Time-Travelling with Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary

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I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don’t know all of them. The other day I came across a new one, on page 2 of Michael Robbins’s new book, “Equipment for Living,” in a quote from the critic Kenneth Burke: “Surely the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images.” I did not feel, at first, that I had to look up “alembicated,” because it was clear from the context that the word basically meant “sophisticated,” and also because I knew that an alembic was some kind of glassware, and this seemed, at the time, like enough knowledge. But then I came to a second instance: “I assume that what Burke says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard, though they are hardly alembicated at all.” This usage sounded somehow more specific than the first, and it made me realize that I didn’t know the lyrics to even one Def Leppard song. Now I felt inadequate, and had to Google something.

I thought for a while about which to investigate, Def Leppard or “alembicated,” and decided on the latter. Indeed, it basically meant “sophisticated,” like something boiled for a long time in an alembic, or, to quote Merriam-Webster, “overrefined as if by excessive distillation.” Then, just as I was about to leave the dictionary’s Web site, I noticed something new: next to the earliest known year that a word appears in print—for “alembicated,” 1786—Merriam-Webster now offers a link to a list of all the other words that were first used in the same year. The feature is called Time Traveler, and it has indeed enabled me to travel in time, because once I start looking at it I find that hours have passed. What could be more bewitching than to see, under a given year, all the words that it birthed, like a squirming litter of word-kittens? In an effort to save the public some of the time I myself have lost in this fashion, I will endeavor to summarize my findings.

The year-by-year lists start with 1500, the rich vintage that gave us “backside,” “brownie,” “cadaver,” “civil law,” and “haircloth.” The fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth, and twelfth centuries each have their own lists, as does the catchall “before 12th century,” notable for its outmoded Anglo-Saxon administrative vocabulary—“wapentake,” “witenagemot”—and for a charming, antiquated term for vocabulary itself: “word-hoard.” Time Traveler comes to a stop in the arids of 2010, a year with only two entries: “Arab Spring” and “gamification.”

One pleasure of searching the lists, I discovered, is to look for apparent anachronisms. I took a childish delight in seeing that “outgoing,” “marshmallow,” and “weird” predate the twelfth century, and that “hamster” and “housecat” both date to 1607. (This fine Shakespearean year also gives us “Banquo,” “flotsam,” “large-hearted,” “Machiavellianism,” “marmot,” and “melancholia.”) “Quixotic” and “Shakespeareana” don’t appear until 1718, in conjunction with “American,” “Franklin stove,” “Hobbesian,” “joint-stock company,” “pukka,” and “unelected”: one feels one is in the age of expansion and imperialism. The first year of the American Revolution, 1775, brings “anti-American,” “free speech,” “Indian grass,” “insurgent,” and “liberalize.” Then, in 1776, a premonitory alphabetic run: “shotgun,” “slaveholder,” “slough of despond.”

In 1790, the year after the French Revolution, “guillotine,” “exterminatory,” “furore,” “sansculotte,” and, ominously, “lamppost” enter the fray. The Civil War years see into print “anthrax,” “anti-draft,” “mortarman,” “Old Glory,” and “rebel yell,” as well as “vibrator” and “Wiener schnitzel,” because every era is too complex to allow easy generalization. In 1887, we get “trench warfare” and “department store,” “helicopter” and “mujahideen,” “screwy” and “Statue of Liberty”; 1914 ushers in, all at once, “atomic bomb,” “bad guy,” “Bolshevik,” “gas gangrene,” and “newsreel,” but also “pillow talk” and “raw bar”—life, for some, goes on.

By 1937 (“blitzkrieg,” “scorched earth,” “show trial”), I found myself obsessively combing the lists for strings of found poetry:

boo-boo, borscht belt, B picture, bubble gum, bubkes

hydroponics, hyperrealism, ice-cream headache

tsk, Turing machine, twinset

washateria, widow’s walk, women’s room, yeti

The nineteen-sixties roll around with “after-party,” “diazepam,” and “funny farm.” Every time, it seems, was always the best of times and the worst of times—the time of “Jack Russell terrier” and “Kalashnikov,” “roach clip” and “sudden infant death syndrome,” “self-destruct” and “shell steak.”

Browsing the seventies, I was struck by how the vocabulary of modernity seemed to striate into recurring categories with characteristic voices. Cuisine and geopolitics were cosmopolitan and knowing (“carpaccio,” “chai,” “gulag,” “Moonie”), finance affected to be straight-shooting and square-jawed (“direct deposit,” “junk bond,” “sweat equity”), and fashion invoked comparisons to things that were practical or military (“cargo pocket,” “string bikini”). Workplace lingo was relentlessly jocular (“gotcha,” “wake-up call,” “wimp out”).

I was born in the year of “parachute pants” and “stepparenting,” “bad cholesterol” and “exercise bike,” “brewskis” and “Ebola.” Is it because I was a child then that the lists of the eighties seem to evoke whole worlds? An abridged alphabet of 1982: “AIDS,” “barista,” “couch potato,” “escape key,” “G-spot,” “immersion blender,” “metalhead,” “phone sex,” “Shiba Inu,” “Valley girl,” “zone out.”

I graduated from college in the year of “bling” and “blog,” “chillax” and “clickbait.” I wrote a dissertation in the year of “bucket list” and “mumblecore,” and finished my Ph.D. in time for “listicles,” “tweeps,” and “sharing economy.” Each of these more recent years gets only a handful of words: 2008 is just “Bitcoin,” “exome,” and “photobomb.” The record, it seems, is still being compiled. (New entries that don’t yet appear in the dictionary but have been suggested by users in the past few months include “nothing burger,” “negging,” “po-po,” and “heteronegativity.”)

Closing the Time Traveler tabs one by one, I found myself back where I started, in 1786, filled with new admiration for the language that, in this solitary year, found time to notice and to name so many creatures great and small—from the “hartebeest” to the “Hessian fly,” from the “millionaire” to the “poverty-stricken,” from the “priapic” to the “pigeon-toed,” from the “lance corporal” to the “niminy-piminy.” I returned to that Burke quote—“Surely the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images”—and thought it was a fine description of the dictionary.

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