Articulate Experience
Articulate Experience
Language Artists
On this episode of Articulate Experience—three writers whose love of language propelled their work.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon hasn’t lived in Ireland since he was a teenager. But everywhere he’s gone, his native culture’s obsession with language and storytelling has travelled with him.
A childhood love of words led Kory Stamper to spend nearly twenty years writing and editing dictionary definitions.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has found purpose in preserving and promoting her native Trinidadian creole through her dialectic poetry,
- [01:01] Paul Muldoon
- [12:18] Kory Stamper
- [34:58] Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
INTRO
Welcome to Articulate Experience — the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers I’m Jim Cotter. On this episode— writers driven by their deeply felt love of language.
Since the 1970s, poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has written to preserve and celebrate her native Carribbean dialect—
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: So my legacy is to keep that culture and that language alive
Tori Marchiony reports on how, long before Kory Stamper became a Merriam-Webster lexicographer, she was a junior vocabulary nerd —
KORY STAMPER: I really fell in love with the sound of words more than I fell in love with the meaning of words
And, for the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, becoming a wordsmith was not only a point of personal pride, but of cultural identity—
PAUL MULDOON: The history of Irish literature is truly remarkable. I mean, by any standard.
That’s all ahead on Articulate Experience.
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CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has been a pillar of the New York City poetry scene since the 1970s, when, as an ambitious twenty-something, she first took the stage at legendary venues such as The Nuyorican Poets Café. Despite being oft-overlooked in the mainstream, she’s become a dominant force within the world of dialectic poetry— proudly championing her native creole language, Trinidadian English —through six books, a CD, and countless workshops, offered through her non-profit, Calypso Muse.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: I love that dialect, I love that history. When I was in Trinidad I took so much for granted. Coming to New York in looking at television and not seeing myself represented, I began to love the Calypso and appreciate it.
It was something I took for granted. The carnival, and the costumes, my grandmother looking on a cold stove, and rocks outside. All of those things became important to me and I knew I had to document that for my survival because I did not see myself anywhere.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor came to the U.S. alone at age 13 after her mother was denied a visa because, as a teacher, she was too valuable to her home country. Cheryl’s aunt’s home in Queens was a far cry from the Caribbean island where she was raised, and there was much to adapt to at every turn.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: It’s cold. I’m seeing this sunshine outside and I’m saying, “That’s not true. I don’t have to wear a coat.” And I get outside without a coat, and it is very cold. So that’s the first physical shock to my body. And I realize I’m without my mother—this woman who kept me so close and cuddled me. Although my aunt was the most wonderful person, she didn’t know that cuddling. She didn’t know what to do with a young teenaged daughter.
In the meantime, right before I left Trinidad, two boys had kissed me, the night before I was leaving, as to say goodbye. They were 14. And so here was all of this new transformation happening, and I didn’t know how to process those things. And being a Caribbean family, they really don’t talk to you about anything sexual to prepare you. And here I am, budding. I had just gotten this new bra. I had just gotten these new heels and stockings to come to New York. Literally, lmy life was transforming, and I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I didn't have friends, which was another scary thing because I'd always been a girl with a bunch of friends, so I was lost.
JIM COTTER: You were an outsider, you had this Caribbean accent-
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: I was lost and an outsider.
JIM COTTER: You didn't know baseball or the top 40, or whatever the other stuff 13-year-old kids needed to know.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: No I did not. There were a lot of things going on and I didn't know how I would go forward. Then we lived in Queens, we were Seventh-day Adventists and in those years in order for my aunt to have me there, she had to pay for parochial school because I could not go to public school with a student visa. So, they sent me to the Bronx to Northeastern Academy, which was a Seventh-day Adventist school.
So here I was traveling on three trains two buses to get to this school. I was scared about a lot of things but the one thing that kept me going I knew my mother wanted this for me, for my education, and for the betterment of my family.
So I wrote my mother letters every day, wanting to come back home, and I couldn’t tell my aunt. I believed that, in my 13-year-old mind, that she was doing us a big favor. I knew that she was. She was buying clothing, and how ungrateful I would be to be telling her, “I don’t want to be here. I want to go back to my mother.” So I had to hold all those things inside. So it was a physical transformation, as well as emotional—and spiritual, too.
JIM COTTER: The fact that you had to go through that, do you think that is what gave you your power?
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: I think that that is what gave me my power, knowing that I did not want to let my mother down. I did not want to hurt my aunt’s feelings. I had to power through this somehow. And I did.
Later I resented that when I should be playing and having a good time, I had to be making these decisions. My mother was having me to have piano lessons in Trinidad and my aunt knew this and so when I came she said, "I want you to have piano lessons," and I said, "Oh no I don't like it anymore." Now what made me say that? I knew she was already paying for my school and buying me clothing and that would be an additional expense. That shouldn't have been something I had to decide or give up at that age, but this is when I began making choices for survival.
This “adultification” would continue throughout Boyce-Taylor’s life. She married at 19, and at 20 gave birth to her only child, Malik Isaac Taylor, who grew up to become known as Phife Dawg— founding member of the hugely successful hip hop group, A Tribe Called Quest. From the outset, she was careful to break generational patterns, understanding that not everything she had inherited was worth passing down.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: My mother had the Caribbean dogma, but the Seventh-day Adventist, it is a very strict religion. You can't dance, you can't wear jewelry, you can't wear lipstick and makeup, it was just so strict, coupled with the Caribbean lifestyle of, “you can't date boys, boys can't come into the house.” I was not going to do that with my son. I think I learned very early that I felt that black men didn't really have a voice in this country.
I was 20 years old with this new baby and I said, "I am never going to stop him from saying anything he wanted to say." Now, he had to be respectful and he couldn't be rude, but I wanted him to have those freedoms. When he would say different things to his father, we'd be like, "This boy is too much," but we wouldn't stop him.
Boyce-Taylor demonstrated the power of writing to her son. A precious release, it became her refuge — a way to feel uninhibited, to be honest, to reconnect with, and to rebuild, a sense of home.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: My poetry was really welcomed in the New York community, with the Nuyorican Poets Café, and all of those things. Now, I’m in my early twenties and I’m doing this reading here, giving this workshop there. But what I’m missing is the Caribbean voice. And I’m saying to myself, “I’m loving this, but where’s my Caribbean people?” And so I form an organization called Calypso Muse, in search of Caribbean voices, because that was so missing in my life. And I think that that was the thing that drove me to create family, and I was always looking for the comfort of my Caribbean people.
JIM COTTER: Why?
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: because my mother always taught me you don't just get something and keep it. You share it and you bring your community along. That was a small community I came from. We had a church family and we supported each other in this church family and so really that was all I knew. I didn't want to be reciting poems by myself and get a little local fame, I wanted to involve my friends with me to come along. I still do that to this day.
JIM COTTER: The problem is fundamentally that in America because of the way racial identity is drawn, you show up here you're another black face you're an African-American and you're not.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: No, I'm not.
JIM COTTER: You're not culturally, you're not emotionally, you're not spiritually an African-American, you are Caribbean.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Yeah and so, everybody's lumped together and I really had to ... My cousin said to me don't get involved in this Black Power movement because you're Trinidadian. But I knew at 14, "Yeah but when the revolution come," which was a term at the time, "When the revolution comes, they're not going to look at me and see that I’m Caribbean. They're going to see that I'm a black American." That's what I present and so I had to hold onto both identities. I felt a responsibility because I was living in both worlds and I felt that I had to continue representing my Caribbean culture. I couldn't talk too much without you knowing that I was not hundred percent African-American, just a few words out of my mouth and you knew that I was Caribbean.
JIM COTTER: Right, and you held onto that.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: I held on to that. And that meant so much because we carry so much history, so much beauty, I really had to hold onto that and still to this day. I have dialect poems in my work, I always had it. Before I knew I was a good writer, I said, "I am going to write in dialect," and friends said, "But you're not going to get published," and I said, "Well that's okay, I will go with whatever that means." Because when people read the text I want them to really feel that energy of a mother who says, "Child come back in this house," as opposed to, "Where are you going? Get back in here." That is such a different energy. I always want to keep that in my work so I'm true to myself and to my family.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor Poem:
A long white space
with blue dots and orange lines
a wide winter space
for hummingbird sounds
and steel pan pounds.
a wide space turned out
with yearning.
ah say ah have a yearning
for nite tepid breeze
big fat moon dat eh fraid yu
big moon shining
like meh neighbor Merle face
oh god ah yearning
for mango dou douce
sticky and sweet
for melongen curry cabbage
and blue dasheen
A yearning for voices ringing shrill, from B-flat to High C.
Bam! C roll in.
One hand on left hip,
The other flying, leaping in my face.
Oh gosh, a yearning.
Yearning, yearning, yearning.
Hungry, for my people.
For my people.
Hungry, for my people. For my people, for my people.
JIM COTTER: I want to go back to the real resilience that you learned at 13. I wonder if you had never left Trinidad, what the writing would have become.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: I wonder that too, and for some reason I don't think it would be what it has become because the expectation for me was to finish school, get married, and have children, probably become a teacher, or a nurse, my mother was leading towards a nurse, and stay at home and build a family. Because even with the education as a nurse or teacher, the family and the husband would come first.
JIM COTTER: And that would have given you sufficient respect in the community you were in?
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Sufficient respect, sufficient respect for my mother,
JIM COTTER: Right.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Which was always most important to me. I can't really explain it, but my mother's respect was always most important to me. What I did had to reflect her because she left school at an early age and she really wanted school. She was putting all her hopes and trust in me. I think I would have a much different life living there.
JIM COTTER: When she passed, did you still feel you were obliged to keep getting her respect? Was she still looking over your shoulder when she was on earth? Is she still looking over your shoulder now?
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: She's given me encouragement now, but when she passed, I was freer to express more work about my life as a lesbian. More work on certain sexual freedoms.
JIM COTTER: That would've landed badly with her.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Yes it would've hurt her,
JIM COTTER: I understand.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Although I did still write that when she was alive, but she overlooked it.
JIM COTTER: Have you thought about legacy at all? Is it important to you? Do you ever think about how people will regard you and you're no longer here? Does it matter to you?
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Yes a lot of times when I write I think about legacy, and I think legacy is a gift that's handed down. It's something that's stays there. I don't know if we'll have poets reading in Trinidadian dialect in 20 years but you will have my work.
But not a lot of poets are doing work in dialect. One of the things that made me want that so much is because there's a whole Canadian group of poets that write in dialect, in England too.
JIM COTTER: Yes
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: The black British or the Caribbean British poet is very common, but it's not as common here in the U.S. and that's what made me start Calypso Muse because I felt that, that was something that we could not lose. I've spent the last 20 years talking to poets about keeping their dialect in their work, My son was one of those people in his art, he does both.
JIM COTTER: Yes.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: And Busta Rhymes and, that’s just for hip-hop. I think it's so important to keep that— Zora Neale Hurston, the way she kept that language, Alice Walker, she kept those southern traditions. It's really important to keep that or it gets lost.
JIM COTTER: Or we all end up speaking whatever banal version of Mid-Atlantic English is the-
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Yeah but we lose so much culture in doing that. So my legacy is to keep that culture and that language alive and those family stories. I'm a narrative poet and so I write those narratives of my childhood. And my son has grown up to do the same thing. He's left of body of dialectic and American Standard English hip-hop alive.
JIM COTTER: Because, they both matter-
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: It's a gift that we hand down. I want that to be there so that people can go in and do research and see and hear the things that I said, in the ways I spoke, and I encourage other poets to do it too. It's not just about me, I want that body to remain and I want to encourage younger poets to keep their family's dialect.
When her son Malik passed away in March of 2016 from diabetes-related complications, Boyce-Taylor vowed to be the caretaker of his legacy. Her 2021 memoir, Mama Phife Represents, explores the first two years of her public and private grief in what has been called an “embodiment of pure love, grace, and hope”.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: I am going to keep his spirit alive. I was saying to a friend this morning that because I wrote so openly and so truthfully that was what my son learned from so he could write and impact a generation with his work with Tribe Called Quest. So how could I let that go? He just finished a solo album and A Tribe Called Quest came back 20 years later and have a killer album. I think that those were all of the things that he learned from me. That age and time has nothing to do with it. You just grow deeper, you just grow like granite harder, and look at the world and be-
JIM COTTER: And more difficult to move.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: More difficult to move, but moving anyway, whether it's on a crutch, or with a cane. I'm moving. I'm a type one diabetic for 46 years but I've never been hospitalized, except when they found it. What do you account for that? I really think it's my writing. It has saved me so many times. I don't want to sound like I'm preaching but this is my life.
JIM COTTER: Well, the gift of being a writer is that you get to rise above the confusion of the muddle of everyday thoughts. Have a look at it, put it on a piece of paper and say this is ... You have to examine what you truly believe, and what you truly know, and what you truly know you believe, before you can write it down.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: And I do think the age is what's given me resilience, I do, I really believe that.
JIM COTTER: Give your 20-year-old self the best piece of life advice you can.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Keep writing. Don't be ashamed of some of the experiences that you've had, put them out there. At one time I was ashamed of being a diabetic but I couldn't hide that. We also hide illnesses in this country, mental illness were ashamed of that. Talk about your life as a lesbian or gay or trans person. It may be embarrassing, it may cause people to move away from you, but that is your life you cannot stay away from it.
JIM COTTER: Be honest.
CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR: Yes. Be honest.
Now in her 70s, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor continues to share her truth about the world through her mother tongue— creating records for the future by being fearless in examining the past.
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KORY STAMPER
JIM COTTER: Grammar and language use may well be the last refuge of socially acceptable snobbery. But though dictionaries are often treated as some kind of sacred authority on correctness, right and wrong are not as clearcut as we’ve been led to believe. English is, by its very nature, changeable and democratic—and as Tori Marchiony discovered, is governed by the ways real people use it in their everyday lives.
TORI MARCHIONY: The true job of dictionaries, and in turn, the lexicographers who write them, is not to create language, but to record it.
KORY STAMPER: There's always an assumption that the dictionary is pandering to some agenda And you know, the fact is, we don't care about agendas. Like we only care about language.
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer, author, and a former associate editor for the Merriam-Webster family of dictionaries. For the better part of two decades, she spent most work days in silence, poring over the English language in a steady search for clarity.
As she details in her 2017 book, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, it’s a job few people would be keen to take on. Stamper estimates there are less than 50 lexicographers in the U.S. today, mostly working for the small handful of dictionary publishing companies that have managed to survive into the 21st century. Indeed, though the myth of a singular source of authority known as “The Dictionary,” has become deeply embedded into our collective consciousness, it’s never really been true. The whole idea started off as a marketing ploy in the 1800s—at the height of the so-called “Dictionary Wars”.
KORY STAMPER: So something that most people don't realize is that in America, especially dictionaries have always been a commercial pursuit. They're no dictionaries supported by, you know, the public or a university. They're all commercial. Um, and, and so much of the history of American lexicography is not necessarily which dictionary was better, but which dictionary sold more. So through the 1800s there was this great thing that happened called the Dictionary Wars, which just is ridiculous that we have something called the Dictionary Wars. But there it is. You had two competing companies headed up by two different lexicographers. So you had, um, the Merriam company, they published Noah Webster's dictionaries, and then you had Joseph Worcester, who is another lexicographer, a little bit more linguistically conservative than Noah Webster. And actually a fine lexicographer if you read his definitions.
They're pretty good. And the two of them were in constant competition. Um, Noah Webster really, he really firmly believed that language was part of a new American national identity, right? So all of his dictionaries were written to be pedagogical. They were written to support this idea of American independence, of American identity. And Joseph Worcester was not so much, I mean he felt like that was pretty radical. So the two of them were in constant competition. One would publish a dictionary, the other one would publish a bigger dictionary, then the other guy would publish a bigger dictionary. So in the course of the Dictionary Wars, the Merriam brothers who were the publishers of Webster's dictionaries knew that it was not necessarily going to be this idea of American culture that was gonna win out. So they started this insane marketing campaign. So through the 1800s, if you read old newspapers, you'll occasionally run into these huge long columns with really interesting typography and, you know, really overblown language about a dictionary, you know, get the best. And so, you know, president of Yale College says, you know, “hold all of man's knowledge in the palm of your hand”. You know, just sort of crazy overblown stuff. And Webster won the Dictionary War mostly cuz Joseph Worcester died. But that set up this idea that the dictionary- first, there is only the dictionary and the dictionary is an authority on everything. It is an authority on life, the universe and everything. And if you don't have one, then you are poorer for it intellectually, spiritually, and morally. And that continues all the way through the 20th century.
So, and, and you know, this is something that working lexicographers are like, oh gosh, like, we're not like, no, but dictionary marketing companies love using terms like the voice of authority or, you know, the premier authority on, you know, “authority” as a word gets thrown around a lot in, in 20th century dictionary marketing. So, yeah. You know, the actual <laugh> the actual work that we do is very much like, we're not an authority on anything, we're just recording language. But dictionary marketing for the last 150 years has, you know, sort of rattled the saber of, “this is the sum of all human knowledge”. Buy it! Buy multiple copies!
A few years ago, in an attempt to chip away at the public’s misguided understandings about what dictionaries are really for, Merriam Webster invited its lexicographers to speak for themselves through short Youtube videos and press appearances. Unsurprisingly, the gig was a hard sell.
KORY STAMPER: The director of marketing sent out an emails like, “Hey, who would love to do this?” And no editor responded <laugh> because no editor wants to go, no one wants to do that.
So she, the then director of, of marketing tapped three of us that she knew had done some kind of public facing stuff in either in other parts of our lives or had had, you know, plenty of experience answering email. And it was very weird. But, you sort of get used to it in that it's a conversation. It's a conversation about language. But for the most part, all the other editors were “like, no, thank you. Hard pass.” Yeah.
As a representative of Merriam-Webster, Stamper was surprised by the vitriol and suspicion she faced from the public. Battling common misconceptions quickly became a well-practiced skill.
KORY STAMPER: There's like five standard questions that I answer over and over. And one of them is always sort of a rebuttal to this sense of the dictionary— when the dictionary enters a word, it's legitimizing it, it's making it part of proper English. That's why people are upset that the figurative “literally” is in the dictionary. Right? And trying to explain a) all the things you hate are way older than you think they are and have been used by writers that are way better than any of us. And b)this is not about protecting English. Like English doesn't need protection. It's fine. It's gonna be fine. It's been fine for 1500 years. It's gonna continue to be fine. We really don't need to protect it.
TORI MARCHIONY: Actually, let's talk about that. Cause I've been getting yelled at about that all weekend.
KORY STAMPER: You have?
TORI MARCHIONY: Oh yes. My boyfriend is furious with you guys <laugh>, um, about the figurative literally. <laugh>. So let's talk about that. How did all right, how did that happen?
KORY STAMPER: So this is something that's, this is a, this is a feature of English and not a bug. So “literally” is a word that um, when it first came into English, it meant “by the letter”. So actually for all of the people out there who hate the figurative, literally even the way that we use the non figurative literally is not the original way that we used literally. So literally originally meant by the letter. And then it quickly developed a meaning I think in the 1500s for, um, something was based in actual reality or in fact this is, you know, “this is literally a recording studio” or “this is literally a Monday” or this is, and that use very quickly began being what we called extended. And so, uh, we have evidence of it in the late 1600s, early 1700s being used for emphasis.
“I was literally deprived of my daily bread.” Like, uh, probably not, like, the guy who said that was a very well-to-do gentleman who's probably not literally deprived of his daily bread. And so it just very, very, very slowly started being used for emphasis. And then it became used enough that we entered the figurative sense in our dictionaries in I believe 1909 or 1913. And it lived there for a very long time until the internet found it and then assumed that we had put this figurative sense but the figurative sense goes way back. And so we'd kind of be remiss to not record it. But the thing about the dictionary is our job is to record it and we actually leave it up to the speakers to say, “well, I'm not gonna use it.” And that's a totally fine stance to say, “I'm not gonna use the figurative, literally” –you're wrong, you will at some point in your life, cuz everybody who says, “I'm not gonna do,” they always do. It's just axiomatic of English usage, you know, that's fine. Where it gets dicey for us is when people say, “well it's wrong”. It's not wrong cuz English allows it. Right?
TORI MARCHIONY: And English is about as perfect as we are
KORY STAMPER: <laugh>. Yeah. Right, right. And English is not one thing, you know, it's not just this, it's not standard written English. English is really broad and it's more about context than it is about right or wrong. Yeah. It should be about context instead of right or wrong.
TORI MARCHIONY: I love that. In the book that you said language, there isn't written language and spoken language. There's language and then there's writing. And I feel like if we started there, people would have an easier time digesting with a dictionary supposed to be accomplishing.
KORY STAMPER: <laugh>. Yeah,
Today, Kory Stamper is one of the most prominent lexicographers in American English. After graduating from Smith College with a liberal arts degree that involved studying Latin, Greek, Norse, Old English, and Middle English, it was unclear what her career path might be. But when she got hired as an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster, it was a natural fit for the Colorado girl who had grown up enchanted by words.
KORY STAMPER: My family was not literate, but they were literate. So like, language was not, you know, we didn't sit around and read, you know, Arabian nights or things like that to each other. And for me as a nerd in high school, I didn't, I didn't have looks. It was never gonna be popular. Um, I was way too smart to be cool. I was in the band. So, you know, it's like everything was against me in high school. So the only thing I really had were words. And, and I just loved the sound of words in my mouth. And, and sort of as I discovered language more and more, like initially language just became a weapon. It was a way that I could deflect. So someone was being a, you know, horrible in the hall, I could call them a trogledyte and that, you know, everything would stop cuz nobody in high school knows what that word means.
Or I could, you know, call them “cacafuego” or I could call them “lickspittle”. And, you know, I just loved like the way these words felt in my mouth, you know, you could really chew on 'em. So, so initially words became sort of this, this was the defense mechanism I set up to keep people from, you know, either hurting me or making fun of me or whatever. Um, but, you know, just, I think especially using those words and really sort of letting 'em rattle around, um, it was really, I, you know, I, I really fell in love with the sound of words more than I fell in love with the meaning of words and, and sort of understanding the depth of English words. Like, but you know, then finding these little gems like “lick spittle”, I love the word “lick spittle”, for some reason it sounds so much more obscene than brown noser, like “lick spittle”. Ugh. Oh. So find like, just, you know, sort of finding these little treasures that I felt like were just, nobody knew about them but me. So that was, that was one of the things that really made me fall in love with English.
TORI MARCHIONY: And where were you finding them? Were you sort of like, someone would piss you off and gym class and you'd go to your dictionary? Or was it that you were just sort of like taking notes and everything you were reading?
KORY STAMPER: I mean, it was kind of both. Yeah. You know, I mean, I, yeah, I was a, I was a voracious reader. I mean, my poor parents, like, you know, we had, um, the National Geographic and the Reader's Digest, those were the two things that we had in the house. And I would read them as soon as they came in. Like I'd sit down and I'd read each of them six or seven times in a row, and then I'd go back to them and I mean, they were just in tatters. So, so when I started, like when I found my local library and started, I would just start pulling books at random, just, you know, “I'll take this, I'll take this, I'll take this”. And so I'd find some of these words in the course of reading. And then, you know, also in the course of reading, encountering words that I didn't know what they would mean, I'd go to the dictionary to look them up. And then, you know, you spend five minutes sort of flipping through and just looking at words that catch your eye. I think “cacafuego” was one I found in the dictionary and just went, “oh, oh!” you know, I knew enough Spanish to know what it translated to and was like, “I, what? Oh, oh!” You know, it's so, so I did both of it. I sort of, I collected from all sorts of different places.
TORI MARCHIONY: Gotcha. And so as a, a voracious reader who then has spent now 17 plus years marking <laugh>. Right? How does that change how you read for pleasure?
KORY STAMPER: Oh yeah. I ha yeah, it's a transition. It's a definite transition. So, I, when I read for pleasure, I, I usually have to read, um, the first chapter two or three times just to be like, okay, we're not at work. I'm not at work. It's not a problem. Yeah. It really messes you up. People think that this job, like, “I love reading, I would love your job” and it completely ruins you for reading because you just can't stop marking stuff for new words. Like, you can't.
TORI MARCHIONY: Was that sad that you like, I mean, sometimes they say don't, don't make what you love your work <laugh> because it'll become work.
KORY STAMPER: Right. Um, eh, I don't know that I'd say it was sad. I think it just took getting used to, I think. Um, and it also took just, you know, honestly it took like my family being like, “oh my gosh, can you just stop? Like, can you stop? Can you stop? We don't need to hear”. I mean, I'm the, I'm the person that we go as a family. We go somewhere on vacation and you know, we'll stop at a truck stop or a diner or something. And I'm the one like riding down with the waitress is saying like, “oh, they call it Taylor Ham her?!”. Like, that's amazing. Taylor Ham. Do you think that's capitalized? And you know, my kids were like, “oh, god, Mom's gonna do the work thing now.”
TORI MARCHIONY: So does it feel like a calling then, because also, jobs that you can't leave at the office, right? <laugh> then so much become who you are.
KORY STAMPER: Right.
TORI MARCHIONY: Does it feel like that?
KORY STAMPER: I, in some ways yeah. And in some ways, no. I mean, I think that first, anyone who stays at this job for as long as I've been at it, um, you really have to, to love it. Cuz it's not an easy job to do. It's mentally taxing. It's also, it's publishing so it's low paying <laugh> and it's, you know, it's not a booming industry. So, so if you're in this job for a while, it's because it really suits you and you really love it.
Um, so in that sense it is like a calling because you do end up devoting yourself to it in a way that I think most people who have long-term careers probably don't. Cuz it does change how you interact with language and you interact with language all the time.
Stamper says it took nearly a decade of real world experience to feel like she had a handle on the craft of lexicography, despite a rigorous training process. As a new hire, she had several months of classes and close instruction. During this crash course, Stamper learned many truths about the English language that seemed to violate the grammatical rules she’d once held at the foundation of her self-esteem.
KORY STAMPER: it was hard because I think this is the thing that you do if you care about language, you sort of, you know, you build up a tower of, you know, and it's a defensive bull work against attack, right? Like, “I know how to use the subjunctive” <laugh>. Like, there we go. You cannot say I'm an idiot, you know, I, I know what the word subjunctive means. And, and so if you are raised in the American educational system, this is your view of language, your view of language is there, it's right. There's a bunch of it that's right. And there's a bunch of it that's wrong. If you use this, you're gonna get an A. If you use this, you're gonna get a D. And, and you know, lexicographers are steeped in that, you know, one of the, the requirements for the job is that you have to have a good grasp on the rules of English grammar.
And everyone comes in and it's sort of like, “eh, I got this.” Like, “oh yeah, I know that good can only be an adjective” or, “I know the difference between lay and lie.” And the reason that you need to know those is because you need to understand sort of this broader picture that people have of language mostly. So you can start tearing it apart. And when I went through my style and defining classes, I hit a point where we were working, we were actually talking about grammar. We were talking about how do you determine English grammar? And, and “Good” came up and our director of defining E. Ward Gilman, “Gil”, we called him—sort of this big guy, big belly. And ah, it's kind of gruff manor, very imposing, really sweet guy, but just kind of, he, he was like, “okay, Good. Is it in an adjective or an adverb?” And I was like, “well it's clearly an adjective because that's what everybody has ever told me”. You don't say “I feel good,” you say “I feel well.” And he said, “okay, except it's been used as an adverb for over a thousand years. So, so it's both an adjective and an adverb.” And I just like, he's like, but that's wrong. It's wrong. He's like, it's, it's not. And I think there is a point where, you know, there's sort of a breaking point I think for every lexicographer where you come up against a word you hate or a word you believe is unworthy or a word you don't even think is a word. And you have to grapple with it actually being a word or being something that people use or having a context that makes it worth entering. And, and there yeah, it's like there's a little death to self there <laugh>.
Like, you have to be willing to let it go. And, and I think the, the benefit of it is that it actually makes you a more gracious listener, right? Like, I have friends that when they find out what I do, the first thing they say is, “oh, I have to watch what I say around you.” And that just makes me so sad because it's not my job to police your language and it's not really anybody's job. I mean, if, if I'm your teacher and we're in language arts class, maybe, but yeah, it's, you know, I want to, I can then engage in a conversation or listen to a person and not be hung up when they misuse the subjunctive or when they confuse lay and lie or when they use “that,” when they should have used “which” or you know, all these fiddly little rules that in the moment it's, it's more about communication. It's not so much about catching people in error. So I think if you're willing to let go of all of that, if you're willing to acknowledge that English is a mess and it still holds together, then it makes you a more gracious person and it makes you more interested in language in a right way, as opposed to in a way to shame other people.
TORI MARCHIONY: And then in terms of the ocean that you swim in, I feel like it would be really easy to both talk yourself into and out of an existential crisis every single day <laugh> of like, “oh my God, this is so important.” And then, “oh my God, this isn't, doesn't matter at all.” We're just gonna do another dictionary after this <laugh>. So sort of how do you, where's your inner piece <laugh> in that?
KORY STAMPER: It's, yeah, I mean, there is a point where you're defining and you just have to go again, because, so this gets into some of the weird philosophy of dictionaries, which is, you are writing a definition, which is a reflection of one facet of meaning. You will never capture the full meaning of a word because that meaning is fully contextual. It relies on the speaker, the listener, the time. It can't be captured in writing. So, there's a sense where when you sit down and you write a definition, you already know that it's gonna be inadequate in some way because it can't capture the full meaning of a word. And there comes a point where you just have to, you sort of have to go, “all right, I, I can't do anything else with this”. Like it's passable or that's as good as I can get it, or that's as close as we're gonna get and you have to move on.
And some of that is, you know, there's a production timeline and the editorial coordinator's standing over you going, “come on, we have to publish this sometime soon”. Um, and so there's a point where you just say, “okay, I'm just moving on”. Um, but I, there are times where especially you finish a dictionary, it's out the door. There's sort of this, you get a couple of days to, you know, breathe, read, catch up on, you know, thousands of emails that have piled up and then, and then we're back at it. And there's a sense sometimes where, I mean, I've certainly felt like I, you know, the minute I put it in writing, it's out of, it's out of date. Like the minute that you look at a dictionary, the minute a dictionary is produced, it's out of date. And there is a sense of like, why, why do I bother? Why don't I go get a job that pays more? Or that is, you know, where I can finish something and it's done and I don't have to revisit it. But I think if you, if you are committed to doing this, and if you're a lexicographer, you also understand that language is always gonna outstrip whatever we try and do. And, and then it becomes a chase, and then you can see how language is moving in real time. And that part is exciting because this, if you love language and you love this job, you want language to always be moving forward. You want language to be expanding, you wanna run across new things, you wanna be proven wrong. And so in that sense, yeah, I mean, the existential crisis, you can stave it off for a little bit. <laugh>,
And so, with curiousity and a healthy sense of humor, lexicographers continue chasing after English— a language alive in the mouths and minds of nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide— forever adapting to new contexts, experiences, and needs…just like we all do.
JIM COTTER: That was Tori Marchiony.
PAUL MULDOON
In the half century since his first work was published, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon has released more than 30 collections and earned a lasting place in the history of English-language literature. Now in his 70s, he looks back in wonder at the confidence and optimism of his youth while finding peace with the dawning reality of growing older.
PAUL MULDOON: One of the things I do realize is this: when I was a teenager, I had more of a sense that I could indeed be a poet than I do now, you know? Now I look back on it and think “really? Did I, did I pull it off? Did I manage it?”
JIM COTTER: I think you've done Okay.
PAUL MULDOON: Yeah, but I don't know, honestly, I'm not, I've been quite serious here. I mean, you sort of feel this, the sense that a teenager or a 20 year old has really been able to do anything, you know it's a fabulous thing.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in Northern Ireland— the six counties in the Northeast of the island that are part of the United Kingdom.
Growing up, the sectarian conflict among Protestants and Catholics had started to become violent and his father, a market gardener, and mother, a school teacher, who were well-read Irish nationalists, tried to shelter their three children from the brutality of life beyond their home. They shared a love of popular song, of literature, of words.
PAUL MULDOON: I do think that Irish people in general love language and, uh, you know, that that runs right through society. Of course there are the, uh, those in the higher echelons who would be inclined to use the word “echelon,” but the word echelon would also be used by the, the man in the street or the man in the field, the ordinary person, whatever that is. I myself don't quite think in those terms. I was brought up in county armah in Northern Ireland and my neighbors were farmers but they were also, um, into amateur dramatics. For example, they would put on a play in the local parish hall. Um, they quite naturally recited poetry that was in the era. We're talking to her about, uh, people who would have been, and this particular generation, my father's generation, he was born in 1910. So people who were brought up in the ‘20s, 1920s, ‘30s, their education was very, very good, even at, even at the primary or grade school level fantastically well-educated. One of the places where this delight in language comes across also is in popular song. The songs that people were singing in English. And indeed before that, in Irish, uh, were designed, one would almost believe to show how smart people were, how educated they were, how many big words they could use. “Are you Aurora or the goddess, flora, our timid Dora, or Venus bright or Helen fair beyond compare the prime stole from the Grecian site.” That's your average song in the Gaelic tradition, which you know something about, they're also very interested in, in using big words. So there's a delight in language. And I think it, it, um, not whether or not there's a greater delight in language than there is among the English or indeed among the Americans. I'm not entirely sure, but I do know that among Irish people in general, there is a love of language and a love of chat, you know, of blather. Uh, so in
JIM COTTER: And being able to hold court, you get to hold court. If you a have vocabulary, you have stories.
PAUL MULDOON: I think that's right. I think it's fair to say that Irish people like to read and to talk,
Muldoon is part of a long tradition of Irish poets that stretches back through a centuries-long Gaelic bardic tradition that’s still alive today. But Irish writers really came to the fore after the famines of the 1840s, when spoken English became more widespread. Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, showed Paul Muldoon that a life in letters could be a worthy pursuit. He began writing at a young age, but his early influences were not exclusively from his homeland.
PAUL MULDOON: The history of Irish literature is truly remarkable. I mean, by any standards. It’s astonishing actually, given the size of that population. Like many, I started writing when I was a child, essentially. I got really, really serious when I was in my mid teens, the way people in their mid teens get suddenly very serious about many things. But at that stage, funnily enough, it was T.S. Eliot who really got me started. A combination of T.S. Eliot and John Donne. So paradoxically, I read Yates a little later on as a teenager. He was not necessarily the icon that he became, nor indeed, quite when I started out, was Joyce, who of course is in a league of his own.
JIM COTTER: Do we call Wilde Irish?
PAUL MULDOON: I think we do!
In 1969, Muldoon left home to attend Queens University in Belfast. There, he joined a coterie of poets and playwrights who would later become known as the Belfast Group. It produced several accomplished writers and poets—including the future Nobel Prize Laureate, Seamus Heaney. But back then, says Muldoon, they were under-aware of the depth of their talents, or maybe, just too humble to acknowledge them.
PAUL MULDOON: I don't think we were sitting around thinking, you know, “look at us, you know, there's nothing like us.” I don't think we know you to think such a thing would have been, uh, crazy. And if you'd express such a thing that, uh, you know, you'd have been smacked on the hand,
JIM COTTER: But with a critic’s eye, as you were looking at their poetry, were you aware that they were doing good work? Did you just say, did you just accept that good poets make good work, that this is nothing unusual?
PAUL MULDOON: I think one of the things we really accepted was that there is a chance that one might make something good, whether or not it's a strong chance, is up in the air. Um, I mean, I think really, we were very conscious of the fact that some days you might come up with something good and other days you might not, and that's just how it was.
JIM COTTER: Have a general sense of there being a higher bar than might be? I mean, could you have guessed that, that, that you were working at a higher level, perhaps as a group or as a group of individuals?
PAUL MULDOON: You know, honestly, I don't think that was a feature. I mean, one of the things about the Irish and the Northern Irish Republic of Ireland is that you, you don't, you don't start taking yourself too seriously. Um, uh, as I recall, I mean,
JIM COTTER: If you start getting notions yet,
PAUL MULDOON: You, you don't get notions about yourself. I mean, you might, you know, lying in your bed at night. And I think, “you know, maybe this is okay,” but to express it, I mean, you'd be, you'd be, you'd be marched out. And that's, I think that's quite healthy. And you don't have to look too far to see people getting ideas about themselves, and it's not attractive.
By 1973, even before he had graduated, Muldoon had published his first full length poetry collection, New Weather. An invitation from BBC Northern Ireland to read selections from the book led to a full-time job as an arts producer with the corporation. His time with the broadcaster showed him the importance of the spoken and the sung, rather than the merely written word– a tradition he has embodied ever since.
PAUL MULDOON: I wrote a lot of scripts and most of them had to do with presenting what was in some sense, the most mundane information.
JIM COTTER: Such as?
PAUL MULDOON Such as, “Werner Herzog’s new film would be playing next week at the Queens Film Theater in Belfast.” But that was written out, and it was written out with an ear to how it was going to be presented. So I think actually that one of the aspects, which I’m certain plugged into my poetry, though you wouldn’t necessarily think about it, was a constant engagement with “how is this going to sound?”
And that, by the way, was another feature of my education, which was, the song experience and the song tradition. In particular incredibly, and again, a feature of, uh, I'm sure has been more of a feature of what I've done for the past 50 years or whatever then than most people might imagine. And couldn't myself. I only occasionally think about it and it's the impact of the Gaelic song tradition on what I do. And I was taught Irish at school. In fact, I studied it at university too, and I was taught at school by a couple of people who were really interested in the song tradition. And of course in many cases, the poems were indistinguishable from the song tradition. The poems were songs, the songs were poems. So, um, that, that I think is another feature that, uh, is part of, part of what's going on, you know,
In a poem entitled “The Loaf”, Muldoon uses a common feature of song, the refrain, while remembering a group of Irish navvies as he made repairs to an old house near Princeton.
(Excerpt from Paul Muldoon’s “The Loaf”)
When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch
with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.
When I put my ear to the hole I’m suddenly aware
of spades and shovels turning up the gain
all the way from Raritan to the Delaware
with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click.
Just like those 19th century canal diggers, and many Irish people before and after, Muldoon has spent much of his life abroad. After a short stint at Cambridge, in 1987 he became a professor at Princeton University, where he still works today.
Along the way, he’s published 14 poetry collections, penned librettos for four operas, written two children’s books, collaborated with Warren Zevon to create My Ride’s Here, the song that would ultimately become the legendary rocker’s epitaph, and co-wrote a book with Paul McCartney. 2021’s The Lyrics, was a worldwide best-seller that celebrated the creative life and musical genius of Paul McCartney through 154 of his most meaningful songs.
PAUL MULDOON: I think he said along the way that he probably won’t ever write an autobiography, and that this book might be the closest that would come to that. And so, anyway, the, what we have is the text of the lyric and then his commentary, which as it happens was mediated through myself, but which appears as a, you know, a freestanding thing as he, where he’s talking.
JIM COTTER: His words.
PAUL MULDOON: His words. I mean, one of the things that comes across for me, anyone I think, or for others, is just how great a writer he is.
Paul Muldoon is modest about his own literary legacy and continues to push against having “notions,” ideas about one’s own importance. Proving once again that you can take the boy out of Ireland, but you can’t take Ireland out of the man.
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PROMO
Growing up first generation Chinese in Yonkers, New York provoked Gish Jen to learn, and write, about the the inner workings of the East-West cultural divide.
GISH JEN: In this struggle between ... so I want to be a writer. If that's at odds with my duties as a daughter, as a mother, from the point of view of my parents, but of course, your duties come first. This idea that you should realize yourself—that's just not paramount.
As the high-achieving eldest son of Nigerian immigrants, it took Tochi Onyebuchi until his mid-twenties to internalize racial dynamics in America.
TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: I’ve felt like an interloper in the African-American experience even though all these external cues are lumping me into that same bucket
And Through her short stories, Deborah Eisenberg has dissected American life from the vantage point of its most controversial generation.
DEBORAH EISENBERG: my poor maligned despised generation, we did believe that the world was going to get better and it was getting better.
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That’s all ahead, on Articulate Experience.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.
Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.
Original music and sound design by John Avarese.
I'm Jim Cotter.
