This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

This is part two of the 2017-2018 mini-stories episodes where I interview the staff and our

collaborators about their favorite little design stories that don't quite fill out an entire

episode for whatever reason, but they are cool 99PI stories nonetheless. We have underground tunnels,

alarms, mysterious filing cabinets, and gold, tiny, tiny amounts of gold. Prepare to be very

interesting at your next party. Let's do this. Why don't you start with who you are actually?

Okay, yeah, so I am Delaney Hall and I am a producer and senior editor on staff.

All right, so what is your story today? Well, first I'm going to introduce you to Peter

Suckelowski. My levels are okay? Okay, so I'm not too loud. I'm not pop. I try to not pop my

peas, but I get excited. I'll try not to talk too fast. And the stuff that Peter gets really

excited about, the stuff that makes him pop his peas and talk really fast is language,

because he's the editor at large at Miriam Webster and he's a lexicographer.

Lexicographer is a person who compiles and edits dictionaries. That's the old definition,

the great Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer in London in the mid-18th century, very famously

defined a lexicographer as a harmless drudge. And Peter actually said that they use that term

affectionately now as like a kind of badge of honor. They like to be called harmless drudges,

so don't worry about insulting them if you want to use that term.

So what is a harmless drudge like Peter do all they had Miriam Webster? Well, from his description,

it sounds like they work in an office that is very, very quiet, silent basically. And it's filled

with these massive steel filing cabinets. And I've kind of been imagining it like that scene

in Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end where the man is pushing that crate through a huge warehouse.

But instead of stacks of enormous crates, it's filled with metal filing cabinets. And those

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