The Lexicographer's Lost Lure: On the Word That Got Away
In a quiet corner of a university library, a lexicographer I know keeps a small, unmarked box in her bottom desk drawer. It does not contain rare stamps, cherished photographs, or forgotten mints. Instead, it holds a collection of three-by-five index cards, each one a small monument to a failure. This is her catalogue of lost lures: words she tried, and failed, to add to a major dictionary.
Her work, much like that of an editor or a headline writer, is one of ruthless distillation. It involves sifting through a torrent of language—corpora of texts, databases of periodicals, transcripts of broadcasts—to identify which new terms have the staying power to warrant a formal definition. The criteria are strict: a word must demonstrate sustained, widespread use across a range of sources. It must prove it is more than a fleeting jargon or a personal idiosyncrasy. For every ‘selfie’ or ‘photobomb’ that makes the cut, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, that do not.
But it is the near-misses that haunt her. The words that were almost there. She shows me a card for ‘glimmer-time,’ a word she found in a series of regional poems describing the specific quality of light just before a thunderstorm. Another card holds ‘page-drunk,’ a state of giddy, disoriented absorption after hours of deep reading. She found it in a novelist’s personal letters and a handful of book blogs, but not enough to satisfy the editorial board. These were her lures—beautiful, specific, evocative—cast into the vast ocean of the language, but they failed to catch.
We often think of writing and publishing as acts of addition, of putting something new into the world. The lexicographer’s work, however, is a constant reminder of the profound editorial craft of subtraction, of the traditions that guard the gates of a shared lexicon. Her box of lost words is not a tomb, but a testament to the sheer volume and vitality of language happening just beyond the official margins. It speaks to the audience of speakers who are constantly building the language from the ground up, co-authoring it in real time, long before any institution can codify their creations.
For any writer or editor, there is a quiet lesson in that box. It is a lesson in the virtue of the perfect, unsaid word; the headline that was almost written; the clarifying sentence that was ultimately deemed unnecessary. It is a homage to the potential that remains unrealized, not as a failure, but as a necessary part of the process. The words in the box are not dead. They are simply waiting, patient and full of potential, for the world to finally catch up to them.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: