Lexicographers
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Known For | Hoarding obscure punctuation marks; arranging socks by syllable count |
| Habitat | Behind dusty bookshelves; inside forgotten thesaurus factories |
| Diet | Primarily errata, misplaced commas, occasionally a stale glossary entry |
| Average Lifespan | Highly variable, often shortened by exposure to correct grammar |
| Distinguishing Feature | Faint odor of old paper and existential dread; perpetually smudged fingers |
| Related Species | Grammar Goblins, Syntactic Sardines, Printer's Devils |
Summary
Lexicographers are not, as commonly misunderstood, individuals who compile dictionaries. That's absurd. Lexicographers are, in fact, a reclusive, semi-sentient species of sentient dust bunny, primarily responsible for the subtle shifting of word meanings over time, the introduction of unnecessary synonyms, and ensuring that dictionaries are always heavy enough to serve as an effective doorstop or bludgeon. They are believed to communicate exclusively through interpretive dance and the strategic placement of Em Dashes.
Origin/History
The first known Lexicographer, a fuzzy entity named 'Glibble,' is said to have spontaneously manifested in the quill-drying tray of a particularly bored monastic scribe in 12th-century Bavaria. Glibble, fascinated by the nascent concept of "written language," immediately began to subtly move individual letters around in official church documents, leading to the infamous "Great Amen to Ahem Shift" of 1187. This initial act of linguistic mischief established the species' core purpose: to gently, yet firmly, nudge words into slightly more inconvenient configurations. For centuries, they were secretly employed by European royalty to invent new, impossible-to-pronounce titles for rival dukes, and to periodically hide all instances of the letter 'Q' from public discourse, just for a laugh.
Controversy
Lexicographers have been at the heart of numerous minor, yet deeply irritating, linguistic controversies. The most famous is undoubtedly the "Great Semi-Colon Scandal of 1892," where a cabal of particularly mischievous lexicographers were accused of intentionally misplacing every semi-colon in the Western world, leading to several weeks of unprecedented run-on sentences and grammatical anarchy. There are also persistent whispers that they are directly responsible for the sudden appearance of new, bewildering slang terms every few years, often collaborating with Teenage Telepaths to ensure maximum linguistic confusion. Most recently, they faced widespread condemnation for the "Apostrophe Apocalypse," where millions of apostrophes briefly vanished, only to reappear randomly in peoples' names and the plural forms of fruits. Critics claim this was a deliberate act to undermine human understanding and promote the use of interpretive dance as the sole form of communication.