Discussing slang, Bloomfield, always the reticent scholar, sounded gently reproachful as he cited the types of person who indulged in “facetious and unrestrained language.” These included “young persons, sportsmen, gamblers, vagrants, criminals” and “most other speakers in their relaxed and unpretentious moods.” So, just about everyone.
Bloomfield was certainly aware of taboo language, taking the Lord’s name in vain, or using words that referred to sexual and execratory functions, but his attitude remained scientific, even anthropological. It was simply not for the linguist to justify allowances and prohibitions; only to observe and record. The whole subjective aspect of language seemed to be of little interest to Bloomfield or to linguists as he represented them.
Literature did not appear in Bloomfield’s book as within the jurisdiction of linguistics. Nor was it the linguist’s task to determine meaning beyond what was knowable from the speech act itself.
As so much of what stirs people to take an interest in the study of language relates to meaning, Bloomfield’s scrupulousness was hard for many readers to comprehend. In discussing meaning, he made it sound at times as if he thought the subject too nebulous to be approached. He called “the statement of meanings” the “weak point in language-study.” Meaning was so hard to pinpoint that the dictionary definition of apple could only be “roundabout.”
The linguist could, however, extrapolate from known meanings. Starting with the known meanings of one and add, for example, he could then define two as “one added to one” and three as “one added to two.”8 But, for the linguist, the liberties to be taken with meaning appeared to be few and grudging.
As the University of Chicago became better known for Hutchins’s broad ambitions, and later plans to market the lessons of great literature into a successful series of commercial books à la the Harvard Classics, the delicately chiseled assertions of Leonard Bloomfield would seem out of place. Thinking he had failed in his quest to teach the layman to understand and appreciate linguistics, he told Charles Carpenter Fries to give it a try. And in 1940 Bloomfield left Chicago.
Chapter 13
After Webster’s Second was published, William Allan Neilson was often called on to defend the “universal” dictionary. In doing so, he could be rather modest about its powers of correctness.
To Leon Scott of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who wanted to know why negro had not been capitalized in Webster’s Second, he wrote, “All that a dictionary like Webster’s can do is to record actual usage and when opinion differs show its own preference.” To another correspondent, who complained about a technical inaccuracy, Neilson pleaded helplessness: “One of the embarrassing things . . . about a dictionary is that one is not free to state merely what one is convinced is correct but one has to record usages which are widespread even when they are unscholarly and inaccurate.”1
Usage, of course, was not everything. Naughty words and phrases were left out of dictionaries of the time, including Webster’s Second, which had found room for minor dukes, Austrian generals, and Turkish pashas but not such common scatological terms as cunt, dick, or shit. Nor did it allow fuck, penetrate in the sexual sense, hump in the sexual sense, or pecker in the nonwoodpecker sense.
Some words that referred to dirty matters were allowed into Webster’s Second but made to clean up their act first. The definition for peep show made it sound respectable; the definition for orgy mentioned Bacchus and “carousal” but avoided the issue of arousal. Horny had something to do with actual horns but not much else. Both George Bernard Shaw and D. H. Lawrence had used ménage à trois to describe love triangles, but in Webster’s Second the entry for ménage was limited to “a household”—no more, no less.
Neilson’s dictionary claimed to represent “the civilization of today,” but its concept of civilization excluded large stretches of American and international life. The reporter who said it contained the answer to every question he could think of should have asked about show business.
Movie had elbowed out film, an Americanism that was thriving abroad, but the movies was considered slang in Webster’s Second. Bit, extra, gag, grip, stuntman, and numerous others from the silent and talkie eras made it in. Some terms hailed from elsewhere but gained currency with the rise of cinema: Fan originated in baseball and star had been used figuratively for a long time but both became associated with Hollywood, which itself entered the files in 1923, and by 1934 was shorthand for “the American motion-picture industry.”2
But if he had looked for marquee names, the reporter would have found biographical entries for Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin and none for Mary Pickford. None of the pioneering directors or daring businessmen who built and ran the Hollywood studios were listed.
Nor did the reporter ask about sports figures. The Editorial Board had decided not to include even Babe Ruth, who had set the home run record in 1927 and carried the New York Yankees to seven pennants and four World Series victories.3 The great boxers of the era were not named. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney went unmentioned. The great Joe Louis was left out, while room was found for thirteen different French kings named Louis.
And never mind Louis Armstrong. There was no entry for what was called at the time race music (though there was one for race riot). There was no entry for Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Ma Rainey, or Bessie Smith. “Morton, Jelly Roll” was not on this honor roll. Harlem was listed, but one could not tell that it was the birthplace of the “New Negro Movement.” W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington got in, but not Marcus Garvey.
Darky was labeled colloquial in Webster’s Second, which sadly may not have been unthinkable in the 1930s, when the no-nonsense Rhett Butler asked Scarlett O’Hara, “Do you think you can parade through the Yankee army with a sick woman, a baby, and a simple-minded darky?”
Clearly whiteness did not make you civilized, or even mentionable in polite company. Eugene O’Neill, Somerset Maugham, and Oscar Wilde were all listed, rightly, in the pronouncing biographical section, but none of their works or characters were given entries, while hundreds of lines were devoted to entering the titles of and characters from Charles Dickens’s works. William Allan Neilson had arranged for Merriam to hire a few girls from Smith, at forty cents a hour, to read and mark up contemporary prose for Webster’s Second, but it may have been too much to ask a young woman to page her way through Desire Under the Elms or Of Human Bondage or The Picture of Dorian Gray.4
Sometimes Webster’s Second did not seem to be of the twentieth century. Under wrath were four illustrative quotations, not one of which had been written after the sixteenth century.5 Faced with the choice of being up-to-date or safely behind the times, the editors often chose the latter. The dictionary embraced “formal platform speech” just as radio and microphones were making it possible to spare one’s vocal cords and address the public in a more conversational tone and style, as Roosevelt did in his fireside chats, speaking usually in the first person and cozily calling his listeners “my friends.” Ballyhoo they labeled slang, even after FDR used the term, not without dignity, saying, “We cannot ballyhoo ourselves back to prosperity.”6
Yet it was the great American dictionary of its day, and it did cover a major expansion of the standard lexicon. From Armistice Day (when the Allies and Central Powers ceased fighting) to zero hour (the moment when a military plan is enacted), world war had contributed many new phrases. Flame thrower and mustard gas were newly entered, used in the battles that moved Wilfred Owen to write of “blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Webster’s Second even translated “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori”—a line from Homer that Owen borrowed with bitter irony, meaning “It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country”—because it was the kind of thing cultured people want to know. Shock troops, meaning a highly disciplined advance guard, was in the new dictionary, dated 1917 in Merriam’s files, thoug
h shock as a term of war went back to Shakespeare’s time. Defeatism summed up the postwar mood in Europe; so did shell-shocked, a term of psychiatry coined early in the Great War to categorize numerous symptoms appearing in veterans.
The answers to war were also in Webster’s Second. Woodrow Wilson’s optimistic Fourteen Points were described, one by one, starting with its famous demand for covenants of peace and ending with the proposed creation of the League of Nations, also defined in Webster’s Second. More lasting than either was the developing concept of the nation-state, which entered Merriam’s files in 1918 and became a fundamental principle of the international system, giving all peoples with a historic national identity a presumptive case for statehood.
The dictionary’s preface referred to “the increased pace in scientific knowledge in the past generation.” Blood sugar, continental drift, radio frequency, sac fungus, and countless scientific and technical terms much less recognizable had joined the language. The twentieth century’s interest in the mental self had begun taking shape as a raft of important psychological terms—collective unconscious, extrovert, gestalt psychology, id, superego—appeared while Sigmund Freud still lived and breathed and himself appeared in the main vocabulary as well as the list of noteworthy persons in Webster’s Second.
Jazz was one of the great new words to enter the language (its first citation dated 1913 in Merriam’s files), while its derivatives jazzy and jazz as a verb were labeled slang in Webster’s Second. Flapper, once a young woman trained to prostitution, was labeled colloquial for “a young girl of about fifteen to eighteen years of age, esp. one who is not yet ‘out’ socially.” The very next sense, labeled slang, was the quintessential 1920s usage: “a girl or young woman whose behavior or costume are characterized by daring freedom or boldness.”
With the Nineteenth Amendment, entered in the dictionary like all the other constitutional amendments, the flapper, or at least her mother and older sisters, got the vote. With the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments, alcohol was banned and re-legalized. Speakeasy—labeled slang, of course—dated to the nineteenth century but had gained new relevance in the twenties as the Anti-Saloon League (itself an entry) won passage of the laws that banned the sale of alcoholic spirits. Wet and dry were prominent colloquialisms in the twenties, as adjectives referring to potables, moral attitudes, and political sides of prohibition, itself also defined in Webster’s Second.
The economic meaning of depression, an old usage, was included, but America’s economic troubles had not yet earned the definitive article the or come to be known as “great.” President Roosevelt’s New Deal made for an entry, defined as the policy of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.
Grammar was handled delicately, so as not to offend. Under split infinitive, the editors wrote that it was “widely objected to, but it is sometimes desirable or necessary, esp. to avert ambiguity.” Holding the line on shall and will required an enormously complicated usage note, and under future the entry noted that “this tense is formed with shall and will”—the findings of Charles C. Fries notwithstanding. As Webster’s Second instructed readers on correct usage, it sought to avoid the nagging tone of the schoolmarm, but sometimes it could not be helped.
“The forms of lie are ignorantly or carelessly confounded with those of the transitive verb lay,” said the dictionary. Elsewhere the editors reported actual usage while acknowledging the rules such usage violated. Under got, the dictionary said, “the phrase ‘have got’ . . . is objected to by many grammarians but is common in colloquial use.” Under me could be found a usage note for “It is me,” saying, “although avoided in formal writing and by precise speakers is frequent in colloquial and dialectal speech.” Different from was preferred to different than, and than him was “generally regarded as incorrect.”
Under genteel, Webster’s Second said the word was “now regarded as at least inelegant, except when used humorously or somewhat sarcastically.” Such was the fate of genteel some twenty years after the writer George Santayana decried the “genteel tradition in America” and Van Wyck Brooks followed by criticizing the separation in American life of a prissy, respectable, academic culture of “highbrows” from the popular, streetwise culture of “lowbrows.” In this division, William Allan Neilson was certainly on the side of the highbrows, but in its packaging and retailing of high culture Webster’s Second was also an example of what would come to be called middlebrow culture. And genteel was, in fact, an excellent word to describe its editorial intentions, especially in the first sense listed: “free from vulgarity.”
Chapter 14
On a trip to Paris, carrying a letter of introduction from a mutual acquaintance, Dwight Macdonald met James Joyce. Macdonald was accompanied by his good friend George L. K. Morris.
Recalling the “famous meeting,” Macdonald said “JJ” looked “like a haggard race-track tout.” Actually, he could not remember what the man was wearing, but he did remember that the conversation was halting. The famous author “seemed quite content to sit there in silence until we left.”
When the visiting Americans began to make their exit, Joyce suddenly came to life. He turned to Macdonald and said, “I understand you’re on Fortune magazine.” “Yes,” replied Macdonald. Then Joyce, by some lights the greatest writer in the English language at the time, asked Macdonald, a mere journalist not even thirty years old, if he might put in a word for a writer friend of his who was moving to New York and needed work. Macdonald said he would. Then Joyce “ushered us out—with considerably more cordiality than he had let us in.”1
Twenty-seven years later, the episode still struck Macdonald as bizarre. In more than one way, it was. Macdonald’s own feelings toward gainful employment were, in fact, a little eccentric.
Starting in 1935, writers across the country were being given jobs to keep them busy, at miserly rates, producing state guides for the Federal Writers Project. John Cheever and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were on the literary dole, as was Jim Thompson, later author of The Grifters. Thompson was an Oklahoman who thought John Steinbeck a fine writer but that The Grapes of Wrath showed he actually knew little about the state.2 For her sojourns into swampy hideaways in Florida, the inimitable anthropologist-novelist Zora Neale Hurston collected a government check, as did the poet Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco and a young Saul Bellow in Chicago. Few were too proud to be taking assignments, no matter how dull or unremunerative.
Dwight Macdonald, surely alone at the time, was slowly abandoning a lucrative position at a well-known and well-regarded publication to stalk the literary breadlines as a freelancer. He took umbrage at the suggestion that his great salary at Fortune meant anything to him. He and Nancy could very happily live on a fifth of such largesse, he proudly announced as they moved out of a posh apartment on Forty-Fourth Street and into a dark walk-up in Greenwich Village, which at the time well fit Lionel Abel’s description of New York City as the most interesting part of the Soviet Union.3
The literary light of the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had “cracked up” and was now making hungover confessions of what success had been like. Money and gilt-edged prose had given way to a drier landscape of dirt roads and American grit. Erskine Caldwell and John Steinbeck made hunger and survival their subjects. The modernism of Joyce was imported and redistributed by Faulkner, whose Bundrens knew poverty but not common sense as they carried their mother’s coffin on a horse-drawn southern journey, with crows flying overhead, to a final resting place. Fortune sent Macdonald’s friend James Agee to write about tenant farmers and Walker Evans to photograph them. But the magazine rejected Agee’s piece, later published with Evans’s photos as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.4 The new great satirist of American literature, Nathanael West, largely disregarded at the time, took aim not at the small-souledness of country club Republicans (à la Sinclair Lewis) but at the teary-eyed human animal and his utter naked frailty. In the earnest version, human existence was
rendered tragic; in the less earnest version, it was pathetic to the point of embarrassment.
In this atmosphere, patriotism was “morally suspect” and “intellectually unfashionable.” There seemed to be “no reason to believe in the ‘viability’ of American capitalism.”5 Immediately after leaving Fortune, Macdonald wrote a three-part siege on Henry Luce in the pages of the left-wing magazine the Nation.6 He was now a confirmed member of those radicals to whom, as he had put it in his letter to Luce, small wonder, Time looked rather silly.
He met the fetching young troublemaker Mary McCarthy, who became an important friend. She described him in her short story “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man.” His fictional version was shallow, bumbling, and likable, buoyed along by good looks, Ivy League bona fides, and the decency to be a radical without rubbing it in anyone’s face.
Macdonald threw parties, including one for the sharecroppers, serving cocktails “for free and in glasses,” noted McCarthy. After a few drinks, he would get into fights with Geoffrey Hellman of the New Yorker, whom he considered a Tory. Just as predictably, the two would make up during the week and reunite over drinks the next weekend. It was McCarthy, along with Margaret Marshall of the Nation, whose chance comments on the fraudulence of the Stalin trials prompted Macdonald to purchase a transcript and read them for himself.7
Macdonald was shocked that the Soviets hadn’t taken more care in framing the defendant Leon Trotsky. “Witnesses” made the absentee defendant out to be the perfect straw man, a living antithesis to every single policy Stalin undertook, a murderous villain bent on undoing the Russian Revolution. It was uncanny.
The Story of Ain't Page 9