General Session Speaker - Kory Stamper

Kory Stamper, author of the best-selling book, “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries”

Tuesday, June 9 at 10:15am

"Rose" By Any Other Name: The Color-Name Problem from the Language Specialist's Point of View

A color scientist, a fashion consultant, and your Uncle Norman walk into a bar, where the bartender is wearing a sweater that’s…what color, exactly? Each person will recognize that color and will give an accurate answer, but that answer may well not be understood by anyone else in the bar. Our understanding of color itself has progressed dramatically in the last 100 years, but the names we use to describe individual colors are maddeningly diverse, confusing, or imprecise. Color specialists may wonder: why can’t we come up with a list of acceptable color names and just tell people to use them? That is precisely what one scientist, two dictionary companies, and the ISCC decided to do. Stamper will discuss how dictionaries are written, the role of the lexicographer in the whole process, and how technical language enters (or doesn’t) the vernacular. In particular, she’ll look at how a multiplicity of color names across different disciplines and eras makes the dictionary writer’s life a Technicolor headache. She will also share some of the research she’s done for her upcoming book on how the ISCC and Merriam-Webster decided to fix this problem once and for all—with mixed results and unintended consequences for the nonspecialist and the specialist alike.

Bio

Kory Stamper is an author and lexicographer (a writer or editor of dictionaries) who has grappled with everything from the meaning of “god” to the vagaries of “teal” and chronicled some of her exploits in her best-selling book, “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries” (Pantheon, 2017).

Her interest in color names started when she was asked to help write the definitions for 150 color names for one of Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries a decade ago, and has grown since. She is currently working on a book about the difficulty of defining colors, and the 20th-century attempts by three members of the ISCC to standardize color names by using Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries. Her shorter writing on language, lexicography, and usage has appeared in “The New York Times”; “The Boston Globe”; and “The Washington Post.” She currently works with Cambridge Dictionaries as a senior editor of American English for their dictionaries for English-language learners, and she is hoping that she doesn’t have to deal with “teal” again anytime soon.