One of the ideas that comes across in Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged, a warm, personal paean to Merriam-Webster and its staffers, is how oddly this fast, witty public engagement sits with the traditional bread-and-butter work of maintaining the archive of the language as it has been used by Americans over the centuries ... The real pleasure of Unabridged lies in its descriptions of the scrupulous deliberations of Merriam’s lexicographers as they weigh the sense of words, waiting patiently—sometimes for years—to see whether a neologism is a flash-in-the-pan or something that will endure ... A century ago, T.S. Eliot wondered, 'Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?' For all its enjoyable humor, Fatsis’s elegiac book circles around the same question. There is, after all, artificial intelligence, and there is actual intelligence.
Engaging ... Fatsis provides an excellent primer on Merriam-Webster’s role in the culture wars ... Fatsis’ history is charmingly told, even if his miscellaneous approach means the book sometimes loses its center. Its best passages deal with Merriam office life.
Gems aplenty ... Fatsis has his own gift for the sardonic ... Abounds with curious particulars and zesty turns of phrase. More importantly, Unabridged is a stout defense of the craft of making dictionaries.
[A] lively history ... One mildly infuriating impediment to enjoying specific chapters? It’s cute that Fatsis titles each of his chapters with the (lower-case) dictionary definition of words such as 'collection' or 'slip,' but those vague titles don’t make it easy to find specific pieces of information.
Erudite, fascinating ... While obviously appealing to word nerds and writers, Fatsis's narrative is more broadly relevant to anyone who speaks, reads, and writes in American English. It provides a thorough, thoughtful history of dictionaries and the language they both shape and record, while championing the dictionary's continued relevance in the 21st century. Lively, well-researched, and often entertaining.
