The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  A long shift of silent routines and carefully remembered policies could be trying to the nerves, especially for the man in charge. He considered chitchat the enemy of productivity, and worked quietly in his office, avoiding meetings. Word around the office was that at the end of each day, when Gove got home, he poured himself a belt of whiskey.

  Merriam was a serious, thrifty place. The intellectual hierarchy was determined by what college you attended and whether you obtained an advanced degree. Salaries were low for the junior staff, whose dependable habits were the necessary precondition of success but often not as appreciated as a hot shot’s résumé.

  Men wore jackets, of course, which they draped over their chairs while sitting at their desks in the undivided editorial office space. Bathrooms were the only places you were allowed to smoke. The men’s room was the most convivial spot in the building. The day included two breaks and a long lunch. This allowed time to run home for a midday meal, take care of an errand, or for the younger staff to plan a card game after work.

  The first step in making a new unabridged dictionary was to cut up the old unabridged dictionary, pasting every definition and every sense from the 1947 printing of Webster’s Second onto 3×5-inch slips. These were then divided into 107 separate categories and 18 separate etymological lineages.2

  The next step was to add new material. With black or red pencil in hand (never blue, purple, or yellow), Merriam editors read continuously for up to two hours a day.3 Gove had numerous publications delivered to his home, where he kept a stack of 3×5 slips next to his chair by the fireplace.4 Readers were expected to scan, more than any other literature, contemporary nonfiction: newspapers, magazines, learned journals, popular science titles, house organs, annual reports, mail-order catalogs, college catalogs, transportation schedules, bulletin boards, menus, food containers, and owner’s manuals. Contemporary fiction also needed to be read—the works of Norman Mailer, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and many others were all being examined—but Gove believed fictional dialogue and speech were “contrived” and therefore not good examples of the language “genuinely at work.”

  “We are particularly interested in getting enough cits to show the language situation in which a word commonly appears.” A cit was a citation, an illustrative quotation, and it was profoundly important to Gove’s “contextual method of defining.” In describing this method, and laying down rules for how it should be carried out, Gove was able to articulate his philosophy of language and a few choice bits of literary criticism. Here in the Black Books, more than anywhere else, Gove seemed to be at home in his thoughts.

  Words, he observed and argued, never appeared in the language as they do in the dictionary: isolated and defined, as if their meanings could be separated from other words, always with the unjustified suggestion that dictionaries have the authority to say where a word began and where it ended. In answer to the criticism that a dictionary was not the language itself, Gove sought to make Webster’s Third especially rich in illustrative quotations, for these quotations were the language, or at least genuine examples of it. They were “language as it is,” not as some helpful lexicographer tried to make it appear.

  He asked that special attention be paid to words that Webster’s Second had labeled prohibitively with such terms as “slang, opprobrious, derogatory, vulgar, jargon, humorous, jocose, facetious, informal, colloquial, cant, local, dialect, illiterate, low,” especially when context and usage contradicted Webster’s Second treatment of the word in question.5 Gove preferred it when examples of such nonstandard language, as he called it, were found in a standard context where the usual norms of grammar and usage applied. The idea that a word, and any context it might appear in, were always slang, forever and irredeemably so, was a fiction of Webster’s Second and the genteel tradition.

  Such thinking rested on the artificial premise that a given word was always, very simply, either polite or not, just as a person was polite or not—and never would a polite person utter an impolite word. And never could an impolite word be uttered in a polite fashion. In reality, however, a president might use slang and a criminal, though born to the streets, might employ legalese, and formal and informal language were often mixed to heighten the comic, dramatic, ironic, frivolous, documentary, or other possible effects of their joining.

  “The editor cannot . . . assume that because an elegant writer employs a term it cannot be slang,” Gove wrote. “The hearty house organ, the casual New Yorker, and the breezy Time all achieve their effects by variations upon familiarity which means, among other things, the studied use of slang.”6 Characteristic features included the use of contractions, ellipses to signal a silent drum roll of anticipation, words generally labeled slang, a colloquial tone so intimate it might be expressed through use of the first and second persons: I and you.

  The source of a quotation, Gove allowed, might give some hint of whether a word should be labeled slang. “Walter Winchell, Variety, Metronome, are good examples” of sources notorious for their slang, but Gove’s philosophy indulged few such prejudices. A simple majority of citations was the only firm basis for deciding whether a word ought to be labeled slang. The memo for labeling contained a sample of colloquial terms from browned-off to look-see to square that might be considered slang. Ten out of eleven of these disputed terms had been labeled slang in Webster’s Second. With the new procedure, less than half of the same list was to be labeled slang in Webster’s Third.

  Too often the slang label had been used as a cover for snobbery, as when “the social status of the activity . . . determines the status of the terminology of the group.” One way of separating out slang was to ask whether there were standard equivalents. Gove gave examples with equivalents in parentheses: “jive (jazz), horse (heroin), con (confidence), duck (urinal), hash mark (service stripe), platter (phonograph record).” Such terms could be fairly labeled slang. Bebop and zoot suit “on the other hand represent phenomena peculiar to a special activity for which no other term is available.”

  Gove was more comfortable with the linguist’s terminology of standard and nonstandard or substandard, which Webster’s Third editors used in place of old terms such as erroneous, illiterate, vulgar, and so on. The label colloquial, an old standby of lexicographers, Gove dropped entirely, a testament to how often it had been misunderstood to mean incorrect. Yet no word better described the increasing informality of contemporary English, a phenomenon that otherwise weighed very heavily in Gove’s thoughts.

  Colloquial meant spoken—the tonal, and often structural, opposite of nineteenth-century literary prose from which many familiar rules of usage were drawn. It captured language that was acceptable for informal communication, but it was also a product of a time when the lines between formal and informal, educated and vulgar, literary and illiterate, seemed much brighter than they did in the 1950s. These lines were not only linguistic, they applied to actual people, who were not so easily divided into standard and vulgar anymore. The GI Bill was putting more Americans than ever through college, and higher education was increasingly scientific and technical, its lessons no longer founded on training in Latin and Greek. One might develop a highly technical vocabulary for work and speak like a regular joe at home. And the language of regular joes was current in journalism, movies, and literature. Standards for printable language and educated speech now differed profoundly from the Victorian remains that had informed Webster’s Second. There were good intellectual reasons to rethink colloq.—in addition to being misunderstood, whether a word was colloquial often depended on context, a point Gove loved to make—but in dropping the label a great range of contemporary usage was going unnamed.

  In the Black Books, Gove discussed arse, bum, and snot, by no means a full roster of the obscenities making their way into Webster’s Third. Gove did not exercise unlimited freedom in this respect. When he circulated two page proofs with entries for fuck as both a noun and a verb, with anothe
r entry for fuck up, President Gallan made use of his rarely brandished veto power to keep the F-bombs out.7 Other such terms “not commonly in use in some circles of polite society,” wrote Gove, would not be labeled vulgar but would carry a note saying “usu. considered vulgar.” Derogatory words were a related but separate matter. “Particular care should be taken to see that no smear word be entered without an identifying note.”

  Chinaman, “which must surely be used very often without derogatory intent,” Gove observed, was included without a prohibitive note in the first printing of Webster’s Second, and its page had to be subsequently plate-changed. “Dago, hunky, papist usually reflect conscious hostility on the part of the user,” so their entries need to say “used disparagingly.” Gove went on, trying to allow for the innocent usage of malicious language while drafting an approach that would make his dictionary sound less judgmental and less categorical than its predecessor. “For a number of other terms, however, such as nigger, Negress, Jap, Jewess, there is evidence that although they are frequently used innocently, or naively, they are usually (depending on the circumstances) offensive to those to whom they are applied.”

  Gove clearly saw that a dictionary scheduled to come out in 1960 needed to be built on a new foundation. “We must see to it that a mid-twentieth-century dictionary gives evidence of having been written by editors who lived in the twentieth century.”8 In the Webster’s Second definition of chase, Gove had found, the editors had given as a typical usage “to chase the boar.” Under limp, they had written “as in a limp cravat.” For meet, they had allowed “to meet carriages in the street.” Gove eagerly collected many such anachronisms, ranging from the merely out-of-date to the willfully archaic. Under gall in Webster’s Second it was written, “the troops were galled by the shot of the enemy.” Anybody who could have come up with that, said Gove, “must have died many centuries ago.”

  These were verbal illustrations. Unlike quotations, they were thought up by lexicographers as brief, typical uses of a word. In Webster’s Third they would need to sound easy and natural. And they should appear typical. “One could illustrate pirate or crochet,” wrote Gove, “by ‘the pirate was crocheting a doily’ which is grammatically correct, brief, and not impossible, but so untypical of the supposed activities of pirates that to use it would be to mislead the naïve and amuse the sophisticated.”

  Illustrations should be blameless, banal even, making no comments and telling no stories. Under the verb form of shoe, Webster’s Second had the illustration “the cost of shoeing a family,” which, said Gove, “sets up a distracting narrative situation.” Forgo names—“pusillanimous John and Mary” Gove called such mealy-mouthed name-mongering—in favor of he and she, but make sure “the pronouns contain no sinister overtones.” About this Gove felt very strongly. “The phantasmagoric world of antecedentless pronouns,” he wrote, “is full of potential narrative distraction.”

  Definitions should be impartial. “Editorializing has no place in definitions,” said a memo, containing numerous examples from Webster’s Second of what to avoid.9 Aleut had been defined as “a peacable, semi-civilized people.” Apache were described as “Nomads, of warlike disposition and relatively low culture.” Holi Hinduism was called “a licentious spring festival,” and wood duck was defined as “a handsome American duck.” To an editor who challenged Gove’s rule on editorializing, arguing that it did not seem out of place to mention that a certain varietal was “the best known wine of [name of district],” Gove replied that Webster’s Third was not a wine list.10

  Verbal illustrations, too, had to be policed for tendentious content. The illustration for supersede in the fifth Collegiate Dictionary, published in 1937, had said, “electricity has superseded gas.” Under improvement, the same dictionary had written, “electricity is an improvement on gas.” Unfortunately, said Gove, “both definitions were picked up by gas companies, one in California and one in Springfield, who were downright unpleasant about our alleged bias.”

  Contextual defining relied on illustrations and quotations to illuminate a word’s actual range of meaning and usage, where Webster’s Second had relied more on generalizing definitions to convey a word’s particular role in the language. Gove’s method proceeded from the assumption that it was quite difficult to precisely state the limits of a given word; Webster’s Second had confidently assumed that mission and left the worrying to others.

  Gove urged his lexicographers to increase the number of quotations.11 These had to represent the standard language of mid-twentieth-century America but also be immediately readable and clear to the average user. The job of a dictionary, thought Gove, was not to flatter readers with mighty classical allusions or other snippets of high culture. The job of a dictionary was more pedestrian: to illuminate standard meaning and usage.

  Dictionary users were, according to Gove, ill-served by poetic flourishes. “It is no defense, for example, for the ordinary writer who uses an antiquated subjunctive to plead that he can quote a parallel in a good poet.” Gove had collected fourteen examples of literary subjunctives that had been used in Webster’s Second, quotations such as “The father banished virtue shall restore,” from Dryden.

  “The hard truth is that the literary flavor of W34 and its predecessors,” wrote Gove, using the in-house shorthand for Webster’s Second, “represents a luxury of a bygone age.”

  The old dictionary was “rather liberally sprinkled with hapax legomena,” said Gove, referring to words that appeared but once in the history of the language. “Some of Shakespeare’s surcharged figures result in senses that never but for him would have been isolated for dictionary definition.” Shakespeare, the only author Gove would allow to be mentioned by last name alone, also lost standing in Gove’s ban on puns, which he worried would confuse readers. “Your means are very slender and your waste is great,” had to go, as did Hamlet’s incomparable dying words, “The rest is silence.”

  In his Black Books, Gove was nullifying Asa Baker’s preference for elegance and literary effect and contradicting Noah Porter’s view of the dictionary as the source of literary habit and cultivation. The new turn at Merriam-Webster was especially visible in Gove’s instructions on whose words should be quoted in Webster’s Third. “Since the illustrative quotation is to be chosen primarily for its contribution to an understanding of meaning, not for its decorativeness and not for lending authority to a definition, it follows that it doesn’t much matter who is quoted.”

  The Webster’s enterprise may have hinged on the authority of a single prestigious name. And Noah Webster’s successors thought very carefully about what other names should be set in smaller type beneath that first great one, choosing other prestigious names, belonging to figureheads within a figurehead culture, such as college presidents Noah Porter and William Allan Neilson. But under Gove, the non-name editor in chief, it was possible to say that “any prestige a name lends must be considered accidental.”

  Gove wrote to his editors: “Feel free to quote Mickey Spillane, Edgar Guest, Grace L. Hill, G. A. Henty, Elinor Glyn, Billy Graham, Bill Cunningham, Polly Adler, N. V. Peale, Fred Allen, Gypsy R. Lee, Walter Winchell, Al Capp—they all use standard English, some of them rather rewardingly.” The only limitation was that no one working for Merriam-Webster could be quoted.

  “Time was,” Gove added, “when the cultured consultant, on being told that a locution was to be found in Pope, would gravely and docilely feel that he was getting a glimpse of choice English.” Today, Gove said, a dictionary user was liable to ask why Webster’s was still relying on so much old stuff. Reading Webster’s Second, Gove often asked the same question. He had no special animus against Alexander Pope, but every line the dictionary devoted to genuflecting before the great tradition was a line that could not be devoted to elucidating contemporary American English.

  “There must be no hesitation,” he wrote in the Black Books, “about pulling out Milton and putting in Sin
clair Lewis.”

  Another reason to avoid literary quotations, Gove thought, was their tendency to utter falsity. Webster’s Second had quoted a line from Tennyson: “Whitest honey in fairy gardens culled.” Gove could not object more strenuously. First, “bees do not gather honey except by an extension of meaning.” Second, “white is a symbolic, nonsignificant, and false standard applied to honey.” Third, and last, “there just are no fairy gardens.” Gove thought Tennyson’s line “perfectly illustrates why Tennyson was not a great poet,” but more important, it “does not illustrate the meaning of cull.” Sadly, “literary flavor is sometimes very wide of the mark.”

  For his predecessors, being editor in chief of a Webster’s dictionary meant carrying on a tradition. For Gove, it meant he was personally responsible for verifying the dictionary’s intellectual integrity. Not that he wasn’t proud to hold his position. “To a scholar devoted to the English language and its lexicography no higher distinction could come than had already been given to me, the opportunity to be editor in chief of a major edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary,” wrote Gove in a letter to President Gallan.

  He asked to be made a vice president of the company. This promotion, said Gove, would reassure the editorial staff that its work was recognized as essential to the company’s success. If granted, the vice presidency would also certify that Gove and his brain trust were much more powerful right now than in the days when editors were only as free as the company’s guardians of reputation, the Editorial Board, allowed them to be. Gallan, however, must have thought differently, for Gove did not receive this promotion.12