I found this softcover in this Little Free Library in Londonderry NH while dropping off some books of my own, and nabbed it for another release copy.

It's an in-depth - yet surprisingly droll - look at the nitty gritty of maintaining and publishing dictionaries. The author's a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, and much of the book describes how she first began to work for them and how the rather eccentric staff managed to provide definitions and updates for a language that's constantly in flux. Some of the concerns had to do with when a new word or changed usage became sufficiently widespread that it was worth recording in the dictionary - something that I found troubling, as I'm used to thinking of dictionaries as arbiters of language rather than as ongoing (and evolving) descriptors. (Some of the debates on specific instances were vastly entertaining; I could imagine my group of cronies or family members hashing out the topic, to much hilarity.) And the author herself gained some fame from one of these debates on usage: "In short order I became America's foremost 'irregardless' apologist."

If I ever harbored a desire to work with words for a living, this book cured me; while much of the job sounds entertaining, there are also some mind-bendingly tedious bits, especially when it's a key job-performance point as to whether "bored of" is now a correct construct, in addition to "bored with" or "bored by". [I don't think I ever heard anyone say "bored of", but apparently enough did that it became an issue for Merriam-Webster.] In one anecdote she describes meeting a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary (!!!), and among the shop-talk he mentioned that he was tasked with revising the definition for "run": "It took me nine months." (Yes, I did pause to go look at my own OED - a miniature version in two volumes, requiring a magnifying glass - to see how many pages "run" ran to...)

The author's love of language is clear and delightful, and the way she advances at work, acquiring skills, learning the more arcane aspects of the job, and coping with lexicographal crises is quite entertaining. Her writing style is amusing and sometimes snarky, with lots of footnotes that can be quite hilarious.

Guidelines for safely visiting and stocking Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the LFL site here.

I left this book in the Little Free Library outside the public library on this lovely day; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in NH here.]

*** Released for the 2020 Tick Tock challenge. ***