We’re in a paradoxical time for dictionaries, claims Stefan Fatsis. On the one hand, we’re bombarded by words and ways to understand them in this lexically intense, linguistically charged political and cultural moment. On the other hand, the dictionary is struggling. Merriam-Webster—struggling to keep up with AI, machine learning software, and the explosion of voices vying for authority over what words mean—must evolve or compromise on the care put into defining words. But Merriam-Webster isn’t unique, and neither is language, for that matter, in its position within a (political) economy.

Throughout NYT-bestselling author Stefan Fatsis’ book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, readers learn about lexical histories, Merriam-Webster’s backstory, word-enthusiast subcultures, and the importance of a dictionary's measured, apolitical approach to language. As Stefan says, “the demand for life or death information—objective, solid, reality based information that a dictionary like Merriam Webster provides is critical to the functioning of democracy in a civil society.” So there you have it: the thrill and threat to the modern dictionary. It’s a paradox; hopefully an escapable one.

Stefan Fatsis Website

Unabridged - Grove Atlantic Site

Is This the End of the Dictionary? - Atlantic OpEd

American Dialect Society Selects rawdog as 2024 Word of the Year

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity AI for copyright and trademark infringement | The Verge

True Color by Kory Stamper

Here’s why “fuck” is in the dictionary

Lindsay Rose Russell

Peter Sokolowski

Ben Zimmer’s episode on Tomayto Tomahto

Nicole Holliday’s episode on Tomayto Tomahto

“And that’s what ideologies are: the air that you’re breathing, something that feels like it’s common sense.” From start to finish, this episode is about ideologies: their consequences, their makeup, and the struggle to shake their influence.

Savithry Namboodiripad, an associate professor of Linguistics at UMichigan leverages her linguistics background to critique ideologies of the native speaker, monolingualism, multilingualism, and more. Her research often proceeds on two separate tracks: studying language (usually syntax or language contact), and studying the field of linguistics: where our received theoretical framings come from, and how to reach stronger conclusions based on multi-disciplinary evidence.

In this episode, we discuss how to dismantle pernicious ideologies through better experimental design and theoretical framing, and then we get to questions that are far greater than just the field of linguistics. For instance, why must we always get to the “pure” natural object? How have ideas about language always transcended academic discourse?

Throughout, we express a lot of frustration at the academic frameworks that neglect to unsettle eugenicist, misogynistic, or racist ideologies. But it’s important to remember that linguistics is not alone in its failure. Science needs variables, and society provides them. Frameworks make things make sense, so they stay. Linguistics is caught in limbo between formal failures and the impositions of our content: language.

Savithry Namboodiripad

The ROLE Collective

Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab

Rejecting nativeness to produce a more accurate and just Linguistics

Towards a Decolonial Syntax: Research, Teaching, Publishing | Decolonizing Linguistics

Why we need a gradient approach to word order Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker

The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought

The AI Con may as well be the answer to the question: what happens when a linguist and a sociologist come together to write a book? Co-written by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con isn’t just a book, it’s an instruction manual to guide readers through this era of AI hype. In short, this book does what academic scholarship does best: close read texts, historical patterns, marketing schemes, statistics, politics, and more—and find a way to connect these granular details and examples to broader trends in our society. The AI Con sits along this continuum between close reading and abstraction. It’s a book about “AI” technology, yes, but it’s also about the demands of an economy that values human labor and intelligence less and less. It’s a book about the ideals of democracy conflicting with economic pressures; the mutually determining relationship between worldviews and technology, or technology and institutional priorities; the power of technology if people have autonomy over it; and the problems with western epistemological orientations when they are imposed via technology onto populations and individuals who never consented for this technology to be imposed on them. This book is about a lot. But it’s also funny, and witty, and accessible, and written with the best intentions. Throughout this episode, Emily and Alex discuss their writing process, the pernicious economic undercurrents that paved the way for this AI hype era, contrasting epistemological orientations, how technology perpetuates societal biases, and much more.

The AI Con

Alex Hanna

Emily M. Bender

Sébastien Bubeck, et al, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology

Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality

The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It

Ars technica: “Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Tomayto Tomahto is produced, written, and edited by Talia Sherman. Artwork by Maja Mishevska.