Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower joins us to talk about his work at the Oxford English Dictionary, the process of pitching The F-Word, how what we find offensive has changed over time, the ways words get into the language, the OED's transition to digital, the roots of "dropping an F-bomb", the value of kids' texting habits, and the importance of hosting dinner parties and wearing fine suits. Plus, you get to listen to me obsess over word choices and still embarrass myself!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 9 - Putting the Pro in Profanity
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a conversation about books in life, not necessarily in that order. I'm finishing a run of three pharmaceutical conferences on 11 days covering Orlando, Chicago, and New York. I only got interviews in in Chicago, but they were pretty good ones, as you'll see in the next couple of weeks. I discovered there really aren't a lot of literary figures in the Orlando area who I could track down and get for this podcast, so I didn't bring my full recording studio in a bag along on that trip. Now the problem is, when I bring that whole studio and my carry-on, I tend to attract attention from the TSA staff, especially the little tripods I use for the microphone stands, 'cause they look suspicious. But now it's nice. I've actually managed to deflect their attention by bringing along a portable coffee making set up too. And that really, when you see the look on a screener's face, when he notices the 500 milliliter electric kettle going through the luggage, it's pretty rewarding. I would say that I do this because I'm coffee-obsessed, but really, I'm just an obsessive person who happens to like coffee, I think. But this is also an issue of hygiene and personal safety. I have decided, you see, over the years from all the business travel I've done, I reached the conclusion, and I don't know how many people's lives I'm going to wreck by revealing this. You really need to act as though every item in your hotel room has been used for an unspeakable purpose by a lonely traveler at least once and act accordingly. And to me, that includes the coffee machine and don't even get me started about the remote control for the TV. So now I bring an electric kettle, coffee beans, a mini grinder, a digital scale, and a Hario vortex and filters to make my own coffee. I'm considering switching from the Hario to an AeroPress, but that thing totally looks like a bong and I'm afraid that'll lead to even more trouble with TSA. Anyway, speaking of the unspeakable, which you knew there was going to be some segue here, my guest this episode is Jesse Scheidlauer. And Jesse's an editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. He's also the guy who wrote the F-word, a dictionary of the F-word, which is my way of saying this episode has some strong language using strong and quotes. So don't listen to it if you're a minor and your parents are uptight or if you're offended by the F-words and N-words and various other initial words. I think it's a pretty fascinating talk with a guy who cares very deeply about what we say and how and why we say it. I've really learned a lot from the conversation, in fact. And now the virtual memories show conversation with Jesse Scheidlauer. (upbeat music) - My guest today is Jesse Scheidlauer, author of the F-word, editor at large for Oxford University Press. - Oxford English Dictionary. - Oxford English Dictionary. And a dapperly dressed dinner party host. Jesse, welcome to the show. - Thank you, thanks for having me. - Now, the first thing I wanted to ask you about is your lexicographer. That's your chosen profession and career. Do you find people are very hesitant around you about word choice for fear of getting something wrong? - People are often worried about that. They often say things like, well, I'm gonna have to watch how I speak in front of you. They start using very formal language and depending on what I feel like, my usual response to say is to say, that's okay, I don't give tickets. But that doesn't do anything to put them at ease. - And do they tend to use the word fuck more often given your, the F-word dictionary that you compiled? - They probably don't, they might ask about it, but no one starts saying, oh, you know, I have one that I bet you haven't heard of. That doesn't happen. - So why don't you tell us about the, well, the genesis of the F-word, where the book came from, not the word itself? If you could kind of walk us through that process and then. - The F-word started when I was an editor at Random House and we were working on this large project devoted to American slang in general. And it was pretty clear, as with many dictionary projects, everyone is just going to open to a single entry. And in this project, this was a historical dictionary. So like the OED, it gives information about how a word has evolved over time and how it has always been used and has quotations showing how that's been used. So the entry for a fuck in this book was many, many pages long. And I thought, well, this is clearly going to be something that everyone is going to want to look up, but not everyone needs the full multi-volume scholarly thing what if we just took the fuck entry and separated that out into a book and published that on its own? And I thought of this and didn't say anything because it seemed completely ridiculous and no one would ever go for this. And finally, we were in an editorial meeting and no one was presenting anything interesting and someone said, well, is there anything else we can do? And finally I said, well, what if we took the F-word stuff out of the slang dictionary and published that separately? Everyone was like, that's great, great idea, let's do that. So we did. And that was the first edition, this is in 1995, and got a lot of things wrong and added a lot more to the second edition four years later. And then after a rather long gap, during which we had the main part of the internet revolution and started getting all sorts of full text databases available online, the third edition came out in 2009, literally twice as large as the second edition. There was just so much more to say in that short time. Dropping an F-bomb, you know. For example, which was earlier, it was from the 1980s, but it was not very common until-- I was wondering, 'cause I only heard it maybe five, 10 years ago, I was wondering about the etymology on that, or the history on that one. See, I'm being careful about my word choice. And I won't tell you if you're wrong, 'cause you'll just have to wonder. God damn it. Was there an alternate title besides the F-word at any point? I assume the F-book was not going to-- If it was always the F-word, we thought this is a title that itself we can get away with, and it will be clear what it's about. And there have been some books with F- in the title, Arthur Naresians, The Fuck Up, being perhaps the best-known example. And there have been plays with fuck in the title, and I'm in Washington Post a month or two ago, had an article about this exact question. Like, what do you do? We have these prominent plays that are getting produced in serious theaters, but we can't use the word, we can't use the title of the play. And The New York Times has had this problem as well. So this is something that I find extremely interesting, because 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, certainly, you wouldn't have had this problem, because no one would produce a serious play that had a fuck in the title. It just couldn't be done. You might have some avant-garde thing, but that wouldn't matter because The Times isn't going to write about it. But if you're at a point when you do have serious productions-- Like Chris Rock in The Motherfucker in the head. Or anything where it's something that you can't ignore, but you have some policy against using the word, you have a real conundrum. Like, you've decided that something is newsworthy enough to write about, but at the same time, you can't write about it. And I very much understand the reluctance of newspapers to print certain types of language, but I also feel that whether it's a sexual term or a racial epithet, once you've made the decision that you have to write about this, then it behooves you to actually use the word that you're writing about. If the word fuck is part of a book that you want to review because it's that important, or because it's part of a play that is playing in serious theaters, and people are going to it, and people are talking about it, and you want to review it, I think you have to use the word. It was an interesting aspect I thought from the introduction to this latest edition of the book was the way fuck is less stigmatized, but now the N word is that racial and other ethnic stereotypes or ethnic derogations are much more charged and sensitive than sexual terms it seems. - Well, yes, and that's been a relatively recent change. The kind of things that people find offensive have changed a lot over time. Certainly sexual and scatological vocabulary has always been considered offensive, but in the earlier centuries, things like insults of one's parentage, so words like bastard or horse on were considered very bad, and would have been written the same way that some offensive words are written now, where bastard would be written B dash D, for example, and anything, any kind of religious blasphemy, this was extremely bad, God damn would be written with dashes, all sorts of minced oaths, so sounds for God's wounds, there's a long-standing tradition, but it's been quite some time since words like these have been regarded as especially bad. I mean, yes, God damn is, depending on what kind of social environment you're in, it's not a good word, but it's certainly not horrendous, it's not something that you-- - The skies are not gonna fall off. - The skies are not going to fall if you say that. - Although I remember it was a big deal when there was some mini series with Phoebe Kate's back in the '80s where she asked, which one of you bitches is my mother, and that was going to be the first big instance of this word on TV, and again, the world is going to fall to pieces, which in a sense he could argue it did, but regardless, perhaps-- - It's not because of that. - But to go from that being such a major event in 1985 to where we are now, it's kind of an amazing transition. - Yeah, I mean, the use of things like damn or hell in movies, people do track that, and it has gone through censorship issues or internal censorship when people have tried using that prominently. Now those things aren't a big deal, and the sexual and scatological vocabulary is bad, but not horrendous, but yeah, any kind of racial epithet or any kind of ethnic term, these are the worst things where a politician, and occasionally it does happen, and a politician will say get caught on tape or camera saying fuck, and people will usually feign outrage, or there might be some real outrage, depending on the circumstance. I mean, saying fuck in a moment of happiness is one thing, saying go fuck yourself to a political opponent on the Senate floor is something rather different, but you can say this, if a politician is caught saying fuck, it's not going to be the end of the world. If a politician were caught saying nigger, it's hard to imagine how that would be survivable. - And of course I pause the moment you said that, so because I have that natural reaction. What do you find offensive in terms of language? Is there anything that you feel sort of catch and sensitivity over? - Well, I don't find, I think what's important to remember when you're talking about language, that language is a proxy for our thoughts, and if you're upset by something, it's usually not. I mean, okay, there are certain circumstances when people are upset by grammatical things, where they have punctuation issues or whatever, but I mean, really if people are upset by words, it's because they're upset with the underlying concept. It's because we're squeamish about sex, we're squeamish about excrement. We don't like our gods to be insulted, and these are perfectly normal things to care about. We care if people insult other people because of their background. So I don't think, I'm not bothered by the words fuck or shit or nigger or cunt or kite themselves. I am upset by hatred and racism and whatever, and I would rather focus on that. And with that said, expressions of dislike are also culturally important. I mean, you can't say, well, don't dislike your fellow man. You can, but it's a stupid thing to say. So even if you were to eliminate certain categories of words, you couldn't eliminate hatred. And if you could eliminate hatred, it would be something very different from any kind of discussion about language. I mean, it's a very different thing you're talking about. - I think it's a plot of one of Samuel Delaney's novels, actually, where they try and eliminate concepts of things so that the thought and the words don't exist anymore. - Well, 1984, certainly. Yeah, one of the few novel, prominent novels, with a character who is a lexicographer. - Do you track those? - I do, yeah. - You know, sort of heroism. - Well, not here. I mean, he signed the lexicographer in 1984. I mean, his job was keeping the dictionary update with the language that would reflect the right thoughts. And so that's not the kind of lexicographer I want to be, but it's nonetheless curious that it's a major novel with a character who's a lexicographer. - And how did you get started? What was your entree into lexicography? - It was pretty much by chance, which is how it works for most lexicographers. It's not something that you normally plan to go into or train for because there aren't that many jobs, and it's something that most people don't think about. My interest was always in the history of the English language, and I was planning on going into academia one way or another, doing that kind of thing. And I was in grad school, and I started becoming disillusioned with the idea of being an academic. And I made some extremely trivial discovery that I sent into the OED, which is what you're supposed to do. And I ended up doing some volunteer work for them, and then some freelance work for them. In the meantime, I dropped out of grad school and got a job in New York in publishing and was still keeping up with OED stuff. And I was at a division of Random House and a friend of mine at Random House who was in the dictionary department left to work in a magazine, and I got his job. I was there, I had experience with dictionaries. Career by attrition has worked wonders for me. So it was just chance, really, and I ended up there. I spent eight years in the Random House Dictionary department, and then the OED announced that they were opening up an American office, and I got that job, and I've been there ever since. Did your parents have any trepidation over? Our son is a lexicographer? I mean, not a doctor, I guess, but was there any issue like that? No, I mean, I think they didn't know what it was either. No one does, but they like that I am happy in what I do, and they like it when I'm talking to the press, and they get to read things that I say in the paper and we'll hear me on the radio, and it's interesting, which a lot of jobs aren't. Which publication are you proudest of? Sort of which publication are you proudest? OK, not a grammarian, but still. Well, Walker, OED, New York City, Fword. This is something that I have written or participated in. Well, I would absolutely say that the most important thing is my contributions to the OED. I mean, I love the Fword book, and I'm proud of it, and I'm happy to have written it and enjoy working on further parts of it, but the OED is the book. I mean, that's contributing to that, is the greatest thing one can do, I think. Except it's not a book anymore, as we start to move digital with it. How has that transition worked for you the way the OED-- I mean, as far as I know, they're not going to be producing another print revised edition. We might be. We haven't decided. And when I say we haven't decided, I mean literally we haven't decided. Very often, it happens every couple of years that we say someone asks us about it, and we say we haven't decided, and they assume that this means we have decided not to. We have not decided, because we are still 10 or 20 years away from finishing our work. And at the rate we're going, a physically printed OED will be about 40 volumes long. And neither we nor we think anyone else can say honestly that they know what the market will be in 10 or 20 years for a 40 volume physically printed dictionary. So for us to say, yes, we are going to do it, or no, we are not going to do it. Both of those would be silly things to say. We just have to wait and see where things are. Now, what we are being very careful about, we are editing with an eye towards print. We are not just throwing in everything we randomly come across and adding words that shouldn't be in or giving lots and lots of quotations because we're not physically limited by space. That would be difficult in many ways. It would take up editorial time to do, even though we don't have physical limitations on the printing. It still takes time to work on that. We might end up putting in things that probably don't deserve to be in just because we think, oh, well, we can put it in. And then you end up with an unbalanced dictionary that has a lot of attention paid to things and to certain things and less attention paid to other things. So we haven't changed our editorial standards, but-- What does deserve to be in? It depends on the dictionary. For the general idea for almost any dictionary is that words that are really a part of the language go in. Now, if you're dealing with some subset of the language, whether it's a regional part, if you have a dictionary that's devoted to only a certain geographical area, a country or a region within a country, obviously only words from that area can go in regardless of what's in use and the rest of it. If you have ones that are about time within the middle English dictionary, only middle English words are appearing there. If you have dictionaries of slang, only slang words appearing, this is obvious. But within any of these areas, the idea is you're including things that are really used. So you're not going to put in words that you wouldn't want to put in ghost words, let's say words, that only appear in dictionaries. And as far as anyone can tell, have never really existed, have never really been used by people. Except on a David Foster Wallace essay or something. Well, it does happen that people read dictionaries and learn esoteric words from dictionaries and then use them. And this happens particularly with the OEDM. W.H. Auden did this. He read through the OED. He found esoteric words and used them in poems. And we have to make special note of this, saying that this was a revived from the record of this dictionary itself. I can a robber, so that's nice. So yeah, some 17th century dictionary writer would put in a word that apparently didn't exist. There's no real evidence for the bizarre latinate words. And we'll put it in. The OED would include it because we want to have a record of things that may have been used in the 17th century or because it had connections to other words. And then Auden would pick it up and use it for real. And then we have to figure out how to handle the discussion of this. So that is a valid way that words can get into the language. It's not all hearing things from your friends or something like that, or reading it in running text. You could actually come across it in a dictionary. But to go back to the main question, what you're doing when you decide to put a word in, you're trying to figure out how common is this word. Is this really part of the language? Is it used broadly or just within one interest group? And depending on the kind of dictionary, that can be OK. If you have a very narrowly focused dictionary, a dictionary devoted to some specialty field, let's say, a scientific field, perhaps every possible word that has ever been used in that field will go in. Even if it's obsolete or even if it's only used by a small portion of people within that field, you would want to put it in if you're trying to have the comprehensive dictionary of-- Trust me, every April issue in my magazine, at my day job, we do a glossary of pharmaceutical and bio-pharma terms. And we didn't do it originally in the magazine because I assumed everybody else in the industry knew what all these terms meant. And I didn't until it started to become apparent two or three years into the magazine that there are all these words out there in acronyms. Nobody actually knows. So we began keeping it all in one place. Every year, I sent out a call for terms we're missing or things that should be revised. And it's always 200 to 300 new ones coming in. We're supposed to print it in every April issue. And eventually, it's going to take over the entire issue of we keep doing that as opposed to just printing the new ones and telling everyone else the other stuff's online. You can look for it there. Well, that's actually an excellent example of how you approach this. You have a specialty publication. And it really is important for the people in your field to know these terms enough so that you're producing your own dictionary covering absolutely everything that anyone might ever come across. Now, I would imagine that many of these terms, most of these terms perhaps, would not currently make it into a general dictionary, even a very large one like the OED, because they're too specialized. They'd only be in use-- Within a very narrow focus of a field that is itself smallish, let's say. But depending on the size of the dictionary, you can decide to include some terms of this sort. If you have a very small dictionary, you probably won't have very many technical terms at all. You'd only have things in common use. If you have a larger dictionary, you would want to include the major terms. I mean, you would want to have major medical terms, major math terms, major terms from sports. If you have a very large dictionary like the OED, even minor term in terms that would only be used within some group but are widely used in that group, you would want to include, I mean, even something like philately, let's say, you would want to include the most important terms used by stamp collectors, even if they're not widely known outside. So it just depends on what kind of dictionary you're doing. I understood. What do you do to get away from words? How do you relax and not quite be thinking about words and word history so much? Well, it's very hard because, of course, you're always encountering them. I'm going to say language being the center of our being. Yes, so you can't just, well, I'm not going to go online. I'm not going to read anything anymore because I might accidentally come across a word that is used, interestingly, or that I haven't heard before. Well, actually, there was a baseball player, a complete knucklehead named Lenny Dykstra, who, apparently, during his prime, literally wouldn't look at road signs or do any reading because it might affect his batter's eye, which helps explain a good deal of the financial troubles he got into later in his career. But for you, what's the escape, I guess? There is none, really. I mean, I try not to actively search for things if I'm trying to relax. But if I come across things that are interesting, I will have to scribble it down somewhere. Good turn into work or good turn into a nice-- Could turn into a new entry, yeah. Good issue. Now, one of the things I know you enjoy on the side is hosting dinner parties, not something I have any affinity toward because I'm shut in out of the suburbs. Where did this start? Was it your parents throw parties when you were younger, or is this something you just fell into? They didn't particularly entertain. No, I enjoyed food, and when I was in college, I realized that the food was absolutely terrible. And the only way for the food to be good would be to make it myself. And I got books and read about cooking and practiced and cooked for roommates or friends. And I wanted to learn about wine, so I did my best to learn about wine when I could get wine underage, and read about that. And I enjoy entertaining. I'm not normally a wildly outgoing person, and having people over for dinner is a good way to be able to entertain that worked for me, and create interesting dishes, and people will be happy to eat them, and people meet each other, and make good conversation. And being a part of that is something that I really enjoy. Did you ever have the sense, like John Hodgman, of being a 40-year-old person when you were young, that you just wanted to be in a world ultimately where you were having a nice life, and dinner party, and entertaining, et cetera? Or is that something you did like a normal human being? Grow into. No, no, I always felt like I was far too young, and I couldn't wait to be the point where I felt like I was grown up and didn't have to worry about all these young things. I heard an interview with him recently. We're basically the age of 12. He was the guy he is now just waiting to, you know, fatten up and get the mustache and everything. So yeah, I just sort of wonder, again, one of the other aspects of your character, which no one can see, unless they check out the pictures that accompany this podcast. You wear a suit to work, which is a rarity in this industry. Or in this world, if you're not in the banking industry. How did that come about? Why do you address so well? I-- well, because I enjoy it, because I think I'm serious. I take myself seriously. I take my work seriously. And this is the appropriate attire to wear. If you are serious, I like the way I look in it. I like deciding every day what I'm going to wear. And I don't care that I'm the only person in my entire office building who wears a suit. I will do it because this is what matters to me. It usually frightens people in my office when I show up dressed well as I did today before heading into the city to do some other interviews. Do you follow the Robert Caro example of wearing a suit at home when you're sitting down to work? I tend not to work in that style at home. But no, I very often wear suits on weekends or evenings depending on what I'm doing. Even if I didn't quote unquote "need to" for work, which I don't need to do for work, but I might, depending on what I'm doing, I don't mind quote unquote overdressing or doing something where people feel like it's not necessary to do that. But if I were just writing myself on a weekend at home, I would not put on a suit just for that. No. OK. Who are you reading? In your spare time. In your alleged fun time. Who do you read? What do you like to do? It really varies so widely. I can't even narrow it down to any one thing. What was the last book you finished? Oh, because last one I finished was actually Stefan Zweig's chess story. Oh. The Royal Game. It's quite a wonderful book. It's a great little book, yeah. OK, I forgot. You're interested in chess, in literature. What are the good representations of that? Or what attracts you to the Royal Game in prose and how it's represented there? Well, when I was young, I was a moderately serious chess player. And I was always interested in reading about it. Not everyone-- it's something that I think is hard to write well about. And most people do a lousy job about it. All sorts of activities are very hard. The life of scholarship, chess, sports is very hard to write well about. And I would like reading literature about chess to see how good a job they would do at describing it. Tell us about the history of Jesse's word and where it went after Jesse left Jesse's word. What was the history and story behind it? When I was at Random House, I thought of the idea of having a website with answering reader questions about words of the day or the answer question every day. And this was, I think, 1995 or 1996. It started when not that many people were on the internet, and there weren't all these huge things all over the place where you could find information. And it was sort of an unusual thing at the start. I mean, people weren't doing this. And it's hard to remember exactly what it was like back then. But now there is so much information about words and language and people, language bloggers and everything being followed up all over the place. Then it was a lot harder to get this kind of thing. There was a used-knit news group devoted to words, but not all that much information out there. So we started a word of the day on the Random House website, and I ended up writing it for a couple of years. We had really good questions all the time. There are always more things to answer than I could possibly have time for. And that site was called Jesse's word. After I left Random House to come to the OED, the site was changed to Maven's word of the day, and some of my Random House colleagues took over the writing of it, and it lasted a few more years until the Reference Department, Random House, shut down. Did you have a rabid fan base following you at that point? Well, there were a lot of people who really liked it. I mean, that's sarcastically at all. I'm totally straight about it. Yeah, no, no. It was a fairly well-traffic site at the time, and a lot of people wrote in all the time or followed up about things and wanted to get their questions in and liked what I had to say, apparently. And I enjoyed writing, and it was-- it's hard work. It's hard to do something like that every day. People would ask all sorts of questions about any-- etymological things, grammatical things, usage issues, and a lot of it would take a lot of work to answer well and to try to be witty about it and have something-- a range of topics every day, of course. Again, now everyone knows about this. Everyone who tries to blog or tweet or do other things every single day, it's hard to do. And I think back then was harder, at least it was harder for me, because there was no real pattern for this. You didn't know that it was like-- It was Sapphire with the language column, but that was once a week at most. It was once a week, and it's a very different kind of thing. It was a more essayistic exploration of things rather than a targeted answering of particular issues. Yeah, how much of an influence did Sapphire have on you? Both-- well, how much of an influence does a William Sapphire have on you? I don't think Sapphire had any direct influence on me. Of course, he's someone that everyone interested in language had to read, and he was a really great language writer. He was not himself a trained linguist, which he was always completely upfront about, but he was great about knowing who to track down to find the answer, so when people would ask questions that he couldn't answer right off the bat, or if he would-- really anything that he was writing about, he would always talk to the right people. He would talk to the lexicographers. He would talk to linguists. He had so much access, of course, that if it were anything that were connected with a particular person or group, he could get them on the phone and ask them to explain how they had been saying it. Or what this really means. And he did it every week for a tremendous audience that really cared a lot about it. A couple of decades there, while he was doing it, that's what everyone interested in language had to look at every week. And again, it's something that right now we're not-- it's not as clear how important that was, because any kind of language question you can find out online, there are a lot of people who are writing about it, but back then, it wasn't the case. No one was doing this kind of writing, and no one was being that passionate about for such a broad audience. Do you feel any sort of doom and gloom, I guess, about the present era? Or do you feel that, again, there's so many sources of language study out there that people can find out what they want to find out? I guess it's that standard question is a language falling apart under us, or people getting dumber all the time. Usual stuff that I worry about. How significant is that? Or how big is that for you, do you think? Well, the language is not falling apart. It never has been, and it never will be. People who worry about it. I mean, it's a whole separate conversation, but the language is doing just fine. We use it to communicate, and that's what it's for. So any kind of language change that people tend to dislike, whether it's the introduction of new words or changing grammatical patterns or pronunciation shifts, it doesn't matter, because we can still communicate the way we need to. When we become unable to communicate, we will find other ways to-- Even if we're using literally as a magnifier. Which we have been for over 200 years. So all of these things, the individual issues that people peeve about, they're extremely interesting, but they don't signal any kind of problems with the way the language is going. And in general, many of the things that people bring up as signaling the end of language or the end of thought, whatever, usually indicate the exact opposite. So for example, people have been complaining for quite some time about, well, I mean, people are always complaining about you. Young people are always the vector for any kind of bad thing. Back when I was young, we-- Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, you can go back to the Middle Ages, and there are these letters from fathers to their sons at university in Padua saying, well, I hear that you just sit around and strum your loot all the time and neglect your studies. So blaming young people for ruining the language or other bad things is thousands of years of history for this. But lately, you will always hear kids text all the time. They don't know how to capitalize. And they give you all these abbreviations. And language is going to hell in a hand basket. So some version of this, some or other version of this. In fact, what we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years is that young people who did not communicate in writing before are now communicating in writing 100% of the time. I mean, you can go out with a 13-year-old and her friends, and they won't speak to each other. They will sit there at the same table texting to each other, which may be weird. But if you're interested in writing, this is fantastic. I mean, it means that young people are not only communicating with writing, but they're being judged on their ability to communicate in writing. And whether or not they capitalize things or whether or not they abbreviate things seems to me far less important than the fact that good use of the written word is exceptionally important to them. And that is an unalloyed good, I would say. You cannot say that this is bad for the language. You can only say that it's great that young people are communicating this way. Jesse Scheidlauer. Thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memories Show. It's a great way for us to end. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me. And that was Jesse Scheidlauer, lexicographer, dinner host, and sharp-tressed man. You can find the F word, his book about the F word, in bookstores. It's really a hoot. I recommend it. You can also follow Jesse on Twitter if you're able to spell Scheidlauer. It's S-H-E-I-D-L-O-W-E-R. You can go to jessysword.com for more information about him and some of his other publications, like in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic Book Forum, and more. I'm not so much of an egotist to pretend that he's not far smarter than I am. And I'm just awfully thankful that he gave me some time to record this episode. That is a really good conversation, I think. Now, at the beginning of the show, I mentioned getting some interviews in during the Chicago leg of my trade show tour for the last few weeks. But I want to tell you about something kind of neat that happened during the New York event. It's a pharmaceutical processing and services conference, and I happened to be at my magazine's booth for a little while when this consultant showed up, looking for a reference for a spray-drying company for a startup he's representing, he handed me his card, and I noticed he shared the same last name as one of my favorite writers, and I mentioned that, and he said, "Oh, you mean Stefan Zweig? He's one of my distant cousins." And this guy told me about how he went down to Brazil last year to see the Zweig museum that just opened in the house where Zweig and his wife killed themselves back in 1942. I told him that I'd love to do a podcast with various Zweig-related people, like some of his translators and his biographer, and I even found there's a Brazilian journalist who Zweig mentored a bit in 1941 into '42, who's still alive, and I'd love to get that guy. And he told me he'll connect me with the people who put up the funding to establish the museum, and he'll try and find out more about his familial relation to Stefan Zweig. It was pretty amazing just to have opened my mouth at that moment, to have been there when that guy happened to come by instead of just having his card dropped off by our marketing assistant. So what I'm saying is just keep your eyes open in this world, you know? And just because you're stuck in a giant exhibit hall full of tabletting equipment and chromatography columns, it doesn't mean you can't find something to rejoice in, you know? There's one other bit of good news I want to share. Well, I was in Chicago. I had this really great experience at the Art Institute, the Great Museum and Millennium Park, and it led me to write something, and let me to finish something. It was my first short story in 20 years. Once upon a time, I was supposed to be a writer before this whole editing pharmaceutical trade magazines thing came up. I have no illusions about making a living as an author, or as a podcaster, actually. So here's the deal. I put a PayPal donate button on our website, and if you go there and donate at least $1 to support the podcast, I will send you a PDF of my short story. It features my alter ego, and it right now has the title of Abe Lesser and the Six-Face Conqueror of Death on a Buffalo. So visit our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, kick in a little money so I can get those new microphones I have my eye on, and you will get a 2000 word short story in your email. And that was a virtual memory show. You can find previous episodes of the show on iTunes at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, or virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. We're also on Facebook at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. (upbeat music) ♪ Got your sign on all you people say ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]