wskent

The site's innovations have always been cultural rather than computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors' passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David's “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving.

One challenge in seeing Wikipedia clearly is that the favored point of comparison for the site is still, in 2020, Encyclopedia Britannica. Not even the online Britannica, which is still kicking, but the print version, which ceased publication in 2012. If you encountered the words Encyclopedia Britannica recently, they were likely in a discussion about Wikipedia. But when did you last see a physical copy of these books? After months of reading about Wikipedia, which meant reading about Britannica, I finally saw the paper encyclopedia in person. It was on the sidewalk, being thrown away. The 24 burgundy-bound volumes had been stacked with care, looking regal before their garbage-truck funeral. If bought new in 1965, each of them would have cost $10.50—the equivalent of $85, adjusted for inflation. Today, they are so unsalable that thrift stores refuse them as donations.

Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. But for most people who were alive in the earliest days of the internet, an encyclopedia was a book, plain and simple. Back then, it made sense to pit Wikipedia and Britannica against each other. It made sense to highlight Britannica's strengths—its rigorous editing and fact-checking procedures; its roster of illustrious contributors, including three US presidents and a host of Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, novelists, and inventors—and to question whether amateurs on the internet could create a product even half as good. Wikipedia was an unknown quantity; the name for what it did, crowdsourcing, didn't even exist until 2005, when two WIRED editors coined the word.

That same year, the journal Nature released the first major head-to-head comparison study. It revealed that, for articles on science, at least, the two resources were nearly comparable: Britannica averaged three minor mistakes per entry, while Wikipedia averaged four. (Britannica claimed “almost everything about the journal's investigation … was wrong and misleading,” but Nature stuck by its findings.) Nine years later, a working paper from Harvard Business School found that Wikipedia was more left-leaning than Britannica—mostly because the articles tended to be longer and so were likelier to contain partisan “code words.” But the bias came out in the wash. The more revisions a Wikipedia article had, the more neutral it became. On a “per-word basis,” the researchers wrote, the political bent “hardly differs.”

But some important differences don't readily show up in quantitative, side-by-side comparisons. For instance, there's the fact that people tend to read Wikipedia daily, whereas Britannica had the quality of fine china, as much a display object as a reference work. The edition I encountered by the roadside was in suspiciously good shape. Although the covers were a little wilted, the spines were uncracked and the pages immaculate—telltale signs of 50 years of infrequent use. And as I learned when I retrieved as many volumes as I could carry home, the contents are an antidote for anyone waxing nostalgic.

I found the articles in my '65 Britannica mostly high quality and high minded, but the tone of breezy acumen could become imprecise. The section on Brazil's education system, for instance, says it is “good or bad depending on which statistics one takes and how they are interpreted.” Almost all the articles are authored by white men, and some were already 30 years out of date when they were published. Noting this half-life in 1974, the critic Peter Prescott wrote that “encyclopedias are like loaves of bread: the sooner used, the better, for they are growing stale before they even reach the shelf.” The Britannica editors took half a century to get on board with cinema; in the 1965 edition, there is no entry on Luis Buñuel, one of the fathers of modern film. You can pretty much forget about television. Lord Byron, meanwhile, commands four whole pages. (This conservative tendency wasn't limited to Britannica. Growing up, I remember reading the entry on dating in a hand-me-down World Book and being baffled by its emphasis on sharing milkshakes.)

The worthies who wrote these entries, moreover, didn't come cheap. According to an article in The Atlantic from 1974, Britannica contributors earned 10 cents per word, on average—about 50 cents in today's money. Sometimes they got a full encyclopedia set as a bonus. They apparently didn't show much gratitude for this compensation; the editors complained of missed deadlines, petulant behavior, lazy mistakes, and outright bias. “People in the arts all fancy themselves good writers, and they gave us the most difficult time,” one editor told The Atlantic. At Britannica rates, the English-language version of Wikipedia would cost $1.75 billion to produce.

There was another seldom remembered limitation to these gospel tomes: They were, in a way, shrinking. The total length of paper encyclopedias remained relatively finite, but the number of facts in the universe kept growing, leading to attrition and abbreviation. It was a zero-sum game in which adding new articles meant deleting or curtailing incumbent information. Even the most noteworthy were not immune; between 1965 and 1989, Bach's Britannica entry shrank by two pages.

By the time the internet came into being, a limitless encyclopedia was not just a natural idea but an obvious one. Yet there was still a sense—even among the pioneers of the web—that, although the substrate was new, the top-down, expert-driven Britannica model should remain in place.

We feel there are a lot of misconceptions or ideas that people believe about making stuff on the Internet. Here’s the truth, as we see it.

10(TAYLOR)
Work with a partner

There’s a common myth in the arts — the lone genius, usually a man, creating everything by himself. For the most part, neither of us has found it to be completely true. Look up most cases of a lone genius, and you’ll find a footnote about some unacknowledged helper.

Here’s how we work: Tony usually researches, writes and edits alone. But I do everything else: I edit every draft, watch every version, watch all the clips, do the flash cards, and build the thesis. I am the first and last audience that sees everything before it goes out. And the closest description we’ve ever come up with is that he is the editor, and I am the editor’s editor.

If you look at the picture below, you’ll see Tony edited version 1 of the Chuck Jones video by himself. Then we worked together for 7 days to create version 7 (the final). The yellow boxes are the only parts that stayed the same, and even those sections got moved around.

But most of all throughout this process, I’m a sounding board. Tony and I often build a thesis by arguing the points with each other. Except for a handful of videos, that has basically been our process for three years. We’re not saying that this system will work for everyone, but having two sets of eyes has worked really well for us.

11 (TONY)
There is no such thing as free content on the Internet

Everything costs something to make. If a person is putting out content for free, that means they’re not getting paid for their time.

Video essays cost money to make. There’s the cost of the research, the writing, the assembling of materials, the editing. It adds up to hours and hours of work for something that takes minutes to consume. My average just for editing (not anything else) is about 8 hours of editing for every 1 minute of video essay. So the 9-minute Jackie Chan video was around 72 hours of editing. It was probably at least double for research and writing.

With Patreon donations, Every Frame a Painting was eventually able to break even. But from April 2014 until December 2015, we were making video essays at a loss. We were never in danger of not making the rent, but it got pretty financially stressful on several occasions.

12(TONY)
Nobody can cheat the triangle

Everyone who works in filmmaking knows the triangle: Faster, Cheaper, Better. Pick two. A film can be made fast and cheap, but it won’t be good. Or you can make it fast and good, but it won’t be cheap. Or it can be cheap and good, but it won’t happen fast.

Every Frame a Painting was made after we came home from our day jobs and paid our bills. That kept it cheap. We also tried really hard to make it good. Which ultimately meant we had to sacrifice “fast.”

The big danger for future video essayists is that large websites have started moving away from the written word and towards video, which is completely unsustainable. Video is just too expensive and time-consuming to make.

(TAYLOR) Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, nobody can cheat this triangle. And sooner or later, all of these large sites will bleed money, at which point some executive will say “We need to make our content both faster AND cheaper!”

This is why we encourage every person who wants to make something on the Internet to understand the value of independence. This is not about artistic integrity or even money. We kept Every Frame a Painting independent because as long as we could control this triangle, we could control the end result.

We didn’t care about cheap or fast, we cared about it being good. If we found a company willing to pay for it to happen fast, we’d work fast (full disclosure: we eventually found two, Criterion and FilmStruck). If nobody was willing to pay, then we worked slow.

But if we sold the channel to another company, or partnered with some network, then we would no longer control the triangle. And guess which of these three things would get sacrificed first?

13(TONY)
Know thyself and thy audience

Nothing really prepares you for the experience of suddenly having “an audience” on the Internet. The experience is different for every person, but I suspect the two major feelings are the same: there’s that initial dopamine rush of “Oh my God somebody likes me” followed by that creeping fear of “I better not fuck this up.”

George Orwell has this great quote:

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.

The Internet, and YouTube in particular, is a massive echo chamber of people asking you to write the same book over and over again. For your own sanity, you need to keep those voices at arm’s length. But because of that combination of dopamine and fear, it seems as though a lot of people end up leaning into what the audience wants.

We’re not asking you to ignore the audience completely; it’s more about setting clear boundaries between you and them.

My belief is that if you give the audience exactly what they ask for every time, they will probably enjoy it, but on some level they’ll lose respect for you. Hell, you’ll lose respect for yourself.

(TAYLOR) And I believe that there is a balance that can be found, but you and the audience should be equally as passionate about the idea. The key is nuance.

So with Every Frame a Painting, we made it clear that we would not accept requests; we came up with all the ideas and set up boundaries. Not everybody needs to set the same boundaries we did, but you need to have something.

14(TAYLOR)
Success can be scarier than failure

The idea of failure is always scary. Nobody wants to fail, especially not in front of other people. But this script you’re reading is a failure.

The reason we‘re putting it out there isn’t as an act of bravery or anything; we just wanted to be honest. Failure is a fact of life — certainly a fact of any life in the arts. It’s the only way we’ve ever learned anything.

(TONY) For us, Every Frame a Painting ended up being both a personal and a professional success. But over time, I felt trapped by what we’d created — and also trapped by that success.

Every time I mentioned some film, I’d hear, “are you gonna make a video about it?” Every time I started writing something, even for my own amusement, a voice in the back of my head would say “how do I make this accessible to my audience?” I stopped experimenting in my editing, mostly because it was too far outside the margins of what I was making on YouTube.

It wasn’t even fun making jokes on Twitter anymore, because they got taken at face value:

I’d been a working video editor since I was 19 years old. I’d spent three years of my personal time editing video essays. And now I could barely stand to look at my own work. Eventually, the solution became clear: go do something else.

(TAYLOR) Whenever Tony got really down like this, I would remind him of a clip that we both love, from the Studio Ghibli documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.” It’s a moment when Hayao Miyazaki is trying to draw a specific airplane. And for some reason, he cannot do it.

For days and days, he keeps trying to draw this plane, but nothing meets his satisfaction. Eventually, he realizes that he’s spent too much time on it. So he hands the plane off to another animator, and he moves on to something else.

For me and for Tony, this clip is extremely reassuring. If Miyazaki — the world’s greatest living animator — can admit defeat after trying his best, then it’s okay for everyone else. If he can let go, then so can we.

ClickHole is joining Cards Against Humanity, but the The Onion isn’t

“Obituaries reflect what the present thinks of the past,” wrote journalism professor Kathleen McElroy.

What will the future think of President Donald Trump and two historic votes senators must take on his impeachment? The obituaries of the Republicans who voted in favor and against the articles of impeachment for President Richard Nixon could provide some insight. How these GOP members of Congress voted in 1974 featured prominently in all of their obituaries.

It’s fair to say that when it comes to the impeachment of Trump, two votes in his Senate trial will long be remembered.

The first vote will come soon when senators decide whether to call the star witness, John Bolton, who has agreed to testify if they do. “In a courtroom, by contrast, jurors would not be allowed to deliver a verdict without hearing witnesses,” wrote the leading legal ethics expert, Stephen Gillers in discussing the Senate’s upcoming decision. Indeed, it would be unprecedented for the Senate to bar witnesses. Every Senate impeachment trial in American history has heard from witnesses. As Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in 1999 at the close of the Clinton impeachment, 

“I strongly supported efforts to allow both the House managers and the White House lawyers to call whatever live witnesses they deemed necessary to make their case. I favored a full and complete trial, believing that it was more important to insure fairness to both sides than it was to get the trial over by some arbitrary date. This was in keeping with normal procedures in all previous impeachment trials. It also seemed to me to be essential to fundamental fairness and a full airing of the facts and issues in dispute. A hundred years from now, no one will care whether the trial lasted two weeks or six months. They will care, we must hope, about the extent to which justice was done.”

Since the revelations in Bolton’s book manuscript have come to light, an overwhelming majority of the American public wants the Senate to call Bolton. It seems clear that history will understand full well “the extent to which justice was done” by senators who vote not to hear from him.

The second vote will be on whether to convict and remove the president from office. How will historians write about this momentous decision? That also seems clear. Over 2,000 historians signed onto a statement saying:

“President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president. Among those most hurtful to the Constitution have been his attempts to coerce the country of Ukraine.”

The statement goes on to say, “It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.” 

As House Manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) remarked on the floor of the Senate last week, “We can do a lifetime’s work, draft the most wonderful legislation, help our constituents and yet we may be remembered for none of that, but for a single decision, we may be remembered, affecting the course of our country.” He said these words after reflecting on the courage of the late Republican CongressmanThomas Railsback, who worked with a small bipartisan group in the House in 1974 to vote to impeach Nixon. Schiff highlighted Railsback as the congressman had passed away on Jan. 23, the eve of the Trump impeachment trial. The headline for his obituary in the Associated Press read, “Thomas Railsback, congressman who broke with GOP to back Nixon impeachment, dies.”

And so it has been for every obituary of every Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee who voted in 1974 for or against the Nixon articles of impeachment. If the reference is not made in the obituary’s headline, it still appears as a central point in the narrative of their lives as that single decision affected the course of history.

Here’s what we found when researching these obituaries.

In that summer of 1974, seven Republicans joined the Democrats to vote for at least one article of impeachment, including Toni Railsback (Ill.), Hamilton Fish Jr. (N.Y.), Lawrence J. Hogan (Md.), M. Caldwell Butler (Va.), William S. Cohen (Maine), Harold V. Froehlich (Wis.), and Robert McClory (Ill.) 

Ten Republicans voted against all three articles of impeachment: Edward Hutchinson (Mich.), David Dennis (Ind.), Delbert Latta (Ohio), Trent Lott (Miss.),  Joseph Maraziti (N.J.), Wiley Mayne (Iowa), Carlos Moorhead (Calif.), Charles Sandman (N.J.), Henry Smith (N.Y.), and Charles Wiggins (Calif.). 

Regardless of whether the congressmen voted for or against the articles of impeachment, their legacies were largely defined by this one moment. So much so that newspapers titled their obituaries with reference to this vote: 

“Former Rep. Joseph Maraziti, 78, Defender of Nixon on Watergate” 

“Wiley Mayne; House GOP Member Who Voted Not to Impeach Nixon” 

“Sandman, Nixon Supporter, Dies” 

“Lawrence J. Hogan Sr., Md. Republican Who Called for Nixon’s impeachment, Dies at 88”

“M. Caldwell Butler, a Key Vote Against Nixon, Dies at 89” 

“R. McClory; Backed Nixon’s Impeachment” 

“Thomas Railsback, Congressman Who Broke with GOP to Back Nixon Impeachment, Dies.”

“Charles Wiggins, 72, Dies; Led Nixon’s Defense in Hearings”

HOW THEY VOTED OVERALL

OBITUARIES FOR THE CONGRESSMEN WHO VOTED FOR THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

OBITUARIES FOR THE CONGRESSMEN WHO VOTED AGAINST THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

My appreciation to Danielle A. Schulkin (NYU Law ‘20) for research on this project.

Photo credit: Bhaskar Dutta/Getty Images

The Fog & Gold Flag is now available for purchase! Find all different sizes and options at www.SFfogGoldFlag.com

The City of San Francisco deserves a compelling, attractive, unique, and symbolic flag. Cities should have a way to rally around their place through a symbol, much how sports fans rally around the colors and logos of their team. Such a beloved, controversial, challenged, sometimes groundbreaking and beautiful city would do well with a flag to show civic pride.

Having a phoenix represent the city that has survived at least 3 major fires that destroyed nearly all of the city is a good symbolic choice. Let's make our flag a more compelling and attractive flag than the current city flag dating from 1940.

The Fog & Gold Flag of San Francisco, by Brian Stokle (2019) Flag with 3x5 proportions, shown as 6x10. Phoenix and flames horizontally centered on the eye of the phoenix while vertically centered on where the outspread wings meet the neck of the bird.

Per the North American Vexillological Association (the association dedicated to studying flags), the five principles of a good flag design are:

1. Keep it simple. The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory. (not sure what age, but let's say a 7 year old since I have one that age.)
2. Use Meaningful Symbolism. The flag's images, colors, or patterns should relate to what it symbolizes. 
3. Use 2 or 3 Basic Colors. Limit the number of colors on the flag to three which contrast well and come from the standard color set.
4. No Lettering or Seals. Never use writing of any kind or an organization's seal.
5. Be Distinctive or Be Related. Avoid duplicating other flags, but use similarities to show connections.

Rendering of the 1900 flag for San Francisco. This appears to be the original drawing submitted by policeman John M. Gamble for his winning concept. Source: San Francisco Municipal Reports for 1899–1900.

Current (2020)

San Francisco's flag does work well on a few of the principles and general good design regarding the following elements:

Principle 2: Meaningful symbol - a phoenix

The flag is "ok" on being simple or distinctive related to the gold border with a white field.

However the flag overall fails on most of the principles:

Principal 1: Keep it simple. The bird is too complicated, as is the ribbon.

Principal 3: Use 2 or 3 colors. The flag's base is rather basic with white and gold, but when you add in the bird, motto ribbon, and city name, it totals six colors.

Principal 4: Never use lettering or seals. The original design had the city motto, and the current flag has the motto and the name of the city on it! "If you need to write the name of what you're representing on your flag, your symbolism has failed." says Ted Kaye of the North American Vexillological Association.

Principal 5: Be distinctive or related: The overall design is not distinctive due to its failure on the other principles, and it looks like a bit of a jumbled mess of text, ugly bird, and ribbons. Two other major cities have a phoenix (Atlanta, GA, and Phoenix, AZ), and that's ok. However I don't relate to the flag or make a connection to my city.

Fog and Gold Design
So I set out to make a flag that used the relatable phoenix that symbolizes the city's resilience after fires in the 1850s, and the rebirth after the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Here is my final design and submission for your consideration.

Elements and symbolism:
1. Phoenix and fire shape are based on the 1929 version of the flag with some minor adjustments, including adding a few feathers to the head, and opening up the eye a bit.

(caption from John Lumea's blog entry) Photograph of a detail of the original San Francisco flag. This design was executed in 1900 and in use until sometime in the 1930s. The photo, dated no later than 1927, is from the second volume of the two-volume scrapbook, “Album of San Francisco,” compiled by Hamilton Henry Dobbin (1856–1930). Collection of the California State Library. Library catalog listing via Calisphere.

2. Flame color: International orange like the Golden Gate Bridge
hexidecimal color code #e74000, a slightly deeper red color than official Golden Gate Bridge International Orange and a touch of cyan. I call it Flame International Orange. 

3. Phoenix color: Crimson for the loss of life and blood from our disasters, first San Franciscan Ohlones, union workers, soldiers, and activists throughout history.
hexidecimal color code #8d0000, a variant of crimson red. I call it Brown Crimson.

4. Gray: Should San Francisco's flag show our distinctive and well known flag? The answer is a resounding YES!
hexidecimal color code #a7a9ac

5. Gold: The city blossomed into its metropolis state thanks to the California Gold Rush. Gold represents that history, as well as the city's bold pride to take its own distinctive path.
hexidecimal color code #FDBB1B, which is a variant of Golden Poppy

Fog and Gold Flag of San Francisco, by Brian Stokle (2019)

How do we make a better flag for San Francisco?
1. Order flags from me and hang them out your window.
2. If you'd like to submit your own design or push for a better flag, organize and write letters to your elected officials, and community groups.
3. Sponsor a competition and get a good design panel that represents all aspects of San Francisco and has some good design folks on the panel that understand flags.
4. Finally, when the City selects a new flag, whether the Fog & Gold Flag or not, ti will need to change the language of the official ordinance, most likely. If Fog & Gold were selected, I'd change the Administrative code.

Official San Francisco Administrative Code regarding the city's flag design.

Below what I'd revise it to.


I'll be ordering 3'x5' flags to show with pride from our homes and throughout the city. Who's in?

UPDATE: April 2020

After weeks of Republicans demanding that Schiff open up the doors and allow the public to see the impeachment proceedings, Trump says this morning: “They shouldn’t be having public hearings.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 8, 2019

Trump tells reporters this morning that he’s considering visiting Russia in May. Putin invited him to the May Day parade; Trump is thinking about going

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 8, 2019

Trump says Democrats should not have public hearings, which is odd because I thought the Republicans were pushing for hearings to NOT be done behind closed doors?

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 8, 2019

Trump calls people who testified against him “Never Trumpers”; there’s no evidence for this (he seems to be redefining the word to mean anyone who criticizes him). He says nobody has firsthand knowledge here (wrong). He calls the phone call “perfect.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 8, 2019

One rock-solid consistency of Trump is deference to Russia: expressing admiration for Putin, taking his word over that of US intel, delaying Russian sanctions, downplaying Russian aggression, echoing Kremlin talking points. This has enormous impact on US national security. https://t.co/WYnqXe6geb

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) November 8, 2019

May Day, also known as International Workers Day, and celebrated by communists and socialists all over the world. https://t.co/vzy6Oqg1wD

— Jim Zarroli (@JimZarroli) November 8, 2019

The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you’ve never heard of, or whose sense you’re unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you already know.

Indeed, if you look up those particular words in the dictionary that comes with your computer — on my Mac, it’s the New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd Edition — you’ll be rewarded with… well, there won’t be any reward. The entries are pedestrian:

example /igˈzampəl/, n. a thing characteristic of its kind or illustrating a general rule.

sport /spôrt/, n. an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.

magic /ˈmajik/, n. the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

Here, words are boiled to their essence. But that essence is dry, functional, almost bureaucratically sapped of color or pop, like high modernist architecture. Which trains you to think of the dictionary as a utility, not a quarry of good things, not a place you’d go to explore and savor.

Worse, the words themselves take on the character of their definitions: they are likewise reduced. A delightful word like “fustian” — delightful because of what it means, because of the way it looks and sounds, because it is unusual in regular speech but not so effete as to be unusable, is described, efficiently, as “pompous or pretentious speech or writing.” Not only is this definition (as we’ll see in a minute) simplistic and basically wrong, it’s just not in the same class, English-wise, as “fustian.” The language is tin-eared and uninspired. It’s criminal: This is the place where all the words live and the writing’s no good.

The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. They’re all a chore to read. There’s no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.

John McPhee’s secret weapon

John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

The way you do it, he says, is “you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.” You go looking for le mot juste.

But where?

“Your destination is the dictionary,” he writes:

Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line — how each listed word differs from all the others. Some dictionaries keep themselves trim by just listing synonyms and not going on to make distinctions. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words; you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green.

I do not have this first kind of dictionary. In fact I would have never thought to use a dictionary the way McPhee uses his, and the simple reason is that I’ve never had a dictionary worth using that way. If you were to look up the word “intention” in my dictionary here’s all you would see: “a thing intended; an aim or plan.” No, I don’t think I’ll be punching up my prose with that.

But somehow for McPhee, the dictionary — the dictionary! — was the fount of fine prose, the first place he’d go to filch a phrase, to steal fire from the gods. So for instance he’d have an idea of something he wanted to say:

I grew up in canoes on northern lakes. Thirty years later, I was trying to choose a word or words that would explain why anyone in a modern nation would choose to go a long distance by canoe. I was damned if I was going to call it a sport, but nothing else occurred.

And he’d go, Well, “sport” is kind of clunky, it’s kind of humdrum. Maybe I can do better. And he’d look up “sport,” and instead of the even more hopelessly banal “an activity involving physical exertion and skill” that I’d get out of my dictionary, he’d discover this lovely chip of prose: “2. A diversion of the field.” Thus he could write:

His professed criteria were to take it easy, see some wildlife, and travel light with his bark canoes — nothing more — and one could not help but lean his way… Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another — anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion of the field, an act performed not because it is necessary but because there is value in the act itself.

A book where you can enter “sport” and end up with “a diversion of the field” — this is in fact the opposite of what I’d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that’s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder McPhee wrote with it by his side. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn’t, in a ratio of “at least ninety-nine to one.”

Unfortunately, he never comes out and says exactly which dictionary he’s getting all this juice out of. But I was desperate to find it. What was this secret book, this dictionary so rich and alive that one of my favorite writers was using it to make heroic improvements to his writing?

I did a little sleuthing. It wasn’t so hard with the examples McPhee gives, and Google. He says, for instance, that in three years of research for a book about Alaska he’d forgotten to look up the word Arctic. He said that his dictionary gave him this: “Pertaining to, or situated under, the northern constellation called the Bear.”

And that turned out to be enough to find it.

The invention of American English

Noah Webster is not the best-known of the Founding Fathers but he has been called “the father of American scholarship and education.” There’s actually this great history of how he almost singlehandedly invented the very idea of American English, defining the native tongue of the new republic, “rescuing” it from “the clamour of pedantry” imposed by the Brits.

He developed a book, the Blue Backed Speller, which was meant to be something of a complete linguistic education for young American kids, teaching them in easy increments how to read, spell, and pronounce words, and bringing them up on a balanced diet of great writing. It succeeded. It was actually the most popular book of its time; by 1890 it had sold 60 million copies.

But that wasn’t even Webster’s most ambitious project. Certainly it’s not what he became known for. In 1807, he started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly, An American Dictionary of the English Language. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. Think of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole.

Dictionaries today are not written this way. In fact it’d be strange even to say that they’re written. They are built by a large team, less a work of art than of engineering. When you read an entry you don’t get the sense that a person labored at his desk, alone, trying to put the essence of that word into words. That is, you don’t get a sense, the way you do from a good novel, that there was another mind as alive as yours on the other side of the page.

Webster’s dictionary took him 26 years to finish. It ended up having 70,000 words. He wrote it all himself, including the etymologies, which required that he learn 28 languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He was plagued by debt to fund the project; he had to mortgage his home.

In his own lifetime the dictionary sold poorly and got little recognition. Today, of course, his name is so synonymous with even the idea of a dictionary that Webster is actually a genericized trademark in the U.S., so that other dictionaries whose contents bear no relation to Webster’s original can use the name just to have the “Webster” brand rub off on them. [1]

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It makes sense: there was, and is, something remarkable about his 1828 dictionary, and the editions that followed in its line (the New and Revised 1847, the Unabridged 1864, the International 1890 and 1900, the New International 1909, the 1913, etc.). You can see why it became cliché to start a speech with “Webster’s defines X as…”: with his dictionary the definition that followed was actually likely to lend gravitas to your remarks, to sound so good, in fact, that it’d beat anything you could come up with on your own.

Take a simple word, like “flash.” In all the dictionaries I’ve ever known, I would have never looked up that word. I’d’ve had no reason to — I already knew what it meant. But go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”).

You’ll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you’ve seen. “2. To convey as by a flash… as, to flash a message along the wires; to flash conviction on the mind.” In the juxtaposition of those two examples — a message transmitted by wires; a feeling that comes suddenly to mind — is a beautiful analogy, worth dwelling on, and savoring. Listen to that phrase: “to flash conviction on the mind.” This is in a dictionary, for God’s sake.

And, toward the bottom of the entry, as McPhee promised, is a usage note, explaining the fine differences in meaning between words in the penumbra of “flash”:

… Flashing differs from exploding or disploding in not being accompanied with a loud report. To glisten, or glister, is to shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew.

Did you see that last clause? “To shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew.” I’m not sure why you won’t find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won’t. Here is the modern equivalent of that sentence in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster: “glisten applies to the soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface <glistening wet sidewalk>.”

Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”

It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

Words worth using

I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. In fact they’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language.

Recall that the New Oxford, for the word “fustian,” gives “pompous or pretentious speech or writing.” I said earlier that that wasn’t even really correct. Here, then, is Webster’s definition: “An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast.” Do you see the difference? What makes fustian fustian is not just that the language is pompous — it’s that this pomposity is above the dignity of the thoughts or subject. It’s using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for.

It’s a subtle difference, but that’s the whole point: English is an awfully subtle instrument. A dictionary that ignores these little shades is dangerous; in fact in those cases it’s worse than useless. It’s misleading, deflating. It divests those words of their worth and purpose.

Take “pathos.” This is one of those words I used to keep looking up because I kept forgetting what it meant — and every time I’d go to the dictionary I would get this terse, limiting definition: “a quality that evokes pity or sadness.” Not much there to grab a hold of. I’d wonder, Is that really all there is to pathos? It had always seemed a grander word than that. But this was the dictionary, and whatever it declared was final.

Final, that is, until I discovered Webster:

pathos /ˈpāˌTHäs/, n. 1. The quality or character of those emotions, traits, or experiences which are personal, and therefore restricted and evanescent; transitory and idiosyncratic dispositions or feelings as distinguished from those which are universal and deep-seated in character; — opposed to ethos.

It continued. 2. That quality or property of anything which touches the feelings or excites emotions and passions, esp., that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cry.

Dear god! How did I not know about this dictionary? How could you even call yourself a dictionary if all you give for “pathos” is “a quality that evokes pity or sadness”? Webster’s definition is so much fuller, so much closer to felt experience.

Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about itself, even though it’s more complete — as if to remind you that the word came first, that the word isn’t defined by its definition here, in this humble dictionary, that definitions grasp, tentatively, at words, but that what words really are is this haze and halo of associations and evocations, a little networked cloud of uses and contexts.

What I mean is that with its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of “pathos” — “a quality that evokes pity or sadness” — shuts down the conversation, it shuts down your thinking about the word, while the Webster’s version gets your wheels turning: it seems so much more provisional — “that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cry” — and therefore alive.

Most important, it describes a word worth using: a mere six letters that have come to stand for something huge, for a complex meta-emotion with mythic roots. Such is the power of actual English.

The pleasure of finding things out

I could go on forever listing examples. I could say, “Look up example, magic, sport. Look up arduous, huge, chauvinistic, venal, pell-mell, raiment, sue, smarting, stereotype. Look up the word word, and look, and up. Look up every word you used today.” Indeed that’s what motivated this post: I’d been using Webster’s dictionary for about a year; I kept looking words up, first there, then in whatever modern dictionary was closest to hand, and seeing this awful difference, evidence of a crime that kept piling up in my mind, the guilt building: so many people were getting this wrong impression about words, every day, so many times a day.

There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.

Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Let’s go exploring!”

Appendix: How to start using Webster’s 1913 dictionary on your Mac, iPhone, Android, and Kindle

The closest thing you can get to a plain-text, easily hackable, free, out-of-copyright version of the dictionary McPhee probably used is Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828).

You’ll never use it, though, unless it’s built in to your computer and available easily on your phone and e-reader. For instance I wanted it so that whenever I typed a word into Spotlight, I’d get a Webster’s definition:

I even wanted it so that when I highlighted a word in my browser, and hit Cmd + Ctrl + D, I’d see a definition from Webster’s:

Here’s how I got that to work:

• Download this archive from S3.
• Unzip it and launch the DictUnifier app.
• Drag the stardict-dictd-web1913-2.4.2.tar.bz2 file, still compressed, onto that app’s little drag-and-drop area. It might take a few seconds before the conversion process starts. Once it does, it’ll take about 30 minutes to finish.
• The dictionary will now be available in your Dictionary app. (If not, you may need to enable it in the app’s Preferences pane, as here.) But its formatting may look a little off. If the lines are squished together, open ~/Library/Dictionaries/dictd_www.dict.org_web1913.dictionary/Contents/DefaultStyle.css in a text editor and add the following directive:

Restart the Dictionary app to confirm that the CSS was updated correctly. (You might also try bumping the margin-top and margin-bottom values in the div.y block to 0.7em, from 0.5em. And some folks have said that 1em works better than 0.7em.)

• If you want to always see Webster’s results by default, go to the Dictionary app’s preferences and drag Webster’s to the top of the list.
• If you’re on OS X Lion, follow these instructions so that Dictionary results appear first in Spotlight searches.
• If you’re unhappy with the formatting of the entries in Dictionary, here are alternative instructions for setting up Webster’s on OS X that may give better results. (Here, too.)
• To get it on your iPhone, get the Stardict-compatible Dictionary app. On its installation screen, go to the “Network” tab and type https://emw3.com/stardict-dictd-web1913-2.4.2.tar.bz2, exactly, into the URL bar. (Alternatively, just download this free app by Aaron Parks.)
• For Android, you can follow these instructions, courtesy of @TheRealPlato.
• To add the dictionary as a search engine on Chrome, follow these instructions, courtesy of @chancelionheart.
• And finally, follow these instructions to get the dictionary on your Kindle.

Notes

[1] Note that the modern Merriam-Webster, even though it does derive directly from Webster’s original, has been revised so much that it’s actually less similar, content-wise, than some of the impostors. It, too, is one of the “wrong” dictionaries.