A few years ago, when the conversation over the racist nickname and racist iconography of the NFL team that maintained racist hiring policies longer than any other NFL team was a sad constant in the sports media discourse, I was embedding with the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster. Merriam was letting me cosplay as a lexicographer to write a book about the future of the dictionary in a digital world. I traveled regularly to the company’s old brick building on a hill in Springfield, Mass.—a few blocks from a strip club called the 5th Alarm Lounge, near the fire station—to watch the language sausage get made, and make some of my own.
That meant I had access to the Consolidated Files: 16 million three-by-five slips of paper, known as citations, or “cits”—pronounced sites—with examples of word usage culled for more than a century from newspapers, magazines, academic publications, trade journals, contemporary fiction, advertisements, radio transcripts, television shows, annual reports, government reports, cereal boxes, photo captions, comic strips, seed catalogs, restaurant menus, car manuals, airline tickets, you name it. The slips are crammed into alphabetized drawers in rows of chest-high, brick- or tan-colored metal filing cabinets of varying sizes and styles that stretch around the second-floor editorial room like dominoes.Â
