The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  The spread of education in America was, indeed, astonishing. In 1880, less than 5 percent of the population had any experience with secondary school. By 1934, more than 20 percent of Americans had completed high school.6 So-called adult education—correspondence schools, vocational training—was exposing growing numbers to a new “lifelong process” of modern education, as editor Neilson said in his introduction. Education and the “best kind of culture,” to use Porter’s phrase, were less and less the exclusive possessions of a privileged elite like that assembled at the Hotel Kimball.

  A great middle class of intellect—male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and increasingly black—was coming into being, built on American progress toward universal schooling. And the culture reflected it. Little more than a high school diploma was required to enjoy middlebrow offerings such as Henry Seidel Canby’s Saturday Review of Literature and novels from the Book-of-the-Month Club. Radio programs presenting literary discussions became common in the 1930s, as if a popular format built on the art of book reviewing was the most natural thing in the world. Time magazine, while trademarking a smart-aleck prose with no small amount of slang, ran cover stories about the Middle Ages and opera stars.

  Science, too, was transforming the image of education and knowledge in these years. Mustard gas and other lab-inspired brutalities of World War I had left science with a public image problem, which American scientists combated through an energetic program of publishing and advertisement. But no public relations campaign was more effective than the lives and stories of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, which the press gratefully reported.7 Nor could anything so divisive as the Scopes trial and the fight over evolution in the schools rob technological innovation (airplanes, radio) of its power to amaze the public at large.

  Still, this middle class of intellect had old-fashioned notions of quality. Their standards were as much Noah Porter as Cole Porter, something President Baker surely had in mind when he asked William Allan Neilson if he objected to it being mentioned on the first page of Webster’s Second that Neilson had been the associate editor of the well-known and illustrious Harvard Classics.8 Potential buyers wanted it on good authority that a book was worth buying.

  And Merriam was very much in the business of authority. In its own pages, Webster’s Second was “the Dictionary,” with a capital D and the definite article as if no other existed. But to continue as the linguistic law of the land, the last word on words, the great “they” from whom all correctness comes, Merriam-Webster needed to remain up-to-date and true to its reputation for completeness and accuracy. Professor Hart put it well when he stood and said, “You’ve got to be right. Every contributor to the dictionary knows that. That is why Webster’s dictionary is what it is.”

  Chapter 2

  In 1961, G. & C. Merriam Company sent out a press release to announce its new dictionary, Webster’s Third. Along with the press release some journalists received a photo of Betty Grable, whose last movie was How to Be Very, Very Popular.1 The connection was not exactly obvious.

  The new dictionary had updated the definition for leggy, but the press release did not point this out. Nor did it mention the fact that sexy was no longer labeled slang. Or even that pinup was one of the new words entered since 1934. But there was this: Betty Grable spoke English.

  Twenty-seven years after Webster’s Second, the Cold War (a newish term included in Webster’s Third) was under way and President Kennedy was in his first year of office. Looking back from the New Frontier to the New Deal, Merriam’s president, Gordon J. Gallan, decided against throwing another banquet.2

  He had been at Merriam for over a decade but was not an old dictionary hand like Asa Baker. He had no editorial experience. Before becoming president, he had been the publisher’s advertising manager. And what the new dictionary needed, he thought, was a good promotional campaign. So, instead of renting out the Hotel Kimball, he hired Ruth Millard Associates, a public relations firm in New York City.

  Expectations were low, but the story had potential. The press release quoted Gallan, talking up the pretty new words. “The recent explosion of language has forced into everyday usage an avalanche of bewildering new verbal concepts, ranging from A-bomb, astronaut, beatnik, den mother, and fringe benefit to satellite, solar house, wage dividend and Zen.”3

  The alphabetical list read like a scat poem of midcentury Americana, suggesting improbable connections. A-bomb had first entered the Merriam-Webster files in 1917, described as “fanciful, chemical explosion of an atom”; since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was, of course, quite real. Astronaut had been around since the twenties, when it also seemed fanciful, but then came the launch of Sputnik and Yury Gagarin’s trip in orbit earlier in the year. The sound of Sputnik had inspired beatnik, which Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle coined in 1958, and the beatniks, including Jack Kerouac, who that same year published The Dharma Bums, helped popularize Zen as in Zen Buddhism.

  Another angle was the celebrity angle, using famous names and a side-mouth English that no one associated with dictionaries. It was contrary to the tradition of emphasizing Webster’s august literary qualities, but such “pungent, lively remarks,” editor in chief Dr. Philip B. Gove said, helped the dictionary “come alive.”4 Hence Grable and her lovely gams. She had been quoted under anymore: “Every time I even smile at a man anymore the papers have me practically married to him.”

  Mickey Spillane was mentioned. Among the dozen entries quoting the creator of Mike Hammer were clunk (“the gun clunked to the floor”), hardcase, shoot out, and a colorful use of sugar (“an operation that cost heavy sugar”). Public figures were de rigueur for such an announcement, and former president Eisenhower was mentioned for an unexceptional use of the lighthearted goof. Left unmentioned in the press release was Ike’s more memorable language for fallen soldiers, cited under the verb form of exact: “from them has been exacted the ultimate sacrifice,” taken from the general’s May 1945 Proclamation on Germany’s Defeat.

  Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were listed, as their combined public statements had been mined for hundreds of citations, though not as many as came from the Bible and Shakespeare. For a bit of the unexpected, the press release dropped the name Polly Adler, the onetime madam and gossip column item whose 1950s bestseller, A House Is Not a Home, was used as evidence for multiple entries, including sense 5A of shake: “There was no shaking off the press.”

  The press release quoted Dr. Gove saying that the English language had become less formal since 1934. For an example the PR hands chose the new dictionary’s surprisingly tolerant, though oddly worded, entry for ain’t, which said ain’t was “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by cultivated speakers.”

  After ten years of extremely hard work, there was little appetite to convene major contributors and other esteemed persons for another black-tie party with all those dinner courses and long speeches invoking the founding lexicographer, Noah Webster. Such pomp and circumstance would have seemed phony, another word no longer labeled slang in Webster’s Third, a decade after being wielded like a hatpin by J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield against the inflated pretensions of adults, and two decades after the so-called Phony War, when France and England had declared war on Germany but the still-isolationist United States remained uninvolved.

  That whole approach seemed the product of another time, a less honest time, when to sell dictionaries you lined up establishment figures to create the appearance of an unquestionable consensus among those in the know. Then everyone else could go around insisting that it was incorrect to speak as you had been raised to speak, because Webster’s or some anonymous committee called “they” said it was wrong to split your infinitives or to use like as a preposition or to say due to, as in “the festival is canceled due to foul weather.”

  Gove didn’t want to be a “they.” He thought it a profound mistake that Webster’s dictionaries had been
called the “supreme authority.” BusinessWeek picked up this thread, reporting that Webster’s Third had been influenced by the burgeoning science of linguistics, which “strives to describe a language in its present state, without getting into judgments about what’s ‘correct.’ ” Gove had told the magazine, “There’s no divine sanction in language. It’s an instrument of the people who use it.”

  The people who use it? Exactly. Not some distant authority, always beyond present company and of the best intellectual pedigree. We the English-language speakers. You. The lady down the block. Her ridiculous uncle in Des Moines. Betty Grable. All of us. Us.

  The press release did not go this far. It suggested that Webster’s Third was yet another volume for the enlightenment of the middle class. It was “specifically planned to be read and enjoyed by students, housewives, businessmen, as well as scholars,” but this was not Noah Porter’s living-room symbol of genteel aspiration.

  Webster’s Third did not claim to have all the answers. It was not called a universal dictionary. It was shaped by Gove to be something both simpler and more complex: a modern, scholarly dictionary of standard English.

  Just as important to Gove was all that his dictionary was not. It was not an encyclopedia, not an atlas, not an international directory of history’s big shots, not a dramatis personae of every character in Western literature, not an index of epithets and literary allusions, not a class system that could be counted on to disdain certain kinds of words used by certain kinds of people, not a record of all those misinformed rules of grammar that have no basis in actual usage, not some pompous, overreaching, editorializing, know-it-all windbag of a dictionary that takes its direction from the prejudices of the day while giving short shrift to words, the one thing it should be intensely serious about.

  A reader of modern linguistics, Gove knew that even the simplest words defied the neatness of definitions and categories and usage labels, all desperately trying to pinpoint when, where, and under what circumstances chair or apple or girl may be used. Words were much more complicated than they seemed, so complicated that even educated people disagreed on what they meant. And meaning itself was subject to change.

  Teachers could correct their students, mothers their children, and bosses their underlings, but the language moved and changed of its own accord. Tracking its vast and hurried adjustments was a great task, a fitting task for a great dictionary, but one made all the harder by the wrongheaded idea that a dictionary was the language in its purest form.

  To begin with, there could be no doubt which, the language or the dictionary, was primary. Language was primary; a dictionary was no more than a humble attempt to photograph and itemize the contents. In a way, the basic assumption of dictionary users—that you could check language as real people used it against what the dictionary said—was wrong. It was the other way around. The measure of a good dictionary was its fidelity to the language as real people used it. And the one major claim Gove did not mind making for Webster’s Third was that it faithfully recorded the standard language of its time.

  Gove—he was Dr. or Mr. Gove to underlings, Philip to his children—threw his own party, for the dictionary staff and their spouses, at his farm, about twenty miles east of Springfield. President Gallan, with whom he got along well enough, declined to attend, saying merely, “It’s your day.”5 Which it was.

  Guests arrived to find their chief dressed in farming duds and standing atop a hay wagon. He was pouring drinks with a heavy hand that left some of the older editors pie-eyed. The menu was local, including vegetables grown without chemicals on the Gove farm. Dinner was served on the porch.6

  In the living room, a puppet show was staged: “The Big Book,” a jokey skit written by Mrs. Grace Gove with music by her son Norwood. Scene 3 opened on Philip and two other editors stirring a pot, which symbolized Webster’s Third. The men complained about production costs and section editors holding out on their definitions, hoping to be better compensated for longer words.7

  Ann Driscoll, Gove’s assistant, had quit after being told she would not be listed on the masthead as a managing editor, a final casualty of Gove’s impersonal touch as a manager. In the skit, her puppet was a spinster busybody who would not let others be.

  She nips at Gove to finish his work on Webster’s Third, and then clears out the old stock by burning copies of Webster’s Second. When Gove sees the Webster’s Seconds on fire, he becomes distraught—the gag being that, in reality, the sight of the old dictionary in flames would not have upset him in the least.

  After Driscoll exits, the editors say that what she needed was a lover—that, or she should have taken up golf like the men. This was another bit of irony: Gove kept tenaciously regular hours and spent his weekends working his land, leaving little time to improve his handicap.

  In-jokes abounded. A poem in the script cited Mrs. Gove and played on the name of pronunciation editor Ed Artin.

  If to pronounce you’re guessing

  Perfection is grace

  There’s art in expressing

  Each phoneme in place

  The banter also touched on what criticisms the dictionary might encounter.

  We is perfect in grammer

  We knows how to spel

  So the phobic will clamor

  And the damn book will sell

  After the press release went out, the phobic did begin to clamor. Newspapers lunged at the story of the dictionary’s shockingly liberal treatment of ain’t. In Chicago, the Tribune and the Sun-Times picked up the same newswire item, announcing, “The word ‘ain’t’ ain’t a grammatical mistake anymore.” The next day, the Toronto Globe and Mail weighed in.

  “A dictionary’s embrace of the word ain’t will comfort the ignorant, confer approval upon the mediocre, and subtly imply that proper English is the tool only of the snob.” But this was something more than your typical lecture from the union of concerned citizens.

  We live in a world of problems, the newspaper explained, problems that arise from misunderstandings between individuals and even nations. “Where language is without rules and discipline, there is little understanding, much misunderstanding. How can we convey precise meanings to the Russians, when we cannot convey them to each other?”

  The New York Times entered the fray. Complaining that Webster’s had “surrendered to the permissive school that has been busily extending its beachhead on English instruction,” the Times called on Merriam to preserve the printing plates for Webster’s Second, so that a new start could be made.

  James Parton was thinking the exact same thing. The president of the American Heritage Publishing Company, Parton had been trying to buy enough company shares to gain a majority position in Merriam stock. The dictionary and reference book business had become enormously profitable since the passage of the GI Bill and the baby boom, and nothing had so advanced Parton’s takeover efforts as the discovery that Philip Gove had radically altered the dictionary’s editorial approach.

  Attacked by America’s most prestigious newspaper and increasingly vulnerable to a hostile takeover, Merriam suffered yet another blow. Within months, Webster’s Third became the whipping boy of American literati.

  Dwight Macdonald excoriated Webster’s Third in the pages of the New Yorker, producing a classic essay that generated more reader mail than anything else he had written. The aging radical was a traditionalist when it came to literary culture, an Anglophile and a Henry James man. He linked the dictionary’s excesses to the principles of “structural linguistics.” His essay closed with a Shakespearean lament that this new dictionary might very well represent the end of the world.

  In the Atlantic, Wilson Follett, a defender of old-fashioned usage, called the new dictionary “a very great calamity.” In the American Scholar, Follett’s friend the elegant historian Jacques Barzun discovered in Webster’s Third “a subtle attack on The Word”—with the and word in capita
l letters, as they were punctuated “in the beginning” of John, chapter 1.

  America’s greatest language controversy was under way. From Cape Cod to California, the new dictionary was denounced, in the press and from the pulpit, in classrooms and around the kitchen table. As a result, sales of Webster’s Third greatly exceeded expectations. The permissive dictionary was, indeed, very, very popular. But Noah Webster’s ideal of a country unified by his dictionary was in tatters. And forty years later the controversy over Webster’s Third would be called by David Foster Wallace “the Fort Sumter of the contemporary usage wars.”

  Not all disagreements, as it happens, can be attributed to what a Paul Newman movie called “a failure to communicate.” Some disagreements arise because individuals and nations, or in this case critics and lexicographers, finally understand each other rather well. Facts may indeed suffer along the way, and certainly did in this case, but even after the corrections were made it was clear that the feuding parties just didn’t like each other or what each other stood for.

  Philip Gove was not merely defending a dictionary when he stood up for Webster’s Third. He was defending a method of linguistic study and a principle of tolerance for spoken English in all its naturally occurring variety. Dwight Macdonald, similarly, was not merely denouncing an imperfect reference work but attempting to man the ramparts of a civilization whose cultural standards seemed more compromised with every passing year. Gove had unveiled the great shining accomplishment of his life; Dwight Macdonald wrote the best essay of his life, mocking it.

  Chapter 3

  On June 13, 1918, in the midst of the Great War, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, held its annual graduation ceremony. Charles William Eliot delivered the commencement address. He was eighty-four years old and the very personification of American academia.