Ha-has and Moonbeams and Yaks, Oh My!

Carrie:  Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan: I'm Megan Figueroa. 

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: This week we have so much about words. 

Carrie: Yes, words, words, words.

Megan: We're word fiends, which is true anyway, but now we get to share it with the words.

Carrie: Yes, yes. So not only do we have an interview with Lexicographer about a book about words, but dictionary.com just dropped a mass. They just dropped a tone of new words into the dictionary, and I'm really excited about a lot of  them. 

Megan: Yeah, there were some fun ones.

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, there's some ones that I would just never use. I just have lots of feelings about all of them, but did you know Elevator Pitch wasn't in there?

Megan: Yeah, I saw that last week or whatever. 

Carrie: I feel like I've been tortured by people making me do elevator pitches for so long that I'm surprised it hasn't been in the dictionary until now. 

Megan: Yeah, it's been around for a long time.

Carrie: So I don't know how it didn't get in there before. I mean, I do know how it works.

Megan:  Welcome to the Future dictionary.com.

Carrie:  Yeah. 

Megan: Joining us all here 

Carrie: in the 20th century.

Megan: Yeah. They added JOMO, Joy of Missing Out, and I feel like that was a quick turnaround. I'm not sure when it was first used, but it seems like it would've been first used in the past two years max. 

Carrie: Right. I feel like it was a Broad City thing when there was FOMO[?] came up and then we've been talking about, oh, they invented it. 

Megan: I don't know but at least for me, it became popular and I started hearing it everywhere after that because again, maybe I was noticing it, I don't know. 

Carrie: I don't know if I've seen that episode. So I've definitely seen it not because of them.

Megan:  And then of course, we got Latinx and Chicanx, and that just opens up a door to all sorts of people being angry. 

Carrie: Indeed. 

Megan: Yeah. But glad to see those. Okay, so there's some really important ones like colorism.

Carrie: Is there? 

Megan: Yeah. You should explain why that is because I bet you not everybody knows. 

Carrie: Yeah. So dictionary.com defines colorism as.

Megan: Perfect. 

Carrie: Differential treatment based on skin color, especially favoritism toward those with a lighter skin tone and mistreatment or exclusion of those with a darker skin tone, typically among those of the same racial group or ethnicity. So Latinx people have problem with colorism, so I get better treatment because I'm all light-skinned over here. And we often have a erasure of Afro-Latinx people. So that's colorism. Something we all got to work on, that's for sure. 

Megan: Yeah, and it's definitely not just a Latinx community that is guilty. 

Carrie: No, I'm just calling us out because I can. But a lot of fun white ones. So white lash, white guilt and white fragility. Have you heard White lash a lot?

Megan: I don't think I've ever heard it, but I 100% understand what it means. 

Carrie: Yeah. So the dictionary.com is saying that a good example of it is Black Panther and its success sparked some white lash. 

Megan: Is there a male lash as well for things like Captain Marvel? 

Carrie: Now there is, Carrie, congratulations.

Megan: Not to take away from White lash, but I'm just curious. Because it seems like those two things were interrelated. Same group of people. 

Carrie: Yeah, seriously. The first male lash, did you say man lash or male lash? 

Megan: I said male lash, but maybe man lush is better. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: Just because of mansplaining. But Ghostbusters would've been the first one. Right. 

Carrie: It was probably the first one. 

Megan: [crosstalk] in recent memory that I'm really thinking of. 

Carrie: Well, of this kind? Yeah, I think it was the first. 

Megan: And now Captain Marble. 

Carrie: Well, yeah, it was just worse. They were more coordinated, I think.

Megan: For Captain Marvel? Yeah. Well, you know how they are on their sub Reedits getting shit together to be angry? 

Carrie: No, it's four Chan or eight Chan. 

Megan: Yeah, sorry. Reedit.

Carrie: I mean, Reedits not great, but it's not the real cis bowl. 

Megan: Yeah, it's the real cis bowl. That's true. 

Carrie: Okay, so I still don't know what shit posting is.

Megan: What? Oh, wow. 

Carrie: I know but it's telling me. So how would you define it? Or an example? 

Megan: So I'm in a shit posting group on Facebook. I was sort of added. It's where you post something like for the lulls completely. It's not like you're actually, I have this belief, it's just more like, ha,ha,ha, ha, I'm going to piss people off by posting this. 

Carrie: And are good people doing shit posting.

Megan: Yes but it's all like, you know. You know what I mean? If you're in a shit posting group, everyone knows what's going on. You're not hurting anybody because everybody knows.

Carrie: Yeah, sure.

Megan: But in general, yeah, it's bad people or people who don't give a shit, I guess.

Carrie: Yeah, like legit trolls. And then a few more that I think are very, very important for different reasons. So there's media literacy. 

Megan: What that ?

Carrie: I know.

Megan: I'm glad it seems so old.

Carrie:  I know. 

Megan: Maybe not as old as elevator pitch.

Carrie: Well, so whatever the behavior they say now seems to be the right time for this edition, even though it dates back to the 1970s. 

Megan: Yeah. So it is the right time, for sure. 

Carrie: Well, I think we're actually a couple of decades behind, but if only people had been more media savvy, if only 

Megan: I know. Okay. Another really important one is Rage Quit.

Carrie: Oh my God, I love that word so much. 

Megan: And thirst trap.

Carrie: Oh yeah, it's a good one. 

Megan: And welp.

Carrie: W-H-E-L-P or WELP?

Megan:  W-E-L-P. 

Carrie: Oh, okay. 

Megan: I love myself some Welp. 

Carrie: I enjoy it too. But it's interesting that they've decided to add it. Because it feels very much like a word that's not really used outside of the internet. I could be wrong. 

Megan: No, I've said welp out loud, but very purposefully. And then just another one that's important, but for more serious reasons is, imposter syndrome. Another one that I couldn't believe wasn't already in there. 

Carrie: Yeah, that's really old as well. 

Megan: And this is not criticism to the lexicographers at all. 

Carrie:  it's just surprising. I'm not actually mad or anything. 

Megan: Yeah, I'm not going to write new letters. It's just not letter writing time. 

Carrie: Cool. Yeah, that's an interesting bunch. 

Megan: No, I love when these things drop because I think it is a time for 

Carrie: Reflection on what we have in our language, the words we use. 

Megan: Yeah. Oh, toxic masculinity. All of these things kind of makes you stop in the male gaze. 

Carrie: Male gaze?

Megan: Yeah, I know. 

Carrie: Oh my goodness, this is so old too.

Megan:  It was first formulated 'n a feminist film theorist, Laura Mae's, 1975 essay, visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. But yeah, so not only is it kind of fun to reflect on these, but you can learn a lot if you go deeper into where these things came from. We would like to thank our newest patrons from last month, Lena Roth Farb, Katie James, Tom Donahue, and that one guy. So thank you so much. And if you want to support us as well, and you should, because we need all the help we can get. And I really, really, really do want to start paying someone to do the transcriptions for us. You can find us at patreon.com/vocal fries, and if you support us at the $1 level, $3 level, $5 level, all of it's awesome. 

Carrie: Everything helps. 

Megan: But if you want the bonus episodes, that's the $5. 

Carrie: Yes, and one every month. 

Megan:  And if you want to suggest a topic for us for the bonus, always feel free. We take suggestions or for regular episodes as well. 

Carrie: Yeah, we got some things in the works that were suggestions by people.

Megan: So that's really helpful. So thank you so much. 

Carrie: We have another book to add to the vocal prize approved book list. 

Megan: That reminds me, the publisher is sending a copy soon. So I'm excited.

Carrie: I know. We got to look at APDF of this book that we're about to talk about, and it's so fucking cute. I cannot even, I'm so happy that we're going to get full color.

Megan: Hard physical copies and everyone should buy one. And now we're just teasing them. So maybe we should just get to it. Alright, so our episode today is with Jane Solomon about the dictionary of Difficult words. Yay. 
I'm really excited to say today that we have Jane Solomon with us. She is a lexicographer based in Oakland, California, who works on various projects for dictionary.com. Yay dictionaries. She is also on the Unicode emoji subcommittee, the group that decides what new emoji will pop up on our devices. We invited her to chat with us because she has a new book coming out the Dictionary of Difficult Words, which is a children's book about words. It also teaches children how to use dictionaries, and it comes out on April 30th, but you can pre-order it now. Thank you for coming onto the show, Jane. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. Yeah. I'm so excited. I've been following you for a while because of your dictionary.com work, and I just love your Twitter, so everyone listening should follow. But when I saw that you had this book, I was really excited because this is something I would've wanted as a kid. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Jane: Oh yeah, me too. I feel so lucky that I got to write something like this. 

Megan: So let's actually step back a second and define what it is to be a lexicographer. So what is lexicographer? 

Jane: Lexicographer is someone who writes and compiles dictionaries. So I call myself a lexicographer. I write definitions for dictionary.com. I also work on other kinds of things, other projects for them. I work on things like trending word research and word of the Year research word of the day. I also do a lot of media outreach for dictionary.com. So I am used to talking to people who know nothing about how dictionaries are made and explaining how the magic happens. It does seem like magic to people who are not involved in the process. 

Megan: So how did you become a lexicographer? 

Jane: So I studied English and linguistics as an undergrad. I was at Northwestern University. I was only a linguistics minor. I want to put that out there. I was an English major and linguistics minor. And then my last semester at college, I saw that I guess lecturer was coming to teach a class on lexicographer, and that is when I learned that lexicography existed. So this is my senior year, my last semester at college. I was actually a part-time student at the time, so I decided to audit the class. It was taught by Aaron Erine. 

Megan: Oh, yeah. 

Jane: When people think about Lexicographers, she has done so much public speaking about Lexicography. People often think of her. She has a famous TED Talk that she did. 

Megan: Yes, exactly. 

Jane: And for, it's stopped now, but for several years after that Ted Talk came out, people would send it to me because they knew I was a lexicographer and say, have you seen this? And then I was like, not only have I seen this, Erin is someone who got me into the industry. She recommended me for my first few jobs. So basically I audited her class. I loved it. I did all the homework because I'm a huge nerd. And then I probably should have just taken it for credit, but whatever. I didn't want to pay for it. And then right after the class was over, that's when I graduated and at the University of Chicago, they were hosting the next Dictionary Society of North America, and that was happening maybe a day or two after I graduated, and Erin was looking for students to volunteer. So I volunteered at that, met some lexicographers, thought this is a really exciting and amazing thing to learn and to dive into. And that's sort of where my career started. 

Megan: That sounds really fun. And I feel like if you're a word nerd or nerd and you're a little kid who wanted a book, the dictionary and difficult words, lexicographer is kind of like a dream job. 

Jane: Oh, sure. I mean, I didn't even know it was a job, and I was never a kid who sat and read dictionaries cover to cover. That was not me. That's the origin story of a lot of lexicographers. Oh, I sat and read a dictionaries cover to cover. I read encyclopedia's cover to cover. And for me, that was never something I did. I mean, I read a lot and I was very into reading, and I really appreciated dictionaries because I was a terrible speller. I still am a terrible speller. I don't know that I could be an editor if I didn't have the tools that I have. I think it's more important for editors to understand when they don't know how to spell a word. So then they can use the resources around them, like dictionaries to figure out, okay, what's the accepted spelling of this word? Yeah, I mean, I guess there were some clues that I was interested in this. I have a twin sister who is also a lexicographer. 

Carrie: What? 

Megan: You didn't know that ?

Carrie: That's amazing. 

Jane: Have you heard of word reference.com? 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Jane: Okay. It's really popular, especially for other languages. I think it's really popular for Spanish. I heard it was one of the top websites in Spain. So anyway, she works there and I'm not sure what her title is. She manages a lot of people and a lot of different projects there. So she works in sort of multilingual lexicography, whereas I work in monolingual English lexicography. But yeah, when I started getting into it, I included her and she got really excited and she started doing that kind of work too. 

Carrie: That's amazing. That is amazing. 

Megan: But we need to know what is a dictionary? 

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: It's actually, it's it seems like a simple question, but if you think about it, how would I define it? I don't actually know a question of words. 

Jane: Well, I think how we would define it, and I don't know, I think you two are about my age. I'm in my mid thirties. How we would define a dictionary is very different than how a child today might define a dictionary. But how we would define a dictionary is pretty similar to how someone a couple hundred years ago might define a dictionary. So basically dictionaries have been, there hasn't been that much change in how we think about dictionaries for a long time. And now suddenly over the last 15 years, 20 years, a lot has changed. So in terms of what is a dictionary, the dictionaries that I grew up with, and what people our age think of when they think of dictionaries are a collection of words in their meanings. We often will think of a book, even though I never use paper dictionaries anymore, unless it's a really rare dictionary and I'm referencing something. But for general, everyday use, I always use a digital tool. So the aspect of alphabetical order is sometimes lost if you are using Digital dictionary. I've 

Carrie: I've never thought of that. Sorry. Actually I'm stuck on that because that's right. When I first learned how to use a dictionary, I was like, oh, I'm so bad at alphabetical order. It's so hard to find the words, but that's not a thing anymore. 

Jane: And there's often predictive lookups. So you start to type out a word and it guesses, oh, it fills in the blanks. So how we interact and use dictionaries is really, really different. I think that in the past, there's been a lot of brand loyalty for dictionaries. You might be given a paper dictionary. This is for people who are our age or older. For a big event, you graduate from high school or something, you might be given a dictionary, and then you use that dictionary and you reference that dictionary for years and years and years and years. And you think of that brand when you think of dictionaries and you trust that brand. I think today it's a little bit different. People are more source agnostic. You want to find answers to your questions about language, and you don't really mind what the source is as long as it's the answer you're looking for. 

Carrie: Right. That's interesting.

Jane:  But as a lexicographer, you're constantly looking at as many dictionaries as you can reference because you want to see if you're defining a word you want to see, does this other dictionary cover that sense of the word, how does this dictionary treat this word? How do other dictionaries treat this kind of language, especially if it's language that's changing or very sensitive. You want to see what are other people out there doing? And is that something that we want to do? Do we want to go in a direction like that? Do we want to go in a different direction? Also, when you're writing definitions, especially for very well, I would say for really specific types of definitions, you want to make sure you're not plagiarizing accidentally another dictionary by using the exact same wording. Because if you're trying to distil the meaning of a word into a small sentence or a small fragment of a sentence, sometimes you gravitate towards similar words, especially if it's a very specific kind of word, maybe something that's scientific or something like that. You have to be technical in how you define it. So you want to make sure that whatever you're saying is not exactly the same thing that anyone else has said. 

Carrie: Right. This is a question that you probably get a lot, and that when I was teaching a class called English Words, I would get a lot is what makes a word real? How does it get into a dictionary? 

Jane: So what makes a word real? I'll answer that first, but before I answer that, the name of your class sounds amazing, and I wish I could be your student. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Oh my gosh. That's the reason why I knew Erin McKean is because I would use her TED Talk and I would have discussion board posts because I was like, I really wanted to hear what the students thought about it, what makes the word and what makes the word real. And it blows people away. We really don't think about it deeply until someone asks us, I think. 

Jane: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think what makes a word real is also related to what makes a sentence grammatical. And the way that linguists talk about is the sentence grammatical. These are constructs, but actually, I have a section in my book about what makes a word real, and maybe that's why you're asking this. I know that you've seen it. So I think if you are not a lexicographer or a linguist, sometimes you think that you need an authority to tell you this word is real. So you think, oh, if it's not in a dictionary, it's not real. But that's not how lexicographers think at all, because we know better. We know that there are lots of words that we just haven't gotten around to defining yet, and that doesn't make the words not real. It just means that we haven't had the resources and time to go and give it Lexicographical treatment and enter it in our dictionary. We really don't think of ourselves as gatekeepers of language. We think of ourselves as documentaries of language. So we're documenting language as quickly as we can. We're trying to keep up. We'll never keep up the work of lexicographers never over because language is constantly evolving and we don't decide what's right, what's real. Speakers of the language decide that by using the words. 

Carrie: And that's why I asked the two questions together because I had a feeling that that's how it would come out. 

Jane: Well, and the question of how does a word get into a dictionary? You have to understand what a word is first and what a real word is first. 

Carrie: Yeah, exactly. 

Jane: And so there are requirements that we have. It has to be in widespread usage. People have to actually want to look up the word, because it takes a lot of resources to write each and every definition, a lot of research. And we don't want to spend time on something that people are going to not care about in five years, because we're not going to take these words out of the dictionary. So if it's a sort of one day Twitter trend fad word, we're less interested in that than something that has some staying power. And maybe an example to talk about here is covfefe, or however you pronounce that, which was a presidential typo. And as far as I know, we haven't added it to dictionary.com yet. But there's a bill that is called casually the covfefe Bill, which it's about how presidents should not be allowed to block citizens on social media because what they tweet about what they share on social media is kind of like public information. I'm not sure where that bill is right now, what's happening with it, but that's the kind of thing where if that becomes a law and people start talking about that by its more casual name, then that's a word that becomes relevant in a legal way in our country in a different way. Well, are you both in the US? Who's Canadian? 

Carrie: I'm Canadian, but I live in the US. 

Jane: Okay. So when I say our country, I'm just saying the US, you could think of it as your country or not. 

Carrie: Yes, yes. So if covfefe, the bill, I mean, is that an acronym that they've purposely tried to create, or is it just called that sort of more indirectly? 

Jane: Oh, you mean like a acronym where you take the word and then apply? 

Carrie: Because pretty common in laws here. 

Jane: Yeah. I don't think that it's an acronym. I think it was just a casual nickname for the bill, 

Carrie: Which is odd because when I think of covfefe, if I were to write a bill that had that as his name, or even casually, I would think more like President should have to use Twitter more professionally or not just tweet out something, let it stay for hours and hours, and people have no idea what's going on. But obviously that's not the way world works.

Megan: I'm wondering so covfefe is something that is not a word as you've described .It as one that as in the dictionary, because it has widespread use. What about when Cardi B on Twitter said, I will dog walk you? So dog and walk are both real words. Right now, it's not widespread, but if that started to pick up, that might be something that could get into a dictionary one day. 

Jane: So I would have to do more research on the word dog walk, but my understanding of that is that it's actually pretty common expression. For me, I wasn't familiar with it before Cardi B tweeted it, but just because a white woman in my mid thirties, I'm not familiar with the term, doesn't mean that it's a widespread term. So that's something to consider. And also, when we talk about words, we're actually talking about lexical items, which are basically a unit you would look up in a dictionary. And sometimes they're multi word expressions, sometimes they're only one word. So I just wanted to clarify that because I think that some people get hung up on the idea of a word is one unit with no spaces between the letters. 

Carrie: And so yeah, I looked it up on dictionary.com and dog walker's on there, and it's a person who walks other people's dogs, especially for free. So that's why I'm wondering, so something's in the dictionary. You might one day add more senses to it, right? 

Jane: Sure. I can see a verb sense being added to that definition. It's really interesting when I start to dig into an individual word, if I'm writing a piece on the history of a word, I will often look and see what part of speech came into the language first. And I always find that super interesting, and I am often surprised. 

Carrie: Yeah, I am such a word nerd because that is so much fun to know it like trace its history. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Jane: Absolutely. 

Carrie: So as I give myself chills thinking about the dictionary, it makes me wonder, why did you want to write a dictionary of difficult words for kids? What did you hope to accomplish? 

Megan: I'll have to tell you how this whole book came about, which it wasn't my idea originally. So basically it was the publisher's idea. So I got contacted by the publisher at Cordo Books, and they have a nonfiction imprint called Wide-Eyed Editions. And so I just got contacted out of the blue. They found me through my blog, Lexi Call Items, and they contacted me and they said, we want to write a children's dictionary of difficult words, or we want to publish a children's dictionary of difficult words, and we're looking for someone with expertise to write it. And I actually was familiar with this publisher and also this imprint because I have a friend who is a children's book author and illustrator, and an award-winning children's author and illustrator. And she has published her first three books with them. At that time, she had two out. So I responded right away and I was like, yes, I'm very excited. This sounds great. And then I wondered, oh, maybe my friend recommended me and that's how they found me. So I asked, and the publisher got back to me and said, actually, we found you by Googling cool American Dictionary editors, lexicographers. 

Carrie: Oh my God. 

Jane: They're a British publisher, and I think they wanted to expand more. Well, they have a London office, and I think they wanted to have some more American authors. So that's how they found me. And I was thinking, wow, I have really, really good SEO, [crosstalk] that comes to me from that. 

Carrie: You need put that on your resume. 

Jane: Cool. American Dictionary editors. And so then we started talking, and the publisher's original sort of concept for the book was that when she was a child, she won a spelling bee on the word photosynthesis. And she was so excited about that she would define the word and spell it for anyone who would listen. And she wanted to capture that kind of excitement about language in a book. And I heard this and I thought, okay, photosynthesis is a really interesting and fun word, and I can definitely see how children would be attracted to that once they learn it. If this is the most difficult word that they've learned in their life, how they would want to tell people about it. And then I was thinking, okay, well, what if we go harder, more difficult? And so in this call I had with them, I said, how about something like moon bow, which is a rainbow that appears at night essentially from refracted light of the moon. 

And they got really excited about moon bow, and they were just like, we trust you. And so from there, I made up a word list, and the word list has three levels. One of the level is these super obscure words that you would only find by reading old books essentially. One level is words that are more common and adults would probably know, but they might have difficulty explaining to a seven year old and a seven to 12 year old, or eight to 12 year old, whatever the age range of the book is. And then the third set of words are words that adults would definitely know and would make them feel really good about themselves, just to boost their confidence. 

Carrie: Can we have an example of each one? 

Megan: Oh, sure, sure. So I'll just look at the letter A. So the level that is very obscure, you would only find it in an old book, would be probably abecedarian, absquatulate, ailurophile. I could go on. There are a few others. And then for words that adults might know but have difficulty explaining to children, maybe aesthetic would be difficult to explain to a child, because that's a kind of hard concept, arcane, maybe that's a word that, I mean, for years, the meaning of arcane was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't really explain what it meant. Maybe antithesis. And then words that adults would know probably I would say aloof, arid, arachnophobia. That's the ones that the adults can be like, I'm so smart. I know these words that my child doesn't know. But honestly this book, I want it to be interesting to adults as well as children. It's written so a child could understand it. 

Carrie: Oh, it is. 

Jane: And it's written with the approach that a child doesn't know any of these words. Some children might know some of these words, or some children might've heard some of these words, but I just am assuming that most children will not know the definitions of any of these words. How I also wrote it is thinking about, okay, what will keep an adult interested? What about adults who don't have children in their lives? I don't have any children. I have a niece and a nephew, so I guess nibbling who live in another state. So I don't interact with children that much. So I wanted to write something that would be interesting to someone who just likes words and beautiful illustrations. So that was my approach. 

Carrie: I think that you knocked it out of the park. I love looking at this. 

Megan: Yeah, it's so fun. 

Carrie: It's so fun. But you know what? There's no photosynthesis. 

Megan: Yeah, I was looking, where's photosynthesis? 

Jane: Okay, so actually I didn't put photosynthesis in the book because P is one of those letters that there are so many good words. 

Carrie: Okay. 

Megan: Yeah. There are a lot of good words here. 

Jane: So I am going and looking at P right now. Yeah, I mean, there were so many fun words for P that I felt that photosynthesis was maybe almost too easy to put in this book because the levelling made it so that photosynthesis was the lowest level of word that would be there in terms of adults know what it is and probably can explain it to a child. 

Carrie: Right. So what's your favorite entry in this dictionary? 

Jane: So, asking lexicographer what their favorite word is a really [crosstalk], 

Carrie: I know it's so mean. Carrie [crosstalk] it's a little different than the entire dictionary. 

Jane: Sure, sure. It's a selection. So I guess I have so many answers to this question, so officially, because at the back of the book, there's a little section that has a notepad where you can write down whatever you want. And I'm hoping that people will use that for different things. They can either write down their favorite words, or one of the ways to use this book would be to go through the whole book and count how many words you know. And use it as a vocabulary quiz so you could keep track of, if you've learned the words, I'm kind of expecting the kids who have this book to learn all the words better than the adults would learn them. Because I feel like as a kid, you make yourself challenges like that. And as adults, maybe you don't have as much time or energy to pursue that. 

Carrie: And the images too. 

Jane: Oh, sure, sure. 

Carrie: Yeah. The little pictures help you learn. 

Jane: Oh, for sure. And for each letter, there is this featured word for each letter, and then there's a featured illustration. And so I would think that those ones would be, you can read those 26 pages. It's an alphabet book. So I'm thinking that those ones, people will learn faster than just the ones that maybe don't have illustrations. But I mean, there are so many illustrations throughout the book. Louise Lockhart is the illustrator for the book, and she's so great. I was so excited. 

Carrie: It's stunning 

Jane: She uses so many beautiful color combinations and textures. The first letter I wrote of the book was B, I wrote a sample for B. I don't know why I didn't just start with A, I think that I just had at that point thought of more interesting words for B than A. So that was the sample. And when I got back her illustrations from the sample, it really struck me that, oh, this is going to be a book that people who are not my mom will want. I'm really excited, and this is going to be really good, because when you're working in a Google Doc, it looks so different, and you don't know what it's going to feel like as a book. So anyway, the word at the back of the book that I say is my favorite word in the book is diprofos[?], which I define as someone who is very good at having interesting conversations with others while sitting down for a meal. 

Carrie: Oh, I love it.

Jane: I think that's why I picked that word is because, I think what makes a word really exciting and memorable and favorable, I guess, is when it has a really, really specific meaning. And you learn about the word and you think, I never knew there was a word to describe that thing. I know that feeling. 

Carrie: Yes. That's why my favorite word in this is petrichor, because I feel like it's a very specific word in it. I guess I have a visceral reaction to it, because as you define it, the earthy smell that comes from rain falling on soil, especially after it hasn't rained in a while. And I live in a desert, and oftentimes it doesn't rain a while. So I definitely know what petrichor is. 

Jane: Yeah, it's a very evocative smell. 

Megan: Yeah, it is.

Carrie: I enjoy rap scallion just because of the way it sounds. 

Jane: Oh, yeah. Well, it's like sometimes the words are fun just because of how they sound. Sometimes they're fun because of the definition. Sometimes it's how they're spelled. A word that's kind of special to me that I definitely wanted to include in this was haha, which is, it's basically an invisible fence. It's a fence that's a ditch rather than one that comes out of the earth. And if you're on a big property and you have a haha, then it looks like your property goes on and on and on to the horizon, rather than there being a fence separating it. And I really like that word, and I know where I learned it. I learned it in high school from reading a Tom Stopper play Arcadia. And I mean, to me, I have these associations with some of these words, and they're really special and exciting. And I remember reading that play. I learned so many words from that. Another word I learned that is not in the book is carnal embrace, which as a high scholar did not know what that meant. I would not share that with children. I actually think that if I said that in front of a child, they would take it as I took it as a 16 year old. I mean, I was like, oh, okay. This is a euphemism. I mean, they might not even know what that means. They might just think it's a hug. 

But yeah, you pick up words from different places in your life. Since I work, I edit Word of the Day right now. And so that means that I encounter a lot of really obscure words in my day to day editing and work. But I also forget a lot of words. So part of writing this book, I was like, oh yeah, that word, it's so good. I forgot about it. And so that was really fun for me. 

Carrie: Yeah. What about pronouncing these words? Do you know how to pronounce all of these words? Did you know before you wrote this book? 

Jane: Definitely not. I didn't do the pronunciations for the book, for the American Edition. They're from dictionary.com. They were kind enough to let us license them. And for the British version, they're adapted for a British audience because there's an American and British version of the book. When you come across a word in reading, it's very common to not know how to pronounce it, if it's a difficult word to pronounce. English spelling is not consistent in terms of phenology. And so there are plenty of words in this book that I don't know how to pronounce, or I have to remind myself how to pronounce. 

One of the words in the book is Sesquipedalian, which is basically prone to using big words. And I learned how to pronounce this word because I had to MC a spelling bee, and it was a charity spelling bee, and this was one of the words that we had put in the spelling bee. And so I just kept on listening to the audio pronunciation and then repeating it back until it felt natural, because I think it's maybe, I don't know, the Q in the middle of the word kind of feels really squirmy, and it's not an easy word to pronounce. 

Carrie: No, no. I look at it now after you've said it. So I'm looking at the actual spelling and I'm like, okay, that looks hard. But when you said it, I was like, okay, I can do this. But now I'm looking at it, I'm like, I can't do it anymore. I don't remember. How do you pronounce it? [crosstalk]

Jane: I know.  Ignoring that part.

Carrie: Reminds me of how every time, I want to say omnipotent, I have to think so hard because I always want to say omni potent every time because of how it's spelled. So spelling does a lot with our mind. 

Megan: I do that with misled. I always want to pronounce it misled. 

Carrie: Wow, okay. 

Jane: I think that for me, I remember pronouncing myopic, or is it myopic? 

Carrie: It depends. 

Jane: I think it's myopic. I remember pronouncing it in a way, and then someone said, isn't it the other one? And I remember that people will shame you for not pronouncing words right,  especially if you're learning the words from reading. You don't always know how to pronounce them. So originally this book didn't have the spelled out pronunciations in it, but then we decided to add them in. And I'm glad we did because I think the concept was that this would sort of be a jumping off point for kids. And then they would get excited about dictionaries and learn how to use dictionaries as a tool and as a resource, they could go to learn about words. So we weren't going to have pronunciations. But I think that it is nice to have them, because then this can be its own capsule of a book where you don't need to leave the book to go and learn how to say the words in the actual book. The first dictionaries in English didn't have pronunciations. They were more lists of difficult words that they were just vocabulary lists basically with quick definitions. They were often really subject specific. A lot of dictionaries have a bunch of falconry words because there were some really subject specific vocabulary lists about the words you need to know if you're a falconer, or if you're into falconry. And so I don't even know if falconer is a word, so please fact check that. 

Carrie: Sure. I mean, it's now exactly. 

Jane: And definitely other lexicographers talk a lot about how there's a lot of plagiarism in lexicography because the first dictionaries were built on these vocabulary lists of difficult words. They were like, oh, let's take what's already there and then expand on it. I mean, this is firmly planted in that rich history of lexicography in terms of not having all the words that you would ever want to look up in a dictionary. 

Megan: I mean, how can you ever capture that unless you have a huge dictionary? 

Jane: Oftentimes when you write a dictionary for children or for people who are learning a language, you'll have what's called a defining vocabulary. And that means that when you write the definitions, you constrain the level and amount of words that you are going to draw from to write those definitions. So there were a lot of words that every definition I wrote, I started by looking it up in 10 different dictionaries and seeing, okay, how do these dictionaries define these words? And  a lot of these definitions, they're not written for children. So that meant that a lot of the work was leveling it to a place that's appropriate for someone who's eight or nine. And so there were a lot of decisions I made there, and sometimes it meant that I had to write something in many more words than I would've written it if I was writing it for an adult. And I don't know if you noticed that while reading any of the definitions, but let me find an example. 

Okay. So cockalorum is an example I guess. A lot of deaf dictionaries use the word self-important when they're talking about what a cockalorum is. And I define cockalorum as someone who thinks that they're more important than they actually are. And so there's a lot of explaining that goes into talking to a child. I imagined I was talking to a seven or eight year old when I wrote all these definitions, and I also wanted to make sure they could be read aloud. Because I imagine that this book will be read aloud in a way that dictionaries are not typically read aloud. So that means that there's some things like I vary the style of adjectives more than I would probably if I were just writing a dictionary that wasn't meant to be read aloud. 

Carrie: I wanted to ask you about another choice that you made for your book. I think it's really cool that you use singular they. Will you tell us about that choice? 

Jane: Oh, yeah. So this was a very obvious choice to me. I didn't want to needlessly gender any definition or draw attention to gender in any definition where it wasn't required. I also think that a lot of times people, rather than using singular, they will use he or she. And I think that that is a problem for a few different reasons. One of the reasons is it's really clunky. It's hard to read out loud. It's hard to read, not out loud. And the second reason, which is I think more important is that it excludes people. So I wanted to not draw attention to gender, but also not make anyone feel as they were reading this book that it was not for them. And gender comes into, I was just talking about cockalorum. A lot of old dictionaries will define cockalorum as a self-important man, and it's older dictionaries usually, some newer ones that maybe haven't been updated in a while. And I read that and I thought was cockalorum defined as a self-important man because women were not at that time thought of as being important enough to be self-important. 

And that's something that I thought about as I wrote it. So I stripped the gender out of that entirely because it wasn't necessary to understand the meaning of it. And I don't want to exclude anyone who's non-binary in these definitions or trans. So that's something that I took very seriously. And I actually have a usage note at the end of the book about that. And that usage note is not for the children because the kids who read this book will not notice it. I think that there are some adults who will notice it and they will want to be angry. And if the usage note sort of preempts that and says, by the way, this has been used in English for over 700 years, I'm a lexicographer, I say, it's fine to use this. I'm using it in this way. You can use it in this way too. And probably you're already using it in this way without realizing it. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Everybody does. 

Jane: Exactly. 

Megan: So cockalorum is that literally from cock as in rooster? 

Jane: Oh, I don't even remember what that's from right now. 

Megan: Okay. Because then I would be like, maybe that's why it was masculine at first because it was associated with roosters, but I don't even know. 

Jane: But I also for a word, avuncular, which is an uncle, I didn't want to put any gender in that because someone might be an uncle and not be a man. So how I would define that is avuncular is a word that describes uncles and people who act like uncles. If someone is avuncular, they're helpful and friendly to people who are younger than them. So getting at the spirit of the word without bringing gender unnecessarily into it. 

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I mean, like you said, people don't realize that they're already using it. There's no reason to be angry at this because this is just common human decency at this point, and it's been used forever. This is how we use it. It's so simple.

Megan: It's simple. And it's also like they're lying to themselves if they think they don't use it. And so it is strange to me how angry people get about language when all it is is just reflecting what people are doing. But anyway, people get angry about very silly things.

Jane: People are very selective about their language history that they know and don't know. There are a few things that they know and they get really, really upset about those. They know that when they were younger, they did not use they in that way, but then they're not looking at actual usage over time. And even if they were looking at actual usage over time, language changes and evolves. And that means that what you learned when you were younger might not be appropriate or considerate 

Language use when you grow older, and that's okay. One example of this for me that I avoided in this book completely a word that was used all the time when I was younger, and now it's a word that I avoid if I can. Sometimes it's slips out because I'm so used to saying it, but I do try to avoid it out of respect. Is the word crazy? And I do not have the word crazy in this book at all. I also didn't put the word stupid in this book at all. Every time there was  looking up definitions and other dictionaries where the word crazy or stupid was used, I thought, okay, what is this actually trying to say? And what is a way that I could explain this? So sometimes I would use the word silly or foolish, which I don't have the same associations with those words as I do with especially crazy. 

These are things that I thought about because I don't want to put any language in this book that would be harmful to people. And crazy is something that that's becoming, oh, just over the last few years really has been more a discussion with awareness of mental illness, more widespread awareness. And I don't think that that's going to go away. So I want this book to still be appropriate and something that people wouldn't be offended by in many, many years time. So that's something that I sort of thought about as I wrote it. 

Megan: Yeah, I think this is all very considerate, and I think that's excellent that you've made these decisions. 

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, this book is going to, how do you say it? Hold the test of time. Nope, that's not it. Stand the test of time. Yes. Stand it, not hold it. It's going to stand the test of time because of these choices. And I think that that's really important. And I'm happy for the kids and the adults that get to read this because, again, this wasn't something that I had as a kid, but also it's like they're really important and good choices that you made that are in this that I think make it even better. And I already think it's a great book, but those are really, really excellent choices, and I commend you on them.

Megan: For sure. 

Jane: Well, thank you. No, I really appreciate you saying this because as I was writing it, it was in my head for a long time and I was like, I'm making these decisions and I hope they will mean something to people or that they'll not notice them. I want this work to be invisible. I want it to just be seamless in the book. But listen, I'm sure that in 20 years there'll be something in this book that is offensive and I just did not catch it, or I was not aware of it. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think that's probably true, but that's true of literally everything, 

Megan: Right. We're learning and we're growing all of the time.

Jane: My dream would be that this would be so popular that there'd be reprints and then we'd fix the things that need to be updated and changed. 

Carrie: Well, I definitely hope that's the case because I recommend it. Absolutely. I feel like the Vocal Fry should have a book club because this is our second book kind of book interview, and I absolutely recommend everyone buy this for every child they know and for themselves. It's so delightful. 

Megan: It is. 

Carrie: I would love to talk to you about emojis, but we're already at an hour. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: So let's have an emoji conversation another time. 

Megan: Could we do that Jane, will you come back? 

Jane: I am happy to talk about Emoji with you at another time. 

Carrie: Thank you so much for coming on the show. 

Megan: Yeah, thank you. 

Carrie: Where are the places we can buy your book and pre-order at this point, if you're listening to it before April 30th? 

Jane: So first of all, it is really, really helpful to pre-order a book, especially for a first time author. It indicates to the publisher that there's interest in the book and also the pre-sales count toward the first week of sales. So if it is going to appear in a bestseller list, I mean, that would be amazing. I am not expecting anything like that, but that all counts toward that. So you can pre-order it online. If you're in the US I would say IndieBound is really, really cool because it will connect you with a indie bookstore near you, your favorite indie bookstore. There's also Amazon. It's basically available at any online bookseller you could imagine. And then you could also ask your library to get it if it's not something you can afford right now, it's kind of pricey. I think it's $27. 

So you could ask your library. You can also go into your favorite local indie bookstore and ask them to stock it, even if you're not going to buy it. That helps me. So those are places you can find it. And you can find me online @lexicalitems.com. And I also bought the domain dictionary of difficult words.com and the dictionary of difficult words, so.com, so you can find me there. And also, I'm active on Twitter. I have an Instagram account, but it's boring. I do have a fake Instagram account, which is like an emoji, but it's a fake emoji one. 

Carrie: So on Twitter, you're Jane Solomon, right? 

Jane: Yes. 

Carrie: Definitely follow her on Twitter and learn a bunch of fun things. Well, thank you. And I hope that this book helps our future generations not be an asshole.

Jane: That would be a really great outcome. But even if it just teaches some people a bunch of words that are fun and delightful, that's okay with me too. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you, Jane. And everyone, don't be an asshole.

Jane: That's an amazing sign off. Thank you so much.