by David Wolman
Many people mistakenly credit Johnson with writing the first English dictionary. That achievement belongs to a man named Cawdrey, who, 150 years before Johnson, published A Table Alphabetical. It was only 144 pages and defined some 2,500 difficult words; the rest people were just supposed to know.57 With its emphasis on boosting vocabulary, Cawdrey’s book is a lot like modern-day titles that help you pump up your word arsenal before attacking the SAT or waging war in the corporate world.
Other dictionaries followed Cawdrey’s, but by the mid-eighteenth century Johnson could see that English and its speakers needed something better. The language “was in a state of anarchy,” he wrote. “The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary.”58 He would apply a whole new level of scrutiny to lexicography, revealing that much of the complexity and magic of the language was buried within the nuance and flexibility of seemingly easy words. For the word go he recorded sixty-eight different definitions, in an entry covering three pages.
In comprehensiveness and heft, A Dictionary of the English Language wasn’t just unmatched; it forever changed the definition of dictionary. It contains 43,000 entries written out in some 3 million words with 118,000 quotations to illustrate usage. It’s five and one-half times longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace.59 The two brown leather-bound books are as long as the distance from your elbow to your fingertips, and about four inches thick. The beige pages are soft and speckled in places with tiny marks, almost like grease stains, that are in fact a tiny (and harmless) mold that commonly grows on antique paper because it has never been bleached.
In the attic of Johnson’s Lichfield home, I flipped to some definitions. To Spell is “to write with the proper letters.” Correct, from Latin, means “revised or finished with exactness; free from faults.” Orthography is “the art or practice of spelling,” and for this one Johnson includes a quotation from Swift: “In London they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the city, and a third in the suburbs; all which reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography.” For rhubarb, Johnson turns to Shakespeare for illustration. “A medicinal root slightly purgative referred by botanists to the dock. ‘What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug would scour these English hence?’” asked Macbeth.
When he started, Johnson set his sights on removing “spots of barbarity impressed” deeply in the language. To proscribe English in its entirety, he knew he had to level judgments, especially about spelling. In his preface to the Dictionary Johnson writes: “When all the words are selected and arranged, the first part of the work to be considered is the orthography,” in which there remains “great uncertainty among the best criticks: nor is it easy to state a rule by which we may decide between custom and reason…” One rule he could firmly state, however, was that English words shouldn’t end with c. As a result, his Dictionary is filled with the likes of musick, critick, attick, epick, tropick, chaotick, publick, and even publickly. (This was one of Johnson’s more noticeable miscalculations of “custom”; within a decade or two, most people were omitting the tacked-on k.60) Johnson was also a man of opinions and at times they worked their way into the Dictionary. (“Ruse: A French word neither elegant nor necessary.”)
But Johnson’s overall strategy for handling variable spellings was, at least on paper, to “make no innovation without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reasons I do not expect often to find. All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage…” The contracted spelling thro, for example, he thought was crafted “by barbarians from through.” And he did occasionally give in to the urge to innovate, as was the case with dispatch. Johnson spells it despatch, despite the fact that in all his source quotations it’s spelled with an i.61 For the most part, though, his dictionary wasn’t about putting a personal stamp on the language. He wanted to get it down, all of it in one book, so as to solidify the lexicon and do away with (much) inconstancy, which he felt was “a mark of weakness” that hurt “the reputation of our tongue.” Johnson’s Dictionary promised to lock words in place in a manner Swift and other preservationists could have only dreamed.
But nine years spent trying to read, define, and edit forty-three thousand words can change a man. Johnson came to realize just how impossible it was, and is, to pin down a language. “That our language is in perpetual danger of corruption cannot be denied; but what prevention can be found?” Even his dictionary couldn’t provide sufficient reinforcement; the language remained unstable and English purity, orthographic or otherwise, was as elusive as ever. By the end of his language odyssey, Johnson had learned that the lexicographer’s responsibility wasn’t to decide upon and shape, “but to register the language,” documenting how people have “hitherto expressed their thoughts.”62
As for orthographic revolution, Johnson, writing some two hundred years after Mulcaster and company, was dealing with a far more settled English spelling system. True, Shakespeare was explosively inventive and loanwords, as well as new words springing from scientific discoveries, were growing the language. For a test-drive of some new words from Johnson’s Dictionary, take a spin with ophiophagous (“Serpent-eating”), clodpate (“A stupid fellow; a dolt; a thickscull”), and garlericulate (“Covered as with a hat”).63 Yet usage habits were crystallizing rapidly, as Mulcaster had even noted two centuries prior. By 1800, English orthography was buried deep in irregular spelling soil, with tens of thousands of words now frozen into a shape that would preserve the fissure between the sounds of spoken language and their representation in writing. Johnson’s impact was really one of cementing, not changing, spelling forms, lining them up in the pages of a supremely authoritative reference book. From Johnson’s time forward, spelling questions or disputes were easy to resolve. How do you spell a word? Just look it up.
SIX
OUTLAW ORTHOGRAPHY
Every changed spelling now in general—whether for the better, as fish from fysshe, dog from dogge, or for the worse, as rhyme from rime, delight from delite—was once the overt act of a single writer, who was imitated at first by a small minority.1
From Handbook of Simplified Spelling (1920) New York
JOHN MORSE PULLED THE handle opening a red filing drawer, then picked out an index card. The drawers are fire-resistant, but the truly taboo word at the editorial offices of Merriam-Webster, Inc. is water (“wo-t?r, 'wä- noun 1a: the liquid that descends from the clouds as rain…”). Water damage could do a lot more harm to the collection of seventeen million citations stored in those files than most fires could, which is why there are no sprinklers in the building at 47 Federal Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. Charred cubicles, computers, reference books, and personal effects: no big deal. Water-logged, moldy, and illegible citations: a lost treasure.
Morse, Merriam-Webster’s president and publisher, read the typed contents of the card. The word was whack, as in, whacked his head on the low ceiling. The handful of cards stored just in front of or behind this one identify other meanings of the same word, such as the Tony Soprano-esque, to whack a rival gangster, or the (currently slang), take a whack at it, meaning to try or attempt. Next we leafed through a stack of pages for a forthcoming dictionary. Each page has a bunch of pencil marks to identify needed changes. “We also have everything on computer of course,” said Morse. “But a lot of this is still done by hand.” As Morse flipped through a few sheets, I spotted an AF in the margin. Anglo-French, he explained. A new byte of derivation information bound for future editions of the dictionary.
The forty lexicographers and editors at Merriam-Webster are charged with wrangling new words and usages, and adding them to the company’s ever-growing physical and virtual accounts of the English language. The method for dictionary compilation, known as reading and marking, has remained mostly unchanged since 1857, when a Scotsman named James Murray began recruiting people to min
e sample text—primarily books at first, but source material later expanded to include magazines, leaflets, newspapers, office documents, whatever—for examples of new words or novel senses of older ones. For each word or usage, readers sent in a card detailing the citation. Murray then collated them for a project he was working on called the Oxford English Dictionary.*
Technology has blown open the universe of reading material. The Merriam-Webster staff uses hundreds of Internet resources, archives from LexisNexis, and the company’s own corpus, a body of accumulated text that contains around one hundred million words. That’s what it takes to continually track new words, meanings, and variant spellings. I asked about all the writing in cyberspace, where a quick Google search will yield nearly fifty thousand hits for a “misspelled” query like rubarb. Not all writing is source material, said Morse. “There’s still a prescriptivist tradition in this country. People get jumpy when you talk of changing the language,” which is another way to say that every last spelling variant on the Web doesn’t necessarily qualify as an alternative spelling in a grand old dictionary.
But jumpy constituents or not, the language does change, which is why Morse introduced me to Jim Lowe. A forty-year Merriam-Webster veteran and, in Morse’s words, a “born definer,” Lowe is the point person who, after scouring the landscape of the lexicon, compiles the short list of new words and their spellings for the Collegiate New World Dictionary, which is revised annually. During my visit, Lowe was finalizing the list of new words for the 2008 edition. Please welcome not only za/’za and pescatarian/pescetarian, but also podcast, kiteboarding, cyberterrorism, subprime, air-kiss, and a few dozen others.
If some of these words don’t sound brand new, that’s because the unwritten rule of lexicography is that words need a little time to settle. That way, editors can distinguish between a letter string that was briefly well known but then faded out, and a recently coined construction that’s here to stay and can safely be called a word. People were using google (2001) as a verb for a couple of years before the OED or Merriam-Webster put it in the dictionary, and the same is true for invented words throughout the ages, from caucus (1763) to scrunchie (1988). Some words rapidly accumulate ample citations to convince lexicographers that they’re widely used and here to stay (AIDS is a somber example). Other words make their presence known in the lexicon, but it’s a toss-up between two spellings, such as pescetarian versus pescatarian. And then there are the thousands of words for which a spelling dispute was never resolved: blond/blonde, disk/disc, gray/grey, leaped/leapt, savory/savoury, woolen/woollen, cauldron/caldron, douse/dowse.
Morse and other editors review each year’s new additions, but the heavy lifting in terms of defining meanings is left to Lowe. In choosing to call Lowe a born definer, Morse was paying his colleague lexicography’s ultimate compliment. It was the OED’s Murray who had described dictionary legend Noah Webster as “a born definer of words.”
DRIVING SOUTH THROUGH the Connecticut River Valley, Morse and I passed colonial homes and fields of corn and tobacco, before reaching the run-down commercial strips of West Hartford. A few minutes later we turned into the parking lot next to a barn-red building that now hosts a small museum and visitor center. Inside, we met the museum director and gathered around the hearth of the original eighteenth-century farmhouse to learn about the childhood of a spelling rebel.
Noah Webster’s family worked a ninety-acre farm. They raised sheep, cows, and horses, and grew corn, tobacco, squash, artichoke, flax, and hay.2 Noah senior served as justice of the peace for the village of West Hartford. He wasn’t a judge, but people called him “Judge Webster” anyway.3 Noah’s great-great-grandfather had been governor of Connecticut in 1656, but roots didn’t guarantee Noah a position of repute within revolutionary-era America.4 All but the wealthiest boys growing up in the 1760s stopped attending school by the time they were teenagers, their contributions on the farm too valuable to spare. Noah and his four siblings hoed and harvested during the day, and at night churned butter, pulled wool, and beat flax to make linen.
The farmhouse had little in the way of belongings other than farm tools, kitchen utensils, and a Bible. Yet from this sparse environment, said Morse, “sprang an explosively curious mind.” Standing in the bare-bones kitchen, I imagined Webster impatiently asking his mother to read another passage from the almanac (then spelled Johnson-style: almanack).5 The local minister, Nathan Perkins, picked up on the boy’s intellectual potential. Perkins became his tutor, visiting the Webster home to sit with Noah at the rectangular wooden table below the window opposite the hearth, working by candlelight on arithmetic, Latin, and Bible lessons. Completing the fable, Noah’s father, despite financial strain, didn’t resist Perkins’s influence and eventually scraped together the money for his son’s college tuition.
Noah graduated from Yale smack in the middle of the American Revolution. He earned a law degree, but began his career as a schoolteacher. Trying to teach children to read and write deepened his commitment to education and literacy, and inspired Webster to write a spelling book. He was only twenty-five when he wrote and published a thin volume known as The Elementary Spelling Book (originally bearing the title: The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language). The instruction book came to be known as the Blue-Back Speller because of its blue cover, and as the first of its kind in the New World, the Speller was a gargantuan success. With countless reprints and rip-offs over the next century, it would go on to sell upward of one hundred million copies.6 Due to copyright woes, however, fortune eluded Webster, as if he’d been cursed by the ghost of Johannes Gutenberg. He had at least married well, at the age of thirty, to Rebecca Greenleaf, with whom he had eight children. But money was often a source of strain.
Webster wasn’t a government official, but he elbowed his way to de facto statesman status through prolific writing, relationships with some of the Founding Fathers, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time, most notably the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. One of his essays was included among the eighty-five Federalist Papers, arguing for ratification of the Constitution.7 He was a political animal, and in this sense he didn’t think of his Speller as something that was merely about the lettering of words. It was in fact Phase 1 of his mission to help stitch the nascent nation together with words.
Across the country, statesmen fretted the lack of unity of the barely United States. Victory over the redcoats had neither unified the states, nor eliminated British cultural hegemony over its former colonies. Webster shared a fear with many people that the country might splinter at any moment, and he famously commented that the constituents of the nation were held together by nothing more than a cobweb. (It would take twentieth-century science to determine that spider silk is, pound for pound, one of the strongest substances on earth.)
The bold experiment of people ruling themselves, Webster believed, depended on a distinctly American language. Spread over vast terrain, the American people were speaking with varying accents and in a number of immigrant languages. Citizens needed to be speaking, if not with a single voice, at least in the same tongue. Common pronunciation and vocabulary throughout the land, Webster believed, would lead to a greater sense of kinship, which in turn would galvanize a spirit of shared culture and purpose. “Our political harmony,” he wrote, “is therefore concerned in a uniformity of language.” That uniformity was impossible without first removing “the clamor of pedantry” inherited from the English’s English.8 Whereas the British had used language to sustain class divisions, Webster, at least in principle, wanted it to bring people together.
A national language began with spelling. Webster was convinced that a streamlined and more consistent orthography would “demolish those odious distinctions of provincial dialects,” making pronunciation the same from New York to Charleston. After purging the language of spelling ills inherited from the disowned mother country, the American language, he projected, would grow to become as distin
ct from Britain’s English “as the modern Dutch, Danish, and Swedish are from the German, or from one another.”9 Call it nationalistic propaganda, a patriotic vision of an American identity, or language-obsessed sociological gibberish. Whatever it was, Webster believed the United States would at “some future time, be as distinguished by the superiority of her literary improvements, as she is already by the liberality of her civil and ecclesiastical constitutions.”10 “In his eyes,” said Morse, “American language, literature, culture, spelling—all of this was all part of the same whole. The nation. If you had asked Webster whether the [survival of the] country depended on language or on democratic governance, he would have answered: ‘Yes.’”
Webster was determined to be the founder of this new American tongue. But how to begin? He spent much of 1785 and 1786 road-tripping throughout the colonies, promoting his spelling book and lecturing about language. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin attended one of his talks, and the two hit it off immediately. Franklin felt that the ever-widening gap between spelling and pronunciation was leading the language down a denigrating path toward a logographic orthography, in which symbols represent whole words, not a system for producing sound units, as in c-a-t. He considered languages like Mandarin ghastly for their memorization requirements, an “old manner of Writing” that was less sophisticated than a phonological alphabet. “If we go on as we have done a few Centuries longer,” Franklin warned, “our words will gradually cease to express sounds, they will only stand for things.” It was sound, he believed, that gave words their true power, and an optimal writing system must be based on a code for sounding out words.11
In his 1779 pamphlet, A Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling, Franklin tried to murder letters with notoriously variable pronunciation (c, j, w, q, x, and y). He also tried to use new ones for sounds represented by two letters, such as sh, as in ship, and ng, as in spelling. On top of that, he added new letter combinations, such as ts for the sound usually represented by “ch.” (There are about forty-four sounds in most accents of spoken English, which means a phonetic alphabet with exactly one letter for one sound would have to have forty-four letters.) In the centuries to follow, other thinkers would also blame the alphabet for the twisted state of English written affairs. One of them was Mark Twain, who once said the English alphabet must have been “invented by a drunken thief.”