Child Asks Lexicographer 'Why?' Forty-Seven Times, Breaks Professional for First Time in Career

Senior lexicographer Dr. Carol Diction, a 28-year veteran of the Oxford English Dictionary, was reduced to what colleagues described as 'a professional first' on Saturday when her six-year-old niece, Molly, asked the word 'why' forty-seven consecutive times during a family visit, each iteration drilling deeper into the foundations of linguistic philosophy until Dr. Diction found herself unable to answer. The exchange began innocuously. 'What do you do at work?' Molly asked. 'I define words,' Dr. Diction replied. 'Why?' 'Because people need to know what words mean.' 'Why?' 'Because communication requires shared understanding of meaning.' 'Why?' 'Because language is a social contract in which we agree that certain sequences of sounds correspond to certain concepts.' 'Why?' By question twelve, Dr. Diction had moved from practical lexicography into the philosophy of language. By question twenty, she was discussing Wittgenstein's language games. By question thirty, she had entered what she later described as 'a region of thought I have never visited professionally.' 'Molly asked me what "meaning" means,' Dr. Diction said. 'I started to answer and realized I was defining meaning using words that themselves require meaning to be understood. She then asked, "What is a word?" and I — a woman who has spent twenty-eight years writing definitions — could not produce a definition of "word" that did not use words.' The final question — number forty-seven — was 'Why do we talk?' 'I said I don't know,' Dr. Diction recalled. 'It was the first time in my career I've said that. Molly accepted it immediately. She said "okay" and went to play with the dog. I sat there for ten more minutes.' Dr. Diction has described the experience as 'more philosophically rigorous than any peer review I have ever received.'