书名：Word by Word逐字逐句
作者：Kory Stamper
出版社名称：Vintage
出版时间：2018
语种：英文
ISBN：9781101970263
商品尺寸：13.2 x 1.7 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：320
在生活中，你是否切身体会过单词“irregardless”（中文释义为“不管不顾”）所表达的感觉？你是否曾经试图定义单词“is”（中文释义为“是”）的意义究竟为何？编制词典的过程其实充满了智慧和个性，而本书Word by Word《逐字逐句》则以一种幽默风趣的方式向广大读者呈现了词典编者在词典编制过程中的“酸甜苦辣”。

斯坦普在书中讲到：“我们视语言为防守的要塞，倒不如把语言当成一个小孩。语言有自己的生命，它在成长，这才是正确健康的语言观……我们永远也无法成为它真正的老板。这也是语言不断繁荣、不断蓬勃的原因。”

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.”
 
With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage.
Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

Review
“[An] eloquent love letter to letters themselves. . . . A cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.” —The Atlantic

“Both memoir and exposé, an insider’s tour of the inner circles of the mysterious fortress that is Merriam-Webster. Stamper leads us through her own lexicographical bildungsroman, exploring how she fell in love with words and showing us how the dictionary works, and how it interacts with the world that it strives to reflect.” —Adrienne Raphel, The New Yorker

“As a writer, Stamper can do anything with words. . . . You will never take a dictionary entry for granted again.” —Mary Norris, best-selling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
 
“A fascinating, even enthralling, examination of the way words actually work in our language, warts and all.” —The A.V. Club

“An unlikely page-turner. . . . Stamper displays a contagious enthusiasm for words and a considerable talent for putting them together.” —The New Yorker
 
“Word by Word cherishes the dexterity involved in making dictionaries, and . . . proves refreshingly attentive to its human stories. Part of its quirky charm is a delight in the idiosyncrasies of others—not least Merriam-Webster’s many correspondents.”
—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Packed with the kind of word-lore that keeps readers and writers up late at night: Where do our words come from? How and why do their meanings change year to year, century to century?” —The Dallas Morning News
 
“Great fun. . . . [Stamper] brings both zest and style. . . . An exuberant mash note to language.” —The Times Literary Supplement
 
“[Word by Word] mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries.” —The New York Times
 
“Anyone who loves words or has opinions about them will have fun in this sandbox of a book.” —The Washington Times
 
“A delectable feast. . . . [Stamper] declaims elegantly on the beauty and necessity of dialect, how to evaluate emerging words, and many other topics. [She] is at her best when entertaining the reader with amusing etymologies, celebrating the contentiousness of grammar, and quoting annoying emails from an opinionated public,” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Fascinating. . . . Part memoir, part workplace chronicle and part history lesson.”
—The New York Post
 
“A lexicographical bildungsroman. . . . [Stamper] presents passionate, precise, good-humored (and bad-humored) descriptions of every stage of the process that goes into making an entry.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education
 
“[Word by Word] entertains as much as it instructs.” —Baltimore Sun
 
“A captivating book.” —Lincoln Journal Star
 
“Idiosyncratic and engaging.” —The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)
 
“A smart, sparkling and often hilarious valentine to the content and keepers of dictionaries. . . . A paean to the craft of lexicography.’” —Shelf Awareness
 
“A funny inside look at how new words make their way into dictionaries, an irreverent take on the history of English itself, and a memoir of [Stamper’s] own journey.”
—Daily Hampshire Gazette
 
“[A] marvelous insight into the messy world behind the tidy definitions on the page. . . . By turns amusing, frustrating, surprising, and above all, engrossing. It is perhaps unsurprising, given her line of work, that Stamper employs words with delightful precision in her writing.” —Booklist
许多人都想当然地认为词典就是普通工具书，很少有人意识到编制词典的过程其实和语言本身一样生动且充满活力，背后蕴含着大量的学问、知识和技巧。作者科瑞·斯坦普为我们打开了词典编撰学的复杂世界，告诉我们哪些单词需要被定义、如何定义、以及这些单词在随时变化的语言中如何被运用。解释了为何看似普通的词反而是很难定义的，读者们肯定不会想到，对诸如“nude”和“marriage”这类简单单词的定义往往要花掉整整9个月。同时，作者在本书中也解密了很多不为人知的小故事，譬如：事实上“OMG”这个词（中文释义为“我的天”）是温斯顿·丘吉尔在1917年写的一封信中被第1次使用的。

本书同时也记录了作者斯坦普的雇主《韦氏国际词典》的部分历史。《韦氏国际词典》是美国结构主义语言学的硕果，该词典抱着对语言作客观记录和描写的宗旨，有闻必录，收罗了大量的俗语（包括许多不雅的字眼）。斯坦普和她博学乖僻的词典编撰同事们绝大多数时间都在静静地工作，但是他们并不能逃脱这个喧嚣的时代，他们正在静悄悄地改变我们沟通的方式。当然本书在让你体验英语这门语言的复杂和特异的同时，肯定也能让你捧腹大笑！
Kory Stamperis a lexicographer who spent almost two decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post, and she blogs regularly on language and lexicography at www.korystamper.com.

I grew up the eldest, book-loving child of a blue-collar family that was not particularly literary. According to the hagiography, I started reading at three, rattling off the names of road signs on car trips and pulling salad-dressing bottles out of the fridge to roll their tangy names around on my tongue: Blue Chee-see, Eye-tal-eye-un, Thouse-and Eyes-land. My parents cooed over my precociousness but thought little of it.
 
I chawed my way through board books, hoarded catalogs, deci­mated the two monthly magazines we subscribed to (National Geo­graphic and Reader’s Digest) by reading them over and over until they fell into tatters. One day my father came home from his job at the local power plant, exhausted, and dropped down onto the couch next to me. He stretched, groaning, and plopped his hard hat on my head. “Whatcha reading, kiddo?” I held the book up for him to see: Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, a book from my mother’s nursing days of yore. “I’m reading about scleroderma,” I told him. “It’s a disease that affects skin.” I was about nine years old.
 
When I turned sixteen, I discovered more adult delights: Austen, Dickens, Malory, Stoker, a handful of Brontës. I’d sneak them into my room and read until I couldn’t see straight.
 
It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head. As I grew older, words became choice weap­ons: What else does a dopey, short, socially awkward teenage girl have? I was a capital-n Nerd and treated accordingly. “Never give them the dignity of a response” was the advice of my grandmother, echoed by my mother’s terser “Just ignore them.” But why play dumb when I could outsmart them, if only for my own satisfaction? I snuck our old bargain-bin Roget’s Thesaurus from the bookshelf and tucked it under my shirt, next to my heart, before scurrying off to my room with it. “Troglodyte,” I’d mutter when one of the obnoxious guys in the hall would make a rude comment about another girl’s body. “Cacafuego,” I seethed when a classmate would brag about the raging kegger the previous weekend. Other teens settled for “brownnoser”; I put my heart into it with “pathetic, lick­spittling ass.”