Join us in the Garonzik Auditorium on Sunday, February 16, directly following sit-down dinner. We are hosting Peter Sokolowski, an editor at Merriam-Webster, to give a talk on his work as the dictionary’s first French-language editor.
French words we use in English might seem fancy—like cuisine or couture—but these borrowings are only the more recent French invaders in our vocabulary since the Norman Conquest. In English, we can make subtle distinctions every day with synonyms like brotherhood and fraternity or deep and profound, but why is the crime called “murder” but the accusation called “homicide?” Waves of French and Latin words over the centuries tell much more than a linguistic story: they also map how we identify class and privilege in the words we use every day.
Peter Sokolowski joined Merriam-Webster in 1994 as the company’s first French-language editor and has since written definitions for many of the company’s dictionaries. He also contributes blog articles, podcasts, and videos for the online dictionary, and his writing has appeared in Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He is a frequent guest on national radio and television and was named among Time‘s 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013. He leads workshops on dictionaries and the English language for the U.S. State Department, serves as pronouncer for spelling bees worldwide, and is a judge at the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. He is the co-host of Word Matters, a podcast about words by dictionary editors. Peter attended the University of Paris and earned his M.A. in French Literature at the University of Massachusetts. He is also a freelance musician and a music host at New England Public Media.