From Book Smart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

Mike Volo is out this week, where I'm not sure, Vegas maybe, Maximum Security, Salvadoran

prison.

It might just be a spa day. So I'll resume with the second installment of my

conversation with Stefan Fatsis, author of Unabridged, The Thrill of and Threat to Modern Dictionaries.

As mentioned in part one, Unabridged, is really six books in one, one of which is a quixotic

adventure, the author who once spent a summer trying to be a place kicker in an NFL training

camp, this time aspires to professional lexicography, which is where we pick up the conversation as Stefan walks into

Merriam Webster to commence his new position as a definer. It was way more difficult than I imagined,

right? We're journalists, right, Bob? We write all the time. We're smart. We can do this.

I was so humbled by the quality and the

depth of thought and the intellectual rigor with which definers at Merriam Webster and elsewhere

perform their jobs. And I felt really more imposter syndrome doing this than I did, and I'm not kidding,

walking into an NFL locker room and pretending to be a place kicker. I felt way more out of my

league. Like those dudes, I could get to know. I knew I could turn them around, get them to trust me.

Yeah, they would make fun of me because I was like a 40-year-old small dude who couldn't

kick a ball more than 35 or 40 yards, which still pretty good, 40 yards.

Yeah, that's, it's not bad.

Not too shabby.

But this felt much more intimidating intellectually.

And I felt like I wasn't very good at it.

I mean, so many drafts, so many days and weeks,

...