‘Yooper’ and ‘the Dictionary’

Michigan was buzzing last week with the news that the word Yooper is going to be included in the new edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary this spring.

For those of you who may not know, Yooper refers to someone who is from or lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (known as the UP, hence UP-er, or Yooper). Yooper is now a term of pride for many residents of the UP. According to Steve Parks (the man who lobbied for 10 years for the word to be included in Merriam-Webster’s), the term Yooper is “synonymous with resilience, solid work ethic, community spirit and taking care of your neighbor kind of thing—all those good qualities that are something lost in bigger areas.”

This quote from Parks appeared in an article in The Detroit News last Tuesday, an article announcing that Yooper would appear in “the dictionary.” The first line of the article reads:

Escanaba – After a more than decade-long campaign, the term ‘yooper’ is getting recognition in the dictionary.

Escanaba’s local paper, The Daily Press, ran a story the same day also with a reference to “the dictionary” in the first line:

ESCANABA – A familiar word referring to people who reside in the Upper Peninsula will soon gain more exposure as it has officially been approved to appear in the dictionary.

Both articles then provide details that indicate the news is actually more specific: the dictionary in question is Merriam-Webster’s. They do not, however, clarify that this is just one dictionary, albeit a major one, not “the dictionary”; and they do not note that the word Yooper has been in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language since 1999.

Ben Zimmer’s very good column on Yooper in the print version of The Wall Street Journal this past weekend is titled “Yes to Yooper: A Local Term Makes It Big,” and the first line talks carefully about what it takes to get a word into “a dictionary.” The online version of the column, however, runs this title: “Years of Lobbying Get ‘Yooper’ Into the Dictionary.”

I have long been fascinated by our reliance on the phrase “the dictionary,” as in “look it up in the dictionary.” It reflects our belief in the authority of dictionaries generally and suggests that dictionaries are indistinguishable—or at least don’t need to be distinguished because they are all equally authoritative.

If you listen to the way we often talk about words and dictionaries, you learn that dictionaries help make words “real.” A local radio station broke the big news about Yooper last week by stating that Yooper is now “an official word.”

I felt a bit like a wet blanket in a radio interview last week when I reminded people of two things. First, while it is great that Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries are now going to include Yooper, the word had been included in American Heritage for years, and it wasn’t accurate to say it was getting into “the dictionary.” And second, words are “real” long before they get into dictionaries.

As dictionary editors will tell you, they are watching and listening to us: tracking what we say and write and trying to determine which new words are going to stick and which words aren’t. Some words have staying power and some are fads; dictionary editors are trying to avoid including the short-lived fads. But they’re not saying those short-lived words aren’t real while they exist. If we’re using a word in our community and others know what we mean by that word, linguists agree that the word is real. It is a meaningful part of our language, even if it doesn’t last long.

In the case of Yooper, the question for dictionary editors was whether the word was regionally restricted, known mostly to those of us in Michigan, or whether it had spread more widely. Standard dictionaries like Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage tend to limit how many regional terms they include.

The Dictionary of American English (DARE), whose mission it is to record regional terms that get left out of other dictionaries, has an entry on Yooper, with this definition:

A person who lives in or is from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; the dialect of such a person; hence nouns Yoopanese, Yooperese.

The DARE entry also cross-references troll, a term sometimes used to refer to residents of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, given that we live under (i.e., below) the Mackinac Bridge. We’ll see if that meaning of troll ever finds its way into a dictionary like Merriam-Webster’s or American Heritage. In the meantime, for those of us in the peninsula of the trolls, that meaning of the word feels real enough.