Stefan Fatsis embedded as a lexicographer-in-training at America's most famous dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster. He votes on the annual Word of the Year, travels to the legendary Oxford English Dictionary, and visits the world's greatest private dictionary collection in a Greenwich Village apartment stuffed with more than 20,000 books. Fatsis demonstrates how words are weaponized in our polarized political culture - from liberal to woke to DEI - and, in a time of insurrections and pandemics, how they can be a literal matter of life and death.