Fiat Lex: A Dictionary Podcast

Nov 07 2018 435

Fiat Lex: A Dictionary Podcast artwork

Love words? Then you probably love dictionaries, those great guardians of English, hallowed and revered, unchanging as eternity. Ha, just kidding! Dictionaries are living, breathing documents that record a living, breathing language, and which are created by living, breathing nerds. Join two of those nerds--authors and lexicographers Kory Stamper and Steve Kleinedler--as they accompany you down the absurdist log-flume ride of the English language, the dictionaries that chronicle it, and the dorks who dare do such derring-do (lexically speaking).

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

Allsorts 2: "Match Game" Wednesday [EXPLICIT]

Nov 07 2018 23 mins

Continuing last episode's discussion on copyediting dictionaries, Charles Nelson Reilly (played by Steve) and Brett Somers (played by Kory) talk a bit about how online dictionaries are edited and maintained. Steve mentions some of the edits to the new American Heritage online, and then the podcast quickly devolves from there into a discussion of all the "shit" words (and shit words

Oakgarry, Oak Ross: Always Be Copyediting

Oct 18 2018 27 mins

New word updates (like the one that American Heritage just announced!) are super sexy, but the real work that goes into your shiny new dictionary is invisible. Today, Steve and Kory take you down the meandering, Lovecraftian rabbithole of print copyright updates, when we disappear dictionary content that no one loves to make room for "twerk" and "baconnaise." What makes a new dicti

Friends with Words: More Jesse Sheidlower [EXPLICIT]

Oct 03 2018 23 mins

Part two of our excellent interview with lexicographer, language expert, tailor/tinker/soldier and spy, Jesse Sheidlower. We continue our discussion about The F-Word and the f-word; touch on slang dictionaries; talk about verisimilitude in movie or TV dialogue and Jesse's work as a language consultant for the Amazon series "The Man in The High Castle"; geek out about every lexicogr

Friends With Words: Jesse Sheidlower [EXPLICIT]

Sep 12 2018 28 mins

Steve and Kory have a special treat this week: the first half of our interview with lexicographer, author, bon vivant, raconteur, and damn fine human being Jesse Sheidlower. He talks about how he was sucked into the gaping maw of lexicography by Lord Byron's "tool," inadvertently became the hero of a novel set at Random House, wrote this little book called The F Word that resulted

Allsorts 1

Aug 27 2018 27 mins

all·sorts ('ôl-ˌsôrts) noun plural : a mixture of assorted confections (such as licorice); often used figuratively Today's episode is an assortment of colorful treats that, like licorice allsorts, stick unpleasantly to your teeth and coat your tongue with a weird film! In a figurative way. Steve and Kory dig into the mailbag and answer YOUR QUESTIONS about crowdsourced dictiona

I Want to Be A Dord

Aug 08 2018 30 mins

If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that mistakes happen. In the case of this particular podcast, they happen often! And they happen in dictionaries, too. We hope you were sitting down when we told you that. This episode is alllllll about mistakes. Steve and Kory issue corrigenda/errata for earlier episodes (and Kory can't figure out the difference between "corrigend

Beginnings, or, Ježíšmaria/Paskan marjat

Jul 26 2018 31 mins

What kind of a person writes dictionaries for a living? It helps to have what Steve calls "an early awareness of language." It's Old Home Fortnight at Fiat Lex, where Steve and Kory talk about growing up around other languages, studying German and Czech during the fall of Communism, which dictionaries they grew up with (Random House '66 REPRESENT), and why it took Steve decades to

The End of the Line (Literally)

Jul 11 2018 23 mins

Think you might be good at this lexicography racket? This episode will change your mind--or, at least, it should if you had any sense whatsoever. A good chunk of the job is mastering some of the most mundane publishing details imaginable, and that includes the subject of today's episode: the dots in the mid·dle of the head·words in your dic·tion·ary (or dic·tion·ar·y, depend

My Blue God: Hard Words

Jun 27 2018 32 mins

Lexicographers have a tweaked view of the language, and that includes hard words. No, not those hard words, like “koinonia” and “marocain” (Spelling Bee shoutout!). It's the small words are the ones that make lexicographers weep. Steve and Kory take a look back at some of the hard words they've defined, and along the way, Steve talks parts of speech and forks up the convers

Pronunciations, or You Say "Diaeresis" and I Say "Diaeresis"

Jun 13 2018 25 mins

Lots of people use dictionaries not for the definitions--who cares about those?--but for the pronunciations. Steve and Kory talk about how those pronunciations came to be, and why the pronunciation editor gets to watch TV all day instead of getting a REAL JOB. They explain what that stupid bananapants alphabet that American dictionaries use for pronunciations is, drop some hot hist