'll, after nine years, I'll emerge and spend, you know, my menopause having a feud, but I'm gonna insist that it happen longhand, and that'll, that'll be fun, too. Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Longhand and in print media, definitely not online. So you're gonna have to buy some stamps, buy some envelopes, and pick your feuding partner early.

• 1:06:12Sarah Marshall?

  Because it's a commitment, you know, I mean, a feud is not to be entered into lightly, really.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:06:17Sarah Marshall?

  You're gonna grow old together.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Nor do you need two parties to agree to a feud. Really, just one party.

• 1:06:24Sarah Marshall?

  How, what was it like for you to, you know, both spend the time writing this book and now to finish it and to be kind of now looking for the next thing, but how has it been for you to spend time with all of these feuding, sometimes extremely unpleasant 18 century guys? Do you miss them?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  I truly, I fell in love with all of these characters. Some of them are so eccentric and some of them were brilliant eccentrics, you know, Noah Webster, certainly Benjamin Franklin, and then there were some who were clearly out of their minds, but I do love them all. I really like obsessive people. Maybe not in the room with me, but looking back historically, I like people who get very pedantically obsessed with one tiny little thing for long periods of their life and they see it as something that's going to improve the world or create a utopia. You know, Noah Webster with his simplified spelling or any number of these really obsessive

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  hobbyists who really had a lot of time on their hands and could devote decades to a single project. And in the end, a lot of these projects didn't work and I also love the futility of it. I think there's just something poetic and beautiful looking back on it. The futility of being really in love with a project that doesn't work out.

• 1:07:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe the phenomenon where the project is the thing in a way where we're, you know, especially in our culture, very results oriented, perhaps because we don't even have time to put the you in color. So why on earth would we savor the moment? But that, you know, you look at somebody who had this grand dream that didn't work out or that sort of, you know, they remained in obscurity, at least during their lifetime. And then you think, well, that might've been just fine, you know? If the project is enough to give your life shape and meaning, then maybe it's in a way better to not become successful and then end up having some kind of weird feud that lasts beyond your own death.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  I mean, that's true. The moment you become public, you become maybe a target for people who are jealous, like a Noah Webster type. You become a target for people who really just want to take you down a notch, or a target for a mouth friend, someone who pretends to be your friend, but really isn't.

• 1:08:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. I also guess, yeah, I love the failed slang. I love, I do just love the way certain language feels just to say and to read, you know, it's kind of like old baseball names. Like, just give me a list of old baseball names, I'll be happy.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Shoeless Joe Belly God Mouth Friend.

• 1:09:16Sarah Marshall?

  Shoeless Joe Belly God, from the Akron kissing crests.

• 1:09:23Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, we've survived the dictionary wars. Thank you for taking us safely through this battlefield.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Thank you for indulging me. I know this is, you know, this is a subject that I think from afar can look kind of, you know, dusty and old, but at its heart, really, language is about so many things that have to do with our culture. And it's about access and literacy and identity and communication. I think I always feel closely attached to this subject when I'm writing about it, when I'm reading about it. It really does make up so much of the ether of our life. And I think it's invisible to a lot of us.

• 1:10:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. And then it is, you know, like so many things, once you start paying attention to it, it really rewards the attention that you give. And there's just so much joy in language. It feels, I love getting to, I don't know, getting to encounter this history and seeing how language can, you know, always has been in one place or another, in one way or another, used as a tool of control and oppression. And yet, that doesn't define it. And the sort of Weirdness of it and the history that gets picked up by it and, you know, the way that people every day are finding new ways to use language just makes me happy. Thank you so much for, for taking us on this trip.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sarah.

• 1:10:46Sarah Marshall?

  Tell us again what your book is, where can people find it? Would it make a good stocking stuffer? I really think it would.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  It would make a fantastic stocking stuffer. It's actually in the shape of a stocking, which means the shape of a foot.

• 1:10:58Sarah Marshall?

  You gotta kind of wrestle it in, actually. But once it's in there, yeah, it looks good.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  So the book is Enough is Enough. The second enough is spelled E-N-U-F. Subtitle, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. My name is Gabe Henry. You can find me on Instagram at Gabe dot Henry. And yeah, I'd love to talk more about this book with anyone who's interested in talking about it.

• 1:11:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And, you know, and if you got any letters written by a quill, then perhaps that's from a listener. I certainly hope it is.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  I hope so, too.

• 1:11:46Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Gabe Henry, our wonderful guest. You can find Gabe's book Enough is Enough and more about his work linked in the show notes. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing and producing. We have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus. Check out the devil you know and take good care of yourself. We'll see you next time.