Who else is in the goddam dictionary?

Following up on the recent posts by Jessica and me, I thought I’d look up some other people.

Hey, here’s somebody we know:

But no citations from Satoshi Kanazawa, Edward Wegman, Susan Fiske, Robert Sternberg, Lawrence Summers, or Jeffrey Epstein.

Since we’re on the topic, no citations from Noam Chomsky either (not even for “colorless”? C’mon, Merriam-Webster, you can do this!), but he’s got us one better as he’s an actual dictionary word:

Meanwhile, Dan Ariely’s all over the Webster-verse:

Maybe we can use all these words in a sentence:

OPTIMAL . . . SOCIAL . . . FALLACY . . . LEGAL TENDER . . . SHECKEL . . . GOAD

I’m not quite sure how to do this, but all the above words seem very Ariely-related.

Amusingly enough, I’m mentioned on the page for GOAD–but I’m just being referred to, not quoted.

Here’s the Ariely citation:

I think, from Ariely’s perspective the unattainable goal was to make an actual discovery in psychology; the attainable goal was to get some LEGAL TENDER by working with people’s SOCIAL expectations, maybe not OPTIMAL from my perspective as I think of belief in such claims as a FALLACY and they GOAD me into spending my time in what are ultimately less than OPTIMAL pursuits.

On the plus side, friend-of-the-blog Jordan Ellenberg has three:

MARKOV CHAIN, INFORMATION THEORY, and HAGGARD . . . not bad!

And, speaking of Jordan, how about the three Michael Jordans? Merriam-Webster doesn’t appear to be using any citations from them, but Michael B Jordan and Michael J Jordan are mentioned in several of the citations. Same thing with Paul Erdos and Kevin Bacon.