The Word Detective

Wanted: Word detective. Must enjoy dictionaries, books, journals, and other things filled with words. Must be good on the hunt, with a nose for good sources. Expect some travel to out-of-the-way places. Also expect some dust mingled with disappointment when the word trail goes cold. Perks include hanging out in the Rare Book Room and reading old issues of Playboy.

How’s that for a dream job? Sounds pretty good to me—well, maybe except for the Playboy part, but I guess ya gotta do what ya gotta do when you’re a word sleuth.

I bring this up because of an article in today’s Washington Post. Columnist John Kelly writes of a word sleuth named Jon Simon. Simon is a researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary and spends his days documenting the usage of words. Often what he’s after is a word’s earliest published example. Honestly, I was intrigued but not too excited by this story until Simon said this about his work: “It’s like the archaeology of words.” Hello! I’m wordy and I can dig archaeology, so this should be the perfect job for me, right? Well …

If I’m honest (and I do try to be) I would not last long as a professional word sleuth. Can you imagine being surrounded by all those words, all that information, all day long? How could you not get distracted by one neat thing after another? I suspect my word-sleuthing career would go the way of my Internet searches: Oh, that’s interesting. Huh … look at that, and that, and that. Ooh, and what’s this? I never knew that. That would make a great story for Adventures in Editing. Hmm … Now what was I looking for? After a week of this, I would get fired.

But isn’t it nice to know there are people in the world tracking down the origins of things like “nacho” and “bad hair day”?