The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Kenyon and Knott themselves had found the pronunciation guidance in Webster’s Second so inadequate to describing current practice that they had developed an entirely separate volume, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English. And a glance at the five concepts gave Gove away. “All usage is relative” (number five) is obviously a far cry from the principles of “best current practice” and “formal platform speech” touted in Webster’s Second.

  Still Gove sought to mark a trail leading from Webster’s Second to Kenyon-Knott’s pronouncing dictionary and finally to Webster’s Third. In this evolution, Merriam-Webster’s pronunciation guidance had become less formal, more American, and it had ceased relying on Webster’s proprietary pronunciation key. But there was another change that Gove failed to mention: the new sense of variety in the spoken language. In Webster’s Third, the sheer number of possible pronunciations would make even the scientifically informed and up-to-date Kenyon-Knott look like Simple Simon.

  In closing, Gove brought his essay back to lexicography in general, which, unlike linguistics, was not a science but “an overpowering art, requiring subjective analysis, arbitrary decisions, and intuitive reasoning. It often uses analogy, precedent, and probability.” Gove then showed something of his true colors in what would become his oft-quoted statement, “But it should have no traffic with guesswork, prejudice, or bias, or with artificial notions of correctness and superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.”

  A dictionary must be “a faithful recorder . . . it cannot expect to be any longer appealed to as an authority.” A long generation of cultural and intellectual change had reshaped the lexicographer’s art. And Gove was the spokesman for the new lexicography: “When the semantic center of gravity appears to have moved far enough,” he wrote, “when the drift of pronunciation is ascertainable, when a new science makes new knowledge and new methods available, then revision of the affected parts of a dictionary becomes the conscientious duty of the lexicographer. It is in the execution of this duty that Merriam-Webster dictionaries have begun a new series suitable to a new age.”

  Chapter 31

  Sometimes less is more, Jacques Barzun thought. In The House of Intellect, he wrote, “Beyond the last flutter of actual or possible significance, pedantry begins.”

  It was often better for a scholar to stop short of exhausting a subject (and his readers) by using less information than was available. Knowledge was not an unlimitable good. Accuracy and completeness were only relative merits. It was even possible for a scholar to make a fair number of errors yet still deserve praise for answering a few large questions correctly. James Parton, the nineteenth-century biographer who had been criticized for minor inaccuracies, came to mind. Barzun quoted Albert J. Nock’s pardon of Parton: “There are qualities that outweigh occasional and trivial inaccuracy, and Parton has them, while the other biographers of Mr. Jefferson, as far as I can see, have not.”1

  James Parton surely read and appreciated Barzun’s indirect defense of his grandfather, whom the president of American Heritage was said to resemble in his love of history. But it could not have occurred to him that he and Barzun would soon both accuse the quintessential American dictionary of not only pedantry but much, much worse. Parton—sometime journalist, Luce alumnus, and World War II air force veteran—was merely interested in buying G. & C. Merriam Company. In 1959, it looked like the perfect investment for American Heritage.

  Parton’s colleague Gerald P. Rosen (who had also run track with Parton at Harvard) went up to Springfield and learned what he could. He interviewed Samuel E. Murray, a former Merriam employee who had been shown the door several years back after trying to organize a syndicate to buy the company. Management had been utterly opposed to selling. Murray still had the list of Merriam’s stockholders and gave it to Rosen. The new president, Gordon J. Gallan, would be more open, Murray thought, to selling the company.

  But that was not Rosen’s impression. After a few days of snooping around Springfield, he concluded that Gallan would “vigorously fight any effort to acquire this company.” And so would, he thought, the Springfield Safe Deposit and Trust Company. The bank had almost a proprietary interest in Merriam, Rosen believed. It acted as executor of the estates of several of Merriam’s trustees, and Gallan was a member of the bank’s board.2

  American Heritage then retained a former Fortune researcher named Sara Springer to gather basic facts on Merriam and the dictionary market. If Merriam was buyable, her findings showed, American Heritage should buy it. The demographic outlook was excellent, and the company was in a position to reap huge profits. What neither Springer nor anyone else could find was a reason Merriam would want to be sold to American Heritage. There were other, more likely courtiers, and even if the company did not sell, its future looked pretty bright.

  More Americans were becoming more educated, and this was unqualifiably good news for the education publishing business. “In view of the upsurge in college enrollments as the large crop of war babies comes of age,” the report said, “sales of dictionaries should increase to keep pace with this expectation.”

  Sales of dictionaries in 1958 totaled $25 million, in Springer’s estimation. They were, according to some, second only to Bibles among all-time bestsellers, but they were more expensive to make. The American College Dictionary had reportedly cost Random House $2 million to make from scratch. The Webster’s New World had reportedly cost $1 million in 1950.

  The market worked well. Bookstores considered dictionaries stock items. Springer had visited Scribner’s and Brentano’s in New York and learned that dictionaries were almost never returned. Also, they presented no overstock problems since copies eventually sold. A dictionary did not lose value at the same rate as many other books, which quickly became old news or last year’s sensation.

  Merriam never released sales figures, so the only information Springer could gather was out of date. Between 1936 and 1949—despite the lingering Depression, paper shortages, and a major war—Merriam had sold four and a half million Collegiate dictionaries, which it claimed were required reading at most American colleges and universities. Its 1947 Pocket Dictionary was an especially big seller with six million sold. And the company was on sound financial footing with enough government securities to cover three times its current liabilities, which, however, were mounting fast with the production of the new unabridged dictionary.

  Merriam was the leader of the industry, the oldest publisher in the game, with the great name in American dictionaries. Its citation files were thought by some to be the most complete in the world. But its management was rather conservative. Despite the increasing size of the education publishing market, in 1957 Merriam had spent less than 5 percent of its gross income on promotion.3

  Parton was not impressed by Sara Springer. “It’s obvious we made a very bad choice in Mrs. Springer, and I’m damned if I know how she managed to survive as a Fortune researcher if this is typical of her work. . . . About the only real value of the report is its slight further evidence that G. and C. Merriam Co. would be a really desirable acquisition if it is indeed available at anything resembling a normal purchase price.”

  He sensed that he still knew very little about how a dictionary was made. “Presumably if we bought a going dictionary concern, we would get reasonably competent management with it or could hire same away from competitors. But what does dictionary management consist of? What determined the difference between a good dictionary and a bad? What special production criteria are involved?”

  And there were major editorial questions. “How big a staff does a dictionary have? What kind of people are they? What do they do? How long does it take? What supporting reference resources are called for? Are there special fees for various specialists?”

  Then, in late 1959, came confirmation that Merriam was, in fact, trying to attract a buyer. Curtis Benjamin, the president of McGraw-Hill and a friend of Parton’s, said that hi
s company had been invited to take a look at Merriam. They passed on it in order to pursue other opportunities. It looked, Parton had said, as if Merriam had very poor top management, and Benjamin commented that this was “certainly so.”5

  A month after the new year, Parton wrote a letter introducing himself to Ingham C. Baker, the largest single stockholder in Merriam. It was his practice to send along a box of American Heritage publications. He did not ask outright to buy Baker’s stocks, but suggested rather vaguely that the futures of American Heritage and Merriam might become aligned, and asked for a meeting to discuss the matter. Baker passed the letter along to Gallan, who responded rather brusquely.

  “Mr. Ingham C. Baker has asked me to acknowledge your letter of February 3. The Directors of G. and C. Merriam Company are not interested in a merger.”6

  Parton wrote back saying that he was ever so sorry that his letter to Baker had been misunderstood. “We are not interested in mergers either,” he wrote to Gallan. “We do have some ideas of possible mutual interest to your company as well as to mine.” The letter closed with Parton asking Gallan to let him know the next time he would be in New York so they could have the pleasure of lunching together.

  In the meantime Parton and others at American Heritage were considering the possibility of approaching all Merriam stockholders simultaneously with a sweeping offer to buy everyone out. But Parton believed the plan had two major disadvantages. The first was the transactional cost of completing a vast number of small buys with no guarantee of gaining a majority position. The second was that it would invite “a serious Gallan counterblast.”7

  In November, Gallan was finally in New York City and available to meet with Parton, who did his best to convince Gallan that his intentions were mild. Writing to him afterward, Parton said, “You were very gracious to pay me a visit yesterday, and I found our chat both pleasant and instructive.” Then he reiterated some basic information about American Heritage, whose annual sales were around $10 million. The company’s products had secondary value in schools and libraries, and this naturally led Parton to think more broadly about educational publishing. Perhaps the next time Parton was in Springfield they could talk again about some kind of joint venture.8

  Parton began working with a team of fixers to find a way to take over Merriam. In the spring, he was lunching with three of them, each one a link to the next and finally to people of influence inside Merriam. The first, Tenison or “Tenny” Newsom, was an investment counselor from Hartford, Connecticut, and he knew the second, Guy Holt, the son of Lucius Holt, who had worked on the 1909 Webster’s and was an assistant editor on the 1934 Webster’s. Scott Stearns, a real estate developer in Springfield with contacts at Merriam, was also there.

  Recalled Parton afterward, “All three struck me as very civilized and intelligent men, but not notably aggressive ones. I came away with the impression that the pursuit of the prize is being conducted in a pretty leisurely fashion.”

  To raise their intensity a little, Parton tried to give the impression that Merriam was only so attractive to American Heritage. He summarized the dictionary market as he understood it. “Merriam is widely regarded as an obsolete and doddering enterprise,” he said. Random House and New World had both intruded on its turf and were hardly suffering as a result. And, now, what was the latest that Parton had heard? That Merriam’s new editor had “embarked on a wildly radical revision of its long-standing concept of how a dictionary should be organized.” Just imagine that.

  “Merriam’s apparent solidity,” Parton concluded, “might really be nothing more than a brittle façade.”9

  But not one of Parton’s lunch partners had until now heard the part about Philip Gove and the dictionary’s new editorial policies. These supposed insiders were shocked that the new unabridged was going to depart radically from the design of the old unabridged. Then one thought led to the next. This business about the radicalness of the new dictionary was, they all thought, a very strong argument to use in favor of selling the company to American Heritage.

  Parton—the onetime assistant to public relations pioneer Edward Bernays and former aide-de-camp to Ira Eakins, the man who sold Churchill on American airpower—had found his sales pitch.

  Chapter 32

  In addition to a lively cast of characters—Betty Grable, Mickey Spillane, Polly Adler, Dwight D. Eisenhower—the story of the making of Webster’s Third came with enough impressive-sounding, gee-whiz facts and figures to be picked up by many a local and national newspaper. The dictionary weighed thirteen and a half pounds and featured 100,000 new words and senses, a massive amount of new language that Merriam called “the greatest vocabulary explosion in history.” While new words were being added, a quarter million entries were subtracted, and all remaining entries were revised. “Every line of it is new,” Gove wrote in the preface. With 450,000 total entries, the new dictionary contained 100,000 quotations from more than 14,000 authors. The foundation for Merriam-Webster’s lexicography comprised some 10 million citations, and the new edition had cost $3.5 million to make.

  Gove’s preface to Webster’s Third said it had taken 757 editor-years to make the dictionary, while another promotional piece emphasized the number of outside experts, 200, and advanced degrees held by members of the Merriam staff: 33 doctorates and 62 master’s degrees.1 By the numbers, the story offered plenty of material for a nice article on a newspaper’s front page or to lead off its business section, its figures to be ably recalled by future tour guides as they escorted visitors around the Springfield offices of G. & C. Merriam Company. If anything, the jolly tone of these particular numbers understated the dreary intensity of the work. In a letter to Merriam, one chemistry consultant lamented that over six long years, while also serving on a college faculty, he had reviewed 12,790 definitions, a task that had involved approximately 250,000 slips of paper.

  The initial press release was also funny, and it provided conflict with its news of a dictionary embracing informal English and standing up for that quintessential ne’er-do-well ain’t. What actually sent the story into overdrive, however, was a remarkable string of mistakes.

  The press release—which had been read and approved by President Gordon J. Gallan—so abbreviated the dictionary’s entry for ain’t that it amounted to a misquotation. From the usage note written into the first sense, “used orally by many educated speakers,” it left out that ain’t was “disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech.” And the press release failed to show that a substandard label was attached to the second sense. Compounding these errors, the release said that “ain’t gets official recognition at last.”

  So, not only was ain’t being defended, perhaps even recommended for the oral use of educated speakers, the press release also suggested that this was the first time ain’t was recognized by a dictionary. But none of this was true. It was not being defended and it had been in many dictionaries before. Also, by blurring the distinction between a word’s appearance in the dictionary and its status as standard English, the press release invited critics to blame Webster’s Third for “recognizing” every last silly, awkward, dialectal, jargonish, or slang word it provided an entry for. All of these mistaken claims tended in one direction, implying that Webster’s Third was much more permissive than it actually was, and that all other dictionaries, by comparison, were much more censorious than they actually were.

  This is how the newspaper controversy over Webster’s Third began. The first publication to accuse Merriam-Webster of being linguistically radical was its own press release. By hiring out the work of announcing its dictionary to PR professionals, President Gallan and Editor Gove had lost control of saying what the new dictionary stood for. Instead of presenting a united front of America’s learned class, they had circulated a saucy and sloppy notice (with more than a couple typos) designed not to command respect but to catch a news editor’s eye. In this way the dictionary launch was highly succes
sful, but at the price of significant embarrassment to Merriam. For obvious reasons one cannot imagine Robert Munroe or Asa Baker and William Allan Neilson—all of whom took seriously the public image of Merriam—stumbling like this.

  One also wonders what the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, would have said. By his lights, the first question to ask in building a PR campaign was not, What are you selling? It was, What do people actually want?

  In the case of dictionaries, the answer was clear: the knowledge to improve understanding and avoid mistakes in meaning, usage, spelling, and pronunciation. Gallan and others knew this from market research they had read and discussed. The dictionary consumer was conservative. Now, what was this press release selling? An extreme, almost comic form of linguistic liberalism, a license to use ain’t and the right to sound like a Mickey Spillane character.

  It was no wonder, then, that newspaper reporters glommed on to this part of the story. “The word ain’t ain’t a grammatical mistake anymore,” said a hammy United Press International wire story picked up by the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. “This is certainly a far cry from the dictionary’s 1934 edition,” said the Washington Sunday Star, “which bluntly—and correctly, in our view—brands ain’t as a ‘dialectal’ and ‘illiterate’ expression employed by people on the fringe of polite society.”

  Headline writers gleefully (and very predictably) seized on the word in question. “Saying Ain’t Ain’t Wrong,” said the Tribune; “It Ain’t Good,” said the Washington Sunday Star; “Ain’t Nothing Wrong with the Use of Ain’t,” said the Louisville Times; “Ain’t Still Has Tain’t,” said the Binghamton Sunday Press; “There’s Them as Ain’t Using Ain’t,” said the Jacksonville Journal. Accompanying articles highlighted the news that, as the Los Angeles Herald-Express put it, though rather positively, “The word ain’t has at long last come into its own.”2