Being an editor requires drawing lines, and Gove never shrank from this responsibility. In one of his first acts as editor, he had even drawn a chart, full of lines, connecting and overlapping in a series of boxes.13 One central box was labeled Standard Language, to mark off that portion of American English that Gove proposed to cover in Webster’s Third. It overlapped with small portions of several other large boxes labeled dialectal, slang, obsolete, technical, foreign-language, and non-lexical, meaning the names of people, places, commercial products, ships, wars, laws, political parties, tribes, religious festivals, and so on. The largest thing it left out was encyclopedic or “non-lexical” information. Such an omission, though done for practical reasons, was not unprecedented. The OED and the earliest Webster’s dictionaries also omitted general reference information.
Many of Gove’s subsequent decisions were but a refinement of his chart, including his unusual policy on definition-writing. Webster’s first (1909) and second international editions had both used a style called “systematic defining,” in which basic definitions were followed by general information. The entry for insurance was a perfect example. Around line seven of this entry in Webster’s Second, the lexicographer began listing the many types of insurance one might purchase: life, fire, marine, accident, health, automobile, and fifteen others. For Gove, this was yet another way in which Webster’s Second ceased to be a dictionary and insisted on being an encyclopedia. And the essay-like writing was far from accidental. Encyclopedias were, of course, filled with articles. A dictionary, however, ought to be filled with definitions.
And definitions should not be written, thought Gove, in complete sentences and paragraphs. They ought to be phrased in single statements, as if an invisible “is” stood between the headword and the definition, with cumulatively greater detail incorporated, without interruption, until the definition was complete. Although he had been uncertain that two people could agree on the meaning of even so simple a word as girl, Gove was positive that there was but one way to write a definition.
In a memo for the Black Books, Gove referenced two definitions for air, one from Webster’s Second and one prepared for Webster’s Third. The one from Webster’s Second, with nine periods and several semicolons, looked and acted like a short essay. The one prepared for Webster’s Third contained the same identifying details but followed Gove’s preferred defining pattern.14
Air, the Webster’s Third definition said, is “a mixture of gases, invisible, odorless, tasteless, compressible, elastic, sound-transmitting, and liquefiable, composed chiefly of nitrogen and oxygen nearly in the ratio of four volumes to one, together with 0.9 per cent argon, about 0.03 per cent carbon dioxide, varying amounts of water vapor, minute quantities of helium, krypton, neon, and xenon, varying small amounts of such other substances as ammonia, nitrous and nitric acids, and sulfurous and sulfuric acids, and such suspended particles as dust, bacteria, and yeast spores, that surrounds the earth, extending outward for an indefinite distance, with rapidly decreasing density, half its mass being within four miles of the earth’s surface, its pressure at sea level being about 14.7 pounds per square inch and its weight being 1.293 grams per liter at 0˚ C. and 760 mm. pressure. See element 1.”
On his copy of these instructions, after the final cross-reference, “see element 1,” Gove wrote, “or your psychiatrist.” It was often said at Merriam, by Gove and others, that Webster’s Third embraced the common idiom of contemporary language, but as a result of Gove’s defining style its definitions sounded totally unnatural. And Gove seemed to realize this. The definition for air, he wrote, “may be something of a tour de force and certainly is not a model of simplicity, but it is a definition, which the W34 version is not.”
Another line Gove drew concerned initial upper-case letters, which he categorically opposed in headwords. By excluding encyclopedic material, Webster’s Third was excluding proper nouns, which represented a huge set of words that would have had to be capitalized. Beyond proper nouns, however, capitalization became much less consistent. It stood to reason, Gove thought. He quoted Otto Jespersen’s opinion that “linguistically it is utterly impossible to draw a sharp line of demarcation between proper names and common names.” Complicated as this sounded, it led to a simple ban on capital letters. Russia was no longer being defined, but the adjective russian was, and it was spelled with a lowercase r and labeled “usu. cap.” All headwords were to be set in lower case, and for those words normally capitalized the editor had to add one of the following labels: cap, usu. cap, sometimes cap, and often cap.
“Such usages as aristotelianism, johnson grass, magellanic cloud, french fried potatoes, march winds, chinawoman,” said Gove, were no longer mere exceptions to the old rules. In fact, educated usage was increasingly unpredictable on the capitalization of such words. The only ones Gove could identify that always appeared in capital letters were God, “in nearly all aspects of speech,” and the first-person pronoun I.15 Readers of Webster’s Third, however, later found that, aside from abbreviations, God was the only headword given a capital letter. The headword for the first-person pronoun I was set in lower case (i) and labeled “cap.”
Chapter 28
As color television was being introduced, the language of American entertainment saw the arrival of sitcom. It was the early fifties, and television programming had only been around for a few years while television ownership in America went from less than ten thousand before the war to several million made and sold annually. The quality of programming was considered low by sophisticates. The comedian Fred Allen said, “Television is called a new medium, and I have discovered why they call it a medium—because it is neither rare nor well done.” Yet its presence in the living room continued to redirect household activity, setting the table for TV dinner, dated 1954 in the Merriam-Webster files. But one year later, another phrase was making the rounds: idiot box.1
Sometimes, not long after something has been named the language records complaints about its existence. Fast food is dated 1951 in the Merriam-Webster files, three years before Ray Kroc went to work for McDonald’s. Junk food followed in 1960 as Kroc took control of the chain and built the quintessential American food franchise. The midcentury lexicon was filled with new words for the construction boom, including housing development, half-bath, exurb, and exurbia, followed closely by dullsville.
A large cache of computer language was patented, including many words that would not become familiar until the rise of the personal computer in the 1990s: information retrieval, online, random access memory, data processing, artificial intelligence, integrated circuit, software, virtual memory. Technical innovation and the spread of higher education also helped give rise to new vocabulary of measurable accomplishment—overachiever, underachiever, and meritocracy—along with a string of unflattering names for the A-students: egghead, nerd, and wonk were all coined in the 1950s. Maven too, which William Safire later adopted as a preferred term for a language commentator like himself, comes from this period, when Safire was a young publicist angling to get his client’s model home into the famous kitchen debates between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.
Other-directed and inner-directed, David Reisman’s well-known sociological categories from The Lonely Crowd, were coined in 1950. They described different character types, as different as William Allan Neilson and Philip Gove, as different as the public-spirited man and the technocrat, as different as Henry Seidel Canby’s age of confidence and age of doubt. Establishment and organization came into vogue with other attempts to understand the tensions between the individual and a public seemingly dominated by large organizations, from the armed forces to higher education and modern corporations. William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, a work that first took shape in articles Whyte wrote for Fortune magazine (and was read in draft form by David Reisman), was published in 1956. Mass man, an older term used by Ortega y Gasset, among others, gains traction in such discussions, while mass
media, coined in the 1920s but left out of Webster’s Second, becomes an officially important subject for educators, social critics, and anyone else interested in what’s going on.
A basket of terms come into view describing the postwar American childhood: Little League, talent show, show-and-tell, and hula hoop. Do it yourself and the acronym DIY have been rallying cries in recent years for everyone from punk bands to at-home cheesemakers, but they were first recorded in the Merriam files in 1952 and 1955. The decade is popularly viewed as the incubation stage for the American family stereotype consisting of a male breadwinner, a female homemaker, and 2.2 children, the so-called nuclear family, a term noticed in 1947. Yet it is also when these familiar categories start to bend. Househusband was recorded in 1955, and, with Gregory Pincus’s invention of a birth control pill, oral contraceptive joined the language. After the Kinsey Report, gay is increasingly used for homosexuals.
Swing expressed the sassy blend of decadent fun that was no longer gay—this, of course, prior to when swinging came to mean spouse-swapping. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a Norman Mailer sentence published in Dissent in 1957 that captures the fifties tone of swing: “Still I am just one cat in a world of cool cats, and everything interesting is crazy, or at least so the Squares who do not know how to swing would say.” Swing in its new meanings was popularized by jazz, which also gave us the whole cat business and did much to bring out the new flavor of cool. In 1957, Miles Davis released his pioneering album Birth of the Cool. Three years later, Webster’s Third gave the following as the eighth sense: “showing a mastery of the latest of the approved technique and style,” with verbal illustrations, as in “cool jazz” and “as an actor he’s real cool.”
Corny was defined in the 1950 addendum to Webster’s Second as “tiresomely trite, outworn, and old-fashioned.” The second definition referred to music, “contrasted with hot . . . lacking spontaneity, freedom, and enthusiasm of swing.” Hot was now defined as “impassioned and exciting in rhythm and mood,” as in “hot jazz.” Square, meanwhile, was covering ground similar to corny. Eventually labeled slang in Webster’s Third, sense 4g in 1950 reads, “having unsophisticated or conservative tastes . . . belonging to or characteristic of the respectable law-abiding tradition-bound classes of society.” A square was the opposite of a cat, sometimes called a hepcat.
Desegregation was recorded in 1951, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were “inherently unequal.” The popular culture of the era, or at least that remembered in American Graffiti, is recalled in such new language as ponytail, sweater vest, dragster, and hot rod—the delinquent side in the abbreviation OD. By the middle of the twentieth century, Americans had gone abroad and fought on several continents, but Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt smack of the early days of commercial air travel, as does jet set. But our taste for the Orient was evidenced by the appearance of Peking duck in our culinary vocabulary.
American art was taking its place on the world stage. The modernism celebrated in journals like Partisan Review led to abstract expressionism, a 1951 coinage actually belonging to Robert Coates in the New Yorker. The new art was personified by Jackson Pollock, so domineering a figure that Life magazine famously asked if he was the most important painter in the United States, and his drip style was parodied, though ever so gently, by Norman Rockwell. The alternative name for abstract expressionism, action painting, coined by Howard Rosenberg, was recorded in 1951. Pop art followed in 1957, several years before anyone had heard of Andy Warhol.
McCarthyism was recorded in 1950, and for years the growth of Cold War language accelerated like an arms race. From launchpad and lift off to ballistic missile and ICBM, our words reflected a growing investment in high-tech weaponry that, like the A-bomb, would spare nothing but American lives. The aerospace industry was born, delivering not only planes and cruise missiles but the promise of a moon shot, which the Russians accomplished first with Sputnik, inspiring not only fear, envy, and hand-wringing over the quality of American education but the use of -nik to form beatnik and neatnik. The American study of Russia gave us the Kremlinologist a decade after George Kennan penned his famous article as “X” and called on policy makers to think more seriously about the Russian threat, while popularizing containment into a mainstay of foreign policy discussions. Sovietologist had more of the institutional flavor associated with American area studies, whether conducted on campus or at a think tank, another coinage of the 1950s.
Chapter 29
Prefixes pose a problem for the lexicographer. An anti or an un can be attached to countless words. The question becomes how many should be acknowledged. Gove erred on the side of non-recognition when it came to anti—the meanings of many anti- words being self-evident once you knew the rest of the word—but more accommodating of un. So while many words from un-american to unworldly received separate entries, Gove and his editors showed little interest in two defining terms of American politics: anticommunism and anti-anticommunism.
An anticommunist was anyone from Senator Joseph McCarthy to Whittaker Chambers to Sidney Hook to Dwight Macdonald who defined their politics in opposition to the Soviet Union and its doctrines. An anti-anticommunist was one who defined his or her politics in opposition to anticommunists. They were anti the antis—just the kind of regressive messiness a lexicographer would prefer to avoid. Nor would Gove’s editors take note of two other coinages that increasingly preoccupied Dwight Macdonald: masscult and midcult.
In 1954, Macdonald separated from his wife, Nancy, then flew to Alabama to expedite a divorce. This brought an end to his increasingly faithless commitments to her and to radical politics. Already, Geoffrey Hellman, whom after a couple of drinks he used to call a Tory, had helped him get a job at the New Yorker.1
Such changes didn’t stop Macdonald from criticizing the New Yorker in an essay he wrote for the Ford Foundation, not to be confused with an essay he wrote criticizing the Ford Foundation in the New Yorker.2 Dwight was still Dwight. One day he was flattering his boss, William Shawn, with an almost teary fan letter, its humble words shivering with gratitude for taking him in and treating him so well. Other days Mr. Shawn, like Henry Luce before him, received from his prickly writer point-by-point denunciations of articles by other writers he had been wrong to publish.3
But he was productive. Now in his fifties, Macdonald transformed himself into a critic at large, a funny, smart decrier of the cultural decline he believed to be rampant in America. One could see it in Fannie Hurst novels, rock ’n’ roll music, automotive design, Life magazine, Norman Rockwell illustrations, pulp mystery novels, Hollywood films, and television comedies. Macdonald specialized in authors and works that enjoyed some claim to being highbrow but, in his view, fell short of their own standards. The heartless mockery he’d once rained down on Henry Wallace found new targets in the overly prosaic Revised Standard Version of the King James Bible and the pompous Great Books Club, both of which the former “revolutionist” attacked in the name of tradition.4
Macdonald had never cared much for religion, but in reviewing the RSV he was distraught that “my cup runneth over” had been retranslated as “my cup overflows.” The Elizabethan cadences of the King James Version had been rewritten, as the translators put it, in “language direct and clear and meaningful to people today.” The new language, Macdonald said, was “also flat, insipid, and mediocre.” Poetic Latinate verses had been toned down, while homelier, direct passages had been poeticized. “If they tone down some strings, they tone up others, adjusting them all to produce a dead monotone.”
Mr. Shawn loved the article, as did many readers. Macdonald’s essay on the Great Books Club was another hit. Published by Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.—itself a symbol of decline in Macdonald’s eyes, as the once-admired British institution was now owned by former U.S. senator William Benton (a true vulgarian in Macdonald’s estimation) and the University of Chicago—the
Great Books were to Macdonald’s eye a more ponderous and commercially compromised version of the Harvard Classics. Edited by Mortimer J. Adler, author of How to Read a Book, whom Macdonald had previously counted as one of the greater philistines around, and Dr. Robert Hutchins, former chancellor of the University of Chicago, the series seemed utterly fatuous to Macdonald, especially as it pretended to extend the shelf lives of classic titles that were still in print.
Macdonald gleefully aired the unintentionally comic boasts of the Great Books’ champions. Clifton Fadiman, an establishment literary critic who served with Henry Seidel Canby on the Book-of-the-Month Club jury, had compared the Great Books subscribers to the monks of early Christendom whose dedication had preserved great remnants of Western civilization through the Dark Ages. Hutchins had called the set “a liberal education” for Americans, on which depended “the fate of our country, and hence of the world.” Nothing, however, drew Macdonald’s withering attention more than Adler’s Syntopicon, which took up two volumes and came with the Great Books set. It was a dictionary of ideas that make up the Western literary tradition, each laboriously cross-indexed to allow their tracking from one great author to the next. The Syntopicon smacked of the gratuitously academic, needlessly classifying bureaucratic-mindedness that Macdonald hated.
The set of books was reductionist and antiliterary, according to Macdonald, showing the editors believed “the classics are not works of art but simply quarries to be worked for Ideas.” The news that the Great Books sold poorly until Britannica’s door-to-door salesmen began pushing them on timid housewives who paid through an installment plan confirmed Macdonald’s worst suspicions about the unholy alliance between commerce and culture.
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