Stephen Fatsis' book, Unabridged, keeps getting accolades, so I thought you'd appreciate this bonus episode I did with him back in October for the Grammar Pellusians who support the show.

Greetings, Grammar Pellusians.

I'm here today with Stefan Fatsis, and we just finished talking about his book, his new book, unabridged, all about dictionaries.

He embedded in Merriam-Webster, which just sounds like a dream to me.

And we have just more wonderful things to talk about.

Stefan Fatsis, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

You bet.

So, you know, you defined a number of words that got into the dictionary, a bunch more that didn't, but there was one that caused a kerfuffle.

I want to hear about the sheeple incident.

Yes.

I thought sheeple was kind of a normal word that people that already would have been in the dictionary, and very often what I would do was, you know, you have a hunch. You'd go to MW.com and I would type it in. And if it was there, it'd be like, oh, somebody got there first. Not surprising. I'm just like some rookie lexicographer. What do I know? But Sheeple wasn't there.

So I immediately was like I dibs did as we say at NPR.

I put dibs in on it.

And I started researching the history of Sheeple.

And it was fascinating.

I like went into the Merriam archives and did deep dive, you know, online research about the origins of the word and its history. I had seen it, like I think what the trigger was I had seen it during Trump One when Kara Swisher, the tech journalist, had called out a bunch of the tech CEOs for groveling to Trump

after he was elected and called them Sheeple. And that was sort of like, oh, okay, I'm going to go look

this up. And it wasn't there. So I did the research. How far back does it go? Oh, Sheeple goes back.

The OED did enter Sheeple and the first citation in the OED is from 1945.

Oh, wow.

So very interesting and I found the first hit for Sheepel in the OED.

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