The Right Thing: What dictionaries make of our words, right or wrong

In a Right Thing column I wrote about five years ago, I responded to a former student who asked whether I had really used the word "jamoke" in a 1998 Inc. magazine column about laptop cases. I had. She and a friend had debated whether "jamoke" carried any derogatory connotation. When they looked it up in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, she was surprised to find one of my sentences used as an example. I reassured her there was nothing derogatory about the word.

Since then, I've discovered that Merriam-Webster has used other sentences I wrote long ago to illustrate how it defines certain words. In that same laptop case article, I had used the word "schmear." The dictionary also cites two words from a sentence I wrote in a 2019 Right Thing column: "peddle" and "condone." In that column, I wrote: "There's no excuse for items promoting racist tropes to be peddled to the public nor for the rest of us to condone them." I was responding to a reader who had found an item at a big-box office-supply store bearing a supposedly inspirational quotation that could be interpreted as an ethnic slur.

When I wrote that sentence about racist tropes, I meant it. But does it matter that that sentence was later used, on its own, to illustrate a dictionary definition? I didn't write it for a dictionary. I wrote it in a specific context, for a particular audience, and with the purpose of responding to a reader's experience.

Now that the sentence stands on its own, it might carry a broader authority than I originally intended. Does the editor (or algorithm) who selected it know that I stand behind the broad moral judgment expressed in that sentence, even though it was written about a particular incident? I don't believe the editor knows me, so that seems unlikely, although the algorithm might have a good idea of where I stand based on scouring the internet for other things I've written.

Most writers give considerable thought to the words they choose. When I used "jamoke" and "schmear" in that earlier column, I did so deliberately, aiming for a particular tone with a particular audience in mind. Word choice is rarely accidental by most writers.

I appreciate the credibility that comes with being cited by Merriam-Webster. Still, I find myself wondering what happens when our words take on a life of their own beyond their original purpose. A sentence pulled from a column to serve as a general example of usage may carry more weight than it did when it first appeared. Within a column, I have some control over how my words are understood. Outside of that, I have very little.

That loss of control raises an interesting challenge. We can't anticipate every way our words might be reused, nor should we become timid or overly cautious in writing. Yet this experience is a reminder that what we write can have a long shelf life, reaching audiences and serving purposes we never imagined.

We can't control how our words will be reused. But we can try to control whether they hold up when they are. The right thing is to write as if any sentence might one day stand alone, and to make sure that if it does, it still says what we believe.

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This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 4:04 AM.