The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  The second “evil” was “the ever-present danger of being un-self-critical, ingrown, tradition-bound.” This Twaddell did not consider a real problem, since the editorial staff was “anything but stodgy.” But this criticism was sometimes heard from competitors.

  To undermine the suggestion and perhaps even address the felt need for a little outside prestige, Twaddell recommended that Merriam assemble a board of paid advisers, including some of the people who had been considered for the job of editor in chief. These individuals would be in a position to make genuine specialized contributions in their areas of expertise but, more important, their opinions could be separately polled for any innovations Merriam was contemplating. Then their advice could be ignored if necessary.

  As a parting word, Twaddell mentioned another action that could be taken instead of wasting time in search of a prestigious editor in chief: An assistant could be hired for Bethel, the man who asked Twaddell to write up his impressions. Too much of Bethel’s time, Twaddell had noticed, was taken up by routine reports, correspondence with the printer, and company records. If the editorial staff was what distinguished Merriam, then its time needed to be used more carefully.

  Bethel’s exact reaction to this last suggestion is not known, but it seems safe to say that he approved.

  One of the first changes to the traditional design for Webster’s Third, for which there was already broad support, was the end of the split page, in which minor words were relegated to a footer that staff called the “downstairs.” By crediting Merriam’s editors and definers with all the necessary intellectual authority, Twaddell helped reverse another upstairs-downstairs hierarchy, that which dignified the prestigious outsider who stopped in for meetings every couple of weeks at the expense of the hardworking insider who showed up every day.

  Two months after receiving Twaddell’s memo, acting president Robert Munroe gave Associate Editor Philip Gove a promotion. “You have been selected to have full responsibility, under the Editorial Board, for the editing and production of the next edition of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary.” Hired in 1946 at a salary of $5,200, Gove would now receive $8,000 per year, “extra compensation if business returns warrant,” a pension, and “the privileges of the services of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield.”2 His title, for the time being, was managing editor, but he was the most senior individual working on Webster’s Third. He was the new person in charge.

  Chapter 23

  Shortly after being promoted, Philip Gove indulged an urge that would have seemed out of character to many people who later came to know his name. He politely, grammatically, and ever so carefully told someone off—someone who had offended his highly discriminating sense of what was right and appropriate in the use of language.

  Gove was at home, recalling the circumstances. Home was a house on a farm in Massachusetts, twenty miles east of Springfield. A slim man almost fifty years of age with close-cropped, graying hair, drawn neatly in a middle part, Gove was sitting at a typewriter and working from handwritten notes, as was his custom.

  His daughter Doris had brought home a note from her second-grade teacher. It was “a familiar purplish-blue stencil, faint and wrinkled.”1 He called the note’s appearance “familiar” because, as the father of three children, among whom Doris was the youngest, he’d seen many of its kind. And as examples of written communication they were uniformly disappointing. “When these notes turn up . . . I never know whether I am being queried by the child’s teacher, by a student helper learning to type, or by the truant officer.”

  His wife, Grace, usually referred such notes, forms, and permission slips to him, so “my signature shows up rather often; their mother might be nobody in particular.” Yet he was no longer the parent who wrote excuses for when a child was absent. “I never could bring myself to write, ‘Please excuse Doris for being absent yesterday.’ Instead I would write, ‘Doris was absent yesterday because she didn’t go to school.’ ” Such a message was intended not to be rude but truthful.

  Explained Gove, “I didn’t care whether the child was excused or not.” So, asking that the child be excused would have been insincere, a lie. No wonder, he said, “my excuses kept coming back to me for a revise.”

  The latest note was about transportation to and from school. It asked, “On what bus do you ride to school?” Since the note was addressed to him, Gove considered writing “none.” Instead, he shrugged off the problem and asked his daughter about the bus, but she too insisted that queries be phrased in just such a way. He parried by asking if it was maybe the East End bus or the number 2.

  “How should I know?” said Doris.

  Well, Gove continued, “what do you call it?”

  “We don’t call it,” Doris answered. “It just comes.” And, besides, “It isn’t a bus at all.”

  As it happened, the vehicle that picked her up was a car. Gove kept at it though. “We’ll skip the first one. What time does it, the bus, I mean the car, leave your stop?”

  Doris asked, “What’s a stop?”

  With this Gove decided it was no longer worth playing along with this stupid, misaddressed, ambiguous note from the teacher. He folded it over and wrote on the back, “I am sorry but no one in my house seems to know the answers to any of these questions,” and because what he had written was true, he signed his name.

  “Next night the note was back home,” he recalled. “Written in pencil beneath my writing was the following, unsigned: ‘Would you please fill in the name, residence, and the approximate time that Doris has to leave the house and the time that she usually arrives home in the afternoon. Please sign your name. Thank you.’ ”

  This request seemed a little more straightforward. Gove re-interviewed Doris and a half hour later began to write the teacher a reply that surely went through several drafts before ending up almost four pages long. It was the kind of letter you write to let someone know that they are a perfect idiot.

  Tired of being addressed as “Parent,” Gove took his revenge. “Dear Teacher,” he wrote, “I know the name of Doris’s teacher, of course, and if I were sure that you are her I would call you by name.” Take that!

  As for names, he said, “Doris’s name is Doris.” However, he went on, “it is rather uncertain what time Doris leaves the house in the morning.”

  There were several clocks in their house but they were not synchronized. And Doris herself was unpredictable. On her way out, she might stop in the bathroom or get distracted by a toy in the hallway or look in the kitchen for something to eat. But even if she were to check the kitchen clock as she walked out the door, more than likely she’d come back in, then leave again at a different time. Also, she was not so good at telling time to begin with. “Maybe you can get around to drilling her class on how to tell time. But first teach her to reply to notes about herself. At least, tell her what kind of answers you want, and all I would have to do is sign.”

  The second half of the letter was devoted to the equally bedeviling question of when Doris left school and arrived home. “She has to walk some 500 yards from the highway to our house.” And, of course, the little seven-year-old was prone to distraction then as well: “If she sees a squirrel in the big oak tree, she’s likely to try to communicate with it. . . . And on rainy days our dirt road fills up with puddles. They all have to be counted and stirred with a stick.” Toward the end of the letter Gove happened on a bright idea for determining when Doris gets home: “If you want, we can ask her to come straight home all the way some day next week and then phone you herself. You can look at the school clock and would have the official time of her arrival for that day.”

  Philip Gove sent this note to his daughter’s second-grade teacher, and then because the memory of it made him chuckle he recorded its contents in an essay, one of a handful of familiar unpublished memoirs he wrote over the years.

  But this was several years before history’s most notoriou
s dictionary was published. Gove was still an innocent, not yet excoriated in the press as a saboteur of the English language and the dangerous proponent of the philosophy that “anything goes.” In less than a decade, to quite a throng of newspapermen, schoolteachers, parents, intellectuals, mystery readers, and priests, Gove would become known as one of the most dangerous men on earth, a great relativist who was trying to sweep away all the rules of grammar and usage and doom the English-speaking West to a twentieth-century Tower of Babel. To Doris’s second-grade teacher, however, he must have seemed simply a noodge, a stickler, and maybe an ass.

  Chapter 24

  After more than fifty years with the company, Robert C. Munroe, then president and successor to Asa Baker, opened a meeting of the Editorial Board by saying, “I look upon this as one of the most important meetings this company has ever had.” The date was November 20, 1951.

  “We are about to develop policies for a new Merriam-Webster dictionary, a dictionary which will probably be one of the most momentous publications in all of the publishing world. Although I am not an overly religious man, I almost feel like opening this meeting with a prayer that we’ll be guided in the right direction.”1

  The direction was not entirely clear and the circumstances less than auspicious. “I refer to the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Munroe said, “without any daylight or fresh air, and with the mustiest old books imaginable.” After that enigmatic comparison, he turned the meeting over to Philip Gove.

  “It is ironic,” Gove said, “that the very title of the book we are considering contains a series of words which almost defy definition. It starts out with the word Webster, about which there seems to be considerable doubt. The exact meaning of the word New is anyone’s guess. The word International has never been clearly defined. We are not even sure of the precise definition of the word dictionary, and the word English is open to considerable discussion. The word language has had a multitude of interpretations, and, finally, it is almost impossible to define precisely the word Unabridged.”

  Strange but true, the current editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, found the meanings of these words to be so debatable that he was openly casting doubt on whether this volume was still Webster’s, actually new, definitively international, really a dictionary, categorically English, or even unabridged.

  Much had changed since 1934. Gone was the nineteenth-century confidence that had shaped the information and opinions of Webster’s Second. A “universal” dictionary, a “supreme authority” was impossible if not laughable. There were now countless issues, it seemed to Gove, that could not be settled behind a closed door by a handful of men of goodwill.

  “Language is infinitely complicated,” he said, “and the dictionary is therefore infinitely complicated. It demands a type of understanding that defies the ability of any one individual: it demands so much understanding that no one can understand it all and only a few can move about in it comprehendingly.”

  These were not philosophical problems better ignored by the lexicographer, or minimized in order to sell dictionaries. Gove was far too principled for such cynicism. The layman’s point of view had been shown to be primitive, superstitious, unsound. It could no longer be placated.

  But now the theoretical conundrums that riddled linguists became practical challenges for the lexicographer. The basic problem was this, said Gove: “We can never know fully what any word means to another person. The nine of us could not agree on the word girl on any but an elementary level.”

  He said it was “unfortunate” that the company had billed its big dictionary as “the supreme authority,” a comment that by itself represented a 180-degree turn in the zeitgeist that informed the work at Merriam-Webster. An unabridged dictionary, he added, was really only for the “intelligently literate.” More than the ability to read was needed to profit from its use.

  Then, finally sounding optimistic, like a man undertaking a long and difficult project, he said the new dictionary would strive for nothing less than “the widest possible coverage of standard language.” So great a feat required the company to “keep step with linguistic advance.” As language changed, so must the vocabulary of a dictionary, so must its sense of how words were used.

  Everyone, of course, was in favor of that. Without new words and usages, new dictionaries would not be necessary; and without a need for new dictionaries, Merriam would go out of business. But this was only a short breather. Gove quickly returned to his objection to calling Webster’s the supreme authority.

  “Thirty years ago,” he said, “one of the leading linguists in this country, Sapir, warned against identifying a language with its dictionary. Since then the studies of scientific linguists have made this warning even more significant.”

  This convenient fiction of the dictionary business, the unexamined idea that prompted loads of paying customers to say, Well, is it in the dictionary? or What does Webster’s say?, the notion that a dictionary was the language in a bottle, or rather a book, the entire English language printed up, spelled out, and defined, this amounted to an intellectual error that G. & C. Merriam could no longer countenance. Philip Gove would not go around claiming his dictionary as a “register of thought” or “the indispensable basis of literature,” as Professor Hart had said about Webster’s Second in 1934.

  Gove was not afraid to speak the awful truth. In fact, he seemed to like saying it. A dictionary was not the language; a dictionary, even an unabridged dictionary, was only a selective inventory of the language.

  He did not essay for long on the contributions of linguistics, but he mentioned that linguists tended to belittle dictionaries because they failed to keep pace with linguistic change. He alluded to studies like Albert Marckwardt’s, which had documented how our spoken and written language were much more tolerant of deviation from the rules of classroom grammar than educated opinion and the usage notes of dictionaries suggested.

  It was a rather tricky phenomenon Gove was hinting at. People thought of themselves as old-fashioned on grammar, swearing fidelity to rules they violated every day. The lexicographer who believed that practice mattered more than stated preferences could end up selling a product people said they didn’t want.

  A controversial reputation was already attaching to the work of these scientific linguists, so it was remarkable that their work should now become a major point of reference for a mainstream commercial dictionary. But in promoting Gove, Merriam-Webster had determined that technocratic and scholarly knowledge were more important than worldly knowledge and political instinct. In Gove they found an editor whose principles and personal habits would not allow for a cordial smoothing over of the difference between the old way and the new way.

  Gove announced several policy changes, the most important being the new stand on so-called encyclopedic matter, yet another way in which the new dictionary would give up the claim to being universal. Webster’s Third would not pretend to have answers to all possible questions; that claim now seemed a pathetic, empty boast.

  Then Gove told a story about an old Merriam hand named William Wheeler who had worked under Noah Porter on the 1864 Webster’s and written a three-hundred-page supplement of encyclopedic material, including character names from fictional literature, names from the Bible, information for a gazetteer, and “gleanings from history and philosophy.” Wheeler expanded this material into an independent book, which was then reabsorbed almost completely in the 1890 Webster’s before becoming an almost permanent feature of the unabridged dictionaries. In Webster’s Second in 1934, about three-quarters of Wheeler’s material, much of which had not been revised in seventy years, had been reprinted.

  Leaving out all encyclopedic material—proper names, entries on wars and other historic events, types of ships, and so on—was not entirely possible but such material had to be massively reduced if Webster’s Third were to remain a single-volume dictiona
ry. Gove proposed to omit a number of antiquated learned terms, unanglicized foreign terms, proper names (Webster’s Second had devoted thousands of lines to masculine and feminine names: John, Mary, and so on), epithets such as Athlete of Christendom and entries starting Lady of, the titles of literary works, and the furthest reaches of slang and dialect. “All of these recommendations could be summarized by a recommendation that, in general, we make Webster’s Dictionary primarily a dictionary of the standard language as spoken throughout the English-speaking world.”

  After lunch he reached another important item on his agenda, getting the Editorial Board out of his way.

  “Of primary importance to the successful determination and guidance of editorial policy was the formation of the Editorial Board,” said the publisher’s statement of Webster’s Second. The board had been an executive committee of company president Asa Baker, editor in chief William Allan Neilson, general editor Thomas A. Knott, and managing editor Paul W. Carhart. These four had brought together business sense, worldliness, and lexicography to handle those delicate decisions that might affect the company’s bottom line, reputation, or intellectual integrity.

  But the board had also slowed down the works. The minutes of the Editorial Board’s meetings stretched to two thousand pages, filling eleven volumes.

  “To me,” Gove told the current eight members of the board, “that represents a stupendous, if not stultifying, waste of time.” In one instance, he said, the Webster’s Second board had spent at least an hour discussing whether hot dog should be in the dictionary. (In the end hot dog had won admission: “a heated wienerwurst or Frankfurter, esp. one placed in a split roll;—used also interjectionally to express surprise or approval. Slang.”)

  Prior to the day’s meeting Gove had circulated a particularly technical memo on how the new dictionary should handle botanical classification. Did the board members really want to read, absorb, and opine on such material? If so, he had other memos they might want to see.