Where No Grammarian Has Gone Before

A warning before we go anywhere: this essay meanders intentionally. It will digress, double back, and occasionally stop to look at something shiny at the side of the road. Consider this your early consent form. Follow me into the weeds — there’s a payoff, but we’re taking the scenic route to get to it.I should confess my credentials up front, since they are not the credentials of a grammarian. Long before I owned a copy of Fowler, long before Google existed to correct me, a few other girls and I would gather round the Oxford English Dictionary at sleepovers like conspirators, hunting for the naughty words — the ones we suspected existed but had never been allowed to say out loud, now sitting there in cold, respectable, etymological print, footnoted and dated and utterly without shame.It is, I think, the only proper introduction to lexicography: discovering that a dictionary is not a fence around language, but a museum of everything language has ever dared to do. Fowler’s Modern…