The Story of Ain’t
America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
David Skinner
Dedication
For my wife, Cynthia
Epigraph
controversy, n. Dispute; debate; agitation of contrary opinions. A dispute is commonly oral, and a controversy in writing. Dispute is often or generally a debate of short duration, a temporary debate; a controversy is often oral and sometimes continued in books or in law for months or years.
—Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Dramatis Personae
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
When I started working on this book about Webster’s Third and what may be the single greatest language controversy in American history, I envisioned using the occasion to offer my own take on what happened. With all the evidence laid out, I would get to say who was right and who was wrong. In the process, I was going to air many, many important thoughts about language and usage, and you, the reader, were going to be very impressed.
While researching this story, however, I became more interested in what brought about this controversy. Put it this way: Why did Americans in 1961 become so exercised—so irate—that several otherwise sane and distinguished persons said a mere dictionary, however imperfect, represented nothing less than the end of the world?
Controversy wasn’t what Noah Webster had envisioned when he published his groundbreaking An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, which he hoped would unite his countrymen culturally and politically. And a century later—long after G. & C. Merriam Company had lost its exclusive right to the Webster name, giving rise to other so-called Webster’s dictionaries—when Webster’s Second was published to general acclaim in 1934, it didn’t seem likely that panic and controversy would one day stalk the Merriam-Webster brand.
But a lot changed between 1934 and 1961, obviously. There was the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II, all of which left their historical fingerprints on the fast-expanding lexicon. Movies, radio, and television came to the fore, contributing not only new forms of entertainment but new words to describe them. The role of women changed, the baby boom started, the Kinsey reports were published, rock ’n’ roll was invented. Cars and roads multiplied. The civil rights movement began.
The idea of America changed. American culture became “popular,” and serious culture was popularized. The language of Americans went from being a source of modesty to a source of pride, and mined for literary and scholarly purposes. More Americans became more educated and spoke and wrote like educated people speak and write. Feelings about proper usage changed.
Everywhere you looked there was evidence of progress, but always with a glint of darkness. One war gave way to the next, as science assumed a great and sometimes tragic role in society and world affairs. Its influence could even be felt in the humanities, now a collection of second-place disciplines with seemingly inferior standards of knowledge.
And somehow it all contributed to one of the most delicious bouts of accusation, blame, and name-calling ever to be witnessed outside of reality television and the United States Congress. But why? Well, there were many factors. Pride, ignorance, and the profit motive for starters. And, of course, much of it had to do with how we speak and write and what we think of other people’s speech and writing.
Language is the ultimate committee product. The committee is always in session and, for good and bad, every speaker is a member of the committee. But I could not write a book about every speaker of American English in the first half of the twentieth century. So I settled on a discrete cast of characters, whose lives, thoughts, and words not only presaged the controversy over Webster’s Third but also document, to varying degrees, changing standards in American language and culture.
This parade of individuals—more than any attempt by me to offer the last word on whether it is okay to split an infinitive or to use ain’t in polite conversation—makes up a large part of this book. The other part of this book describes the making and unmaking of Webster’s Third: how the editor Philip Gove sought to build a modern, linguistically rigorous dictionary and how his critics—from the New York Times to Dwight Macdonald to James Parton and the American Heritage Publishing Company—sought to destroy it.
The Story of Ain’t trails from Commencement Weekend at Smith College in 1918, when William Allan Neilson, the editor of Webster’s Second, was sworn in as the school’s new president, accompanied by his mentor, the legendary former Harvard president Charles William Eliot, through the slangy 1920s and Prohibition and the construction of the Chrysler Building in New York City as the young Fortune writer Dwight Macdonald watched from a nearby window. Then it proceeds through the Great Depression and the progress of the new linguistics as it sought to examine American English objectively while American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck sought to capture the American vulgate on the literary page. Then it marches through World War II, a war of technology and management and astonishing death tolls, all of which make enormous contributions to the standard language, and into the 1950s as literary intellectuals begin to assess what has been wrought in the American language by the increase in education, by the war, by the political turmoil stretching back decades, and by those scholars trusted to know the most about grammar: linguists. All this leads up to the making of Webster’s Third and the wild, unexpected controversy that came to life.
Throughout, I take particular interest in the efforts of individuals and groups to bring others around to their point of view. The arts of persuasion and polemic must be considered if we are to learn how this disagreement took shape and then festered, only to blow up on so innocent an occasion as the publication of a new dictionary. And while I take a close look at the general issue of communications (ugh, I know, it’s one of those 1940s words that sound like a piece of ma
chinery, but it is a major part of The Story of Ain’t), this tale is, in fact, told historically, aided especially by documents that show us how the editor of Webster’s Third thought about language and what he thought about dictionaries.
Chapter 1
They say it is better to pronounce aunt like art. That it’s sometimes okay to split your infinitives to, you know, avoid ambiguity. But okay is strictly colloquial. Snide is always slang, and alright is in wide use but not considered polite. Dirty words they never use or acknowledge. And ain’t they say is dialectal, illiterate.
Who are they? Their names change from one era to the next, but just now they were the Editorial Board of the G. & C. Merriam Company, and they were at the Hotel Kimball in Springfield, Massachusetts, attending a dinner to celebrate the publication of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Unabridged.
It was June 25, 1934, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt occupied the White House, but few Americans knew their president was bound to a wheelchair. In Hollywood, the actress Mae West was trying to make her film It Ain’t No Sin, which after the censors were done with it was called Belle of the Nineties. A federal court had recently ruled it was legal to sell copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States. For more than a dozen years the novel had been banned due to its earthy vernacular and lewd material, beginning with a scene involving masturbation, which Webster’s Second defined with a good whiff of Sunday school as “onanism; self-pollution.”
Editor in chief William Allan Neilson, a short, bald man with a white mustache and a neat triangular beard, called the room to order. Standing confidently before an oil portrait of Noah Webster, he held a ceremonial gavel that had just been given to him as a gift from his employer. It was fashioned from applewood grown in West Hartford, Connecticut, Webster’s birthplace.
The ballroom had been transformed for supper. It was elegantly strewn with roses and crowded with men in dinner jackets. The menu consisted of consommé vermicelli, breast of chicken with bacon and cream sauce, and then, in the French manner, a salad. History did not record if any libations were served. Prohibition had ended a year earlier, but the very idea of drunkenness was still so vulgar that Webster’s Second followed polite tradition and denied that Americans even used drunk as the past perfect for drink.
Neilson was a practiced public speaker and knew what was expected of him. To introduce Merriam’s president, Asa Baker, he used the most flattering language possible under the circumstances. President Baker, he said, was a “dictionary man.” He was raised in a “dictionary atmosphere” and possessed a “dictionary sense.” His solid judgment had affected every aspect of their new unabridged dictionary, even as Baker also bore responsibility for the firm’s finances.1
Baker then stood, tall, bespectacled, and nervous-looking. He firmly believed that a dictionary should evince a literary quality, and that the writers it quoted should be literary figures, not humble men like himself.2 He said only a few words, but used one of his favorites to describe Webster’s Second. It was a “universal” work, he said, meaning it covered all realms of knowledge and provided answers to almost all questions.
If any book could be so described, Webster’s Second was the one. Weighing seventeen pounds, it contained 600,000 entries, which came to 122,000 more than any other dictionary. It had 12,000 illustrations and 35,000 geographical entries. The cost of its production was staggering: $1.3 million (approximately $21 million in today’s dollars). “The greatest single volume ever published,” Merriam called it.
Certainly no other American dictionary approached its rigor or reputation. And there was no greater name in American lexicography than Webster. The publishing company told and retold the story of George and Charles Merriam buying the unsold sheets of Noah Webster’s 1841 American Dictionary of the English Language. The printer-brothers purchased the right to update Webster’s dictionary from Webster’s family, represented on this night by one of the very few women in attendance, Emily Skeel, Noah’s great-granddaughter.
A member of the founding generation, Webster had dedicated his life to the language of the United States. His wildly popular blue-backed spellers taught Americans to be good, mind their books, and remember the virtues of George Washington. In his dictionary he sought to unite the young republic and liberate Americans from their dependence on the British dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and later imitators. “Language is the expression of ideas,” wrote Webster in 1828, “and if the people of one country cannot retain an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.”
Of course, by 1934 there were many languages spoken in the United States. And even the primary language, English, was shot through with breathtaking variety, as linguists had begun to document in the study of American dialectal speech, and as literary critics had come to praise or blame in the experiments of modern fiction and poetry, and as countless readers had begun to notice in the language of journalism. Also, the United States now played a major role in world affairs. Its frame of reference had grown far beyond North America and Western Europe. Since 1890, Webster’s big dictionary was called an international dictionary.
Still, the dictionaries bearing Webster’s name continued to set the standard for English in the United States, its meanings and its niceties of grammar and usage. Webster’s was “the supreme authority on all matters applying to language,” as one newspaper put it. From this opinion there was no substantial or credible dissent—and there hadn’t been for many years, not since a striking controversy around the time of the Civil War.
For decades in the middle of the nineteenth century (as if there was nothing better to fight over), feuding partisans at Harvard and Yale and among certain newspapers aligned behind competing dictionaries, Webster’s and Worcester’s. The latter belonged to Webster’s onetime business associate Joseph Worcester, with whom he had fallen out. For those at Merriam, the hue and cry of this episode reinforced the lesson that a dictionary needed the documented support of leading public figures. The company sought testimonials from presidents, governors, and notable men of letters. The competition with Worcester also compelled Merriam-Webster to improve its lexicography. Its new editions took account of modern scholarship, even while adding more reference material and illustrations, and becoming more elegant as objects.3
A dictionary in the living room became a symbol of genteel aspiration. It was a password for culture, a ticket to knowledge, a compendium of all that was known and worth knowing. Noah Porter, editor of Merriam-Webster’s 1864 and 1890 editions—and who, like William Allan Neilson, was by day a college president—said a dictionary should be found in every home and consulted on a regular basis. For no other habit, he wrote, “is at once so eminently the cause and the indication of careful attention to the language which we use, and efficient training to the best kind of culture.”4
A reporter covering the dinner for Webster’s Second wondered just how universal the dictionary was. “Who was the twenty-sixth president?” he asked. “Who fought the battle of the Marne?” “What is the scoring in contract bridge?” “What is the difference between a porterhouse and a sirloin steak?” “Who was Pocahontas’s father?”5 Webster’s Second had the answer every time, with lists of battles, presidents, dog breeds, and enough flowers to fill a botanical garden.
It contained basic biographical information on thirteen thousand “noteworthy persons”: American presidents, Austrian dukes, Catholic popes, English writers, French kings, and Roman orators. Its pronouncing gazetteer went from Aarhus in Denmark to Zumbo in Mozambique. The main vocabulary identified historical events, characters from Shakespeare’s plays, figures from the Bible, literary allusions, and classical epithets. Its entries drew bright lines for all those tricky distinctions between shall and will, imply and infer, lay and lie, carefully tending all those delicate little fences. Words that were slang or vulgar or colloquial were so labeled. Pronunciations were few but prestigious, representing �
��formal platform speech.”
Webster’s Second spoke for America’s learned classes, represented at the head table by dignitaries from education, publishing, and scholarship. Harvard, once home to a number of anti-Webster partisans, had sent two professors: Albert Bushnell Hart, the “grand old man” of American history only a few days short of his eightieth birthday, who had worked on the 1909 edition, and John Livingstone Lowes, a special editor and a scholar of Coleridge and Chaucer whose Cambridge ties were about as old as those of William Allan Neilson. The Scottish-born Neilson, himself a former Harvard professor, was a protégé of the late former president of Harvard, Charles William Eliot.
And there were no sore feelings associated with the New York Times, whose opinions on what belongs in a dictionary had sometimes differed markedly from those of Webster and his successors. The Times’ own associate editor, John H. Finley, a writer turned graduation speaker who collected honorary degrees by the handful, sat at the head table representing the paper of record. All three hundred guests, according to Merriam’s own record of the event, were selected to represent the various professions in a great unified showing of “the country’s most intellectual men.”
Rising from his chair at the head table, principal William C. Hill of Central High School said that the dictionary, after the teacher, was the most important aid to learning. Noah Webster and his successors deserved much credit, he said, for the great increase in the number of Americans who had received a high school education since the Civil War.
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