While we continue our short season break from regular interviews, please enjoy this bonus discussion I had with Peter Sokolowski back in November.

It ran for Grammar Pellusians at the time who support the show.

And many thanks to them.

Greetings, Grammar Pallusians.

I am here today with Peter Sokolowski, editor at large, from Merriam Webster, and he has a fascinating tale to tell us.

He calls it the tale of two dictionaries about happenings in France and London in the 1500s.

Absolutely.

Well, first of all, I never really knew where diction dictionary came from. And I just take it for granted. I mean, even me working here with all of these books and in doing a lot of research recently, looking back a little and then a little more and then a little more. I kept going all the way back, and what I found was many, many scholars

made reference to one source book, one source dictionary that was used in Latin in the Renaissance,

and that was sort of the dictionary that was used internationally all over Europe. And it was by a monk,

and the monk's name was Calapino in 1502. Calapino's

dictionary was the big classical Latin dictionary. And when I say classical Latin, that's to

distinguish it from the medieval Latin that had preceded it. And the Renaissance really was about

language. People don't recognize or remember, perhaps perhaps that the rebirth was a rediscovery of the kind of high rhetoric of Cicero and Virgil and the great poets and rhetoricians of that period around 100 BC to 100 AD.

And that rediscovery led scholars to kind of reconsider what they just, what they suddenly

felt was an inferior form of Latin.

The medieval Latin of St. Jerome, that was the Vulgate Bible and the Latin of the church

of the time.

And so there was a sudden kind of reboot and said, let's, instead of the medieval

Latin, let's make Renaissance or new classical Latin as the standard. One important point is

that the big standard dictionary before this time was published, we think, printed by

Gutenberg himself. And that dictionary was called the Catholican, Catholic meaning universal.

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