The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Editorial writers also weighed in before the week was out. The Toronto Globe and Mail called Webster’s Third to account for “the death of meaning” and complained that while the political air grew heavy with the threat of nuclear destruction, the new dictionary “will not assist men to speak truly to other men.” Webster’s Third may, however, “prepare us for that future it could help to hasten. In the caves, no doubt, a grunt will do.” Three days later, the Washington Sunday Star was also warning that the new dictionary of Sputnik, beatnik, and many other new words would fail to fortify us against the likes of Nikita Khrushchev and worse, the likes of Allen Ginsberg, “who are developing a style of writing that may best be described as literary anarchy.”

  The first part of a speech act, according to Leonard Bloomfield, is the stimulus. The second part is the reaction. In this case, the stimulus was a dictionary saying it had thrown out the old rules. The reaction was swift, loud, and cackling.

  Merriam-Webster sent out another press release correcting the earlier statements on ain’t, which mainly inspired newspaper critics to look for other entries to single out for abuse. The reigning opinion on Webster’s Third hardly changed at all.

  The Sunday New York Times gave exasperated notice of several other usages cited in Webster’s Third: orientate, upsurge, hipster, dig (as in, to understand), jazz (“Spouted all the scientific jazz at him”—Pete Martin), beef up, and finalize. The editorial swapped these terms for more natural choices in its own prose: “In orientating themselves toward the upsurge of new words, G. and C. Merriam Company . . . faced this puzzler: Were there enough hipsters to dig all the new jazz or would the old bop do for a while?”

  Days later an article in BusinessWeek showed that Gove and Gallan were unaware of the beast they had awoken. Gallan was quoted, sounding boastful, “We might make more money selling beer, but we have a heavy responsibility to the English-speaking world.” Gove, too, cooperated with the article and sounded the first of many democratic notes, saying language was “an instrument of the people.” The magazine reported that the new dictionary had, in the name of science and linguistics, departed from prescriptivist tradition.

  Another P-word was quickly introduced. The Saturday Review commented: “It would seem that permissiveness now on the wane in child-rearing has caught up with the dictionary makers.”

  On October 4, Dwight Macdonald wrote to Philip Gove to say he was writing a review of Webster’s Third and had a number of questions. These included whether there were other unabridged dictionaries to which Webster’s Third might be compared, what were the sales for Webster’s Second, and why did the Third drop the gazetteer and the biographical dictionary. He wanted to know more about the principles behind Webster’s Third and about the process of making a dictionary. Gove invited Macdonald to Springfield for a visit. They had a long, civil discussion and Gove gave Macdonald a copy of his recently published Word Study article containing the five principles of linguistics that NCTE had endorsed.3

  On October 12, the New York Times issued a call for Webster’s Third to be remade. In the bitter history of dictionary criticism, few passages are more well known than the opening paragraph of this editorial.

  “A passel of double-domes at the G. and C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass., have been confabbing and yakking for twenty-seven years—which is not intended to infer that they have not been doing plenty of work—and now they have finalized Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, a new edition of that swell and esteemed word book.”

  And then the Times explained itself: “Those who regard the foregoing paragraph as acceptable English prose will find that the new Webster’s is just the dictionary for them. The words in the paragraph are listed in the new work with no suggestion that they are anything but standard.”

  Webster’s, said the Times, had “surrendered to the permissive school,” which already had been undermining the teaching of English. But the problem went far beyond mere classroom instruction. “Webster’s is more than just a publishing venture: For generations it has been so widely regarded as a peerless authority on American English as to become almost a public institution.”

  The editorial, which was widely reprinted and commented on in other newspapers, closed by calling for a return to Webster’s Second. “We suggest to the Webster editors that they not throw out the printing plates of the Second Edition. There is likely to be a continuing demand for it; and perhaps that edition can be made the platform for a new start—admittedly long, arduous, and costly. But a new start is needed.”

  James Parton immediately made copies and sent one to James Bulkley, a well-connected lawyer in Springfield who was trying to purchase Merriam stock for American Heritage. “This is a terrible black eye for Merriam,” Parton wrote, “and confirms the worries about the big new dictionary which I expressed to you several months ago when we first got acquainted.

  “Just what the financial results of this severe condemnation will be, I cannot assess. Conceivably it might knock a major hole in Merriam’s business; certainly the competition can be counted on to show this editorial to every library and every scholar in America. It is a most unfortunate development.

  “On the plus side, however, it may serve to bolster your case in approaching major stockholders by providing overwhelming evidence of the incompetence of the present Merriam management.”5

  Life magazine, with a circulation in the low millions, entered the fray two weeks later, calling Webster’s Third “a non-word deluge.” Webster’s “has now all but abandoned any effort to distinguish between good and bad usage—between the King’s English, say, and the fishwife’s.” The popular Luce publication then faulted Webster’s Third for including irregardless, the popular suffix -wise (memorably used not long after this by Jack Lemmon in The Apartment: “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise”), the suffix -ize, the dialectal variant heighth, and hain’t, which Life called a “hayseed” variation on ain’t. According to Life, Webster’s Third had even approved enormity as a synonym for enormousness. The article closed with a nod to Webster’s Second, a copy of which the editors said they would keep “around awhile for little matters of style, good English, winning at Scrabble and suchwise.”

  After the botched handling of ain’t, Webster’s Third was being condemned for including any and all words its critics didn’t like, as if the dictionary were responsible for their existence in the first place. In Life magazine’s complaints about hain’t and heighth, Webster’s Third was treated as culpable even for including words explicitly labeled dialectal. But in constantly evoking Webster’s Second to express their revulsion for Webster’s Third, critics tended to expose the full range of their ignorance. Orientate, upsurge, finalize, and the suffix -wise were all included in Webster’s Second, and none were so labeled there to suggest an inferior status.

  Claiming to be astonished by the Times’ parody of Merriam as a passel of double-domes who had been yakking and confabbing for twenty-seven years, Gove, in a letter to the editor, called the rhetorical maneuver a “monstrosity.” Such an artificial jumble, he indignantly complained, could just as easily have been assembled using materials from Webster’s Second. And it “obscures the fact that there are many different degrees of standard usage which cannot be distinguished by status labels.” Also, said Gove, the Times had failed to examine the quotations in Webster’s Third, which at least gave one “a little of the feeling that surrounds a word by quoting it in context.”6

  Some of this was true but, alas, not interesting, and some of it was neither true nor interesting. Gove had failed, in his preface to Webster’s Third and elsewhere, to explain that his dictionary’s illustrative quotations were partly intended to describe usage. Then again, soft-pedaling this line may have been a strategic decision, for the inquiring mind who looked to see if the quotations effectively characterized usage levels would have learned that often they did not. The only quotat
ion under confabbing was a Saul Bellow usage—“I would see them confabbing in the shed”—that hardly contained enough context to suggest the word’s frequently humorous and dismissive flavor. The entry for double-dome included an even less revealing quotation: “had demonstrated his machine to scores of scientific double-domes.” To understand that both these quotations achieved their effects by mixing standard language and slang, the reader had to be able to label the words himself.

  Gove had erred on the side of minimizing use of the slang label, and having dropped the colloquial label entirely, there remained no obvious way to acknowledge, for the reader’s sake, informal subtleties such as the playful use of confabbing and double-domes in these illustrative quotations. Here one could also see how Gove’s instructions to his readers to look for slang words in standard contexts actually made it harder to know a word’s status from the company it kept. The unexpressed lesson to be taken from the quotations for confabbing and double-domes was one much favored by Gove but not very helpful: that a word may look like slang in some contexts but not in others. This was true, but it also looked like a way for the lexicographer to throw up his hands and say, “Well, it depends,” which was, finally, useless to demonstrating that Webster’s Third took usage status seriously.

  Where Gove did score points was in discovering when his critics had simply failed to examine the entries they had complained about, which happened with amusing frequency. Irregardless, Gove pointed out in a letter to Life magazine, was also included in Webster’s Second. Both dictionaries had, in fact, given the redundantly cased dimwitticism its due: The Second had labeled it “erroneous” or “humorous,” while the Third labeled it (in its always detached manner) “nonstandard.” Enormity, Gove said, was simply not given as a synonym for enormousness in Webster’s Third. And while holding fast to their beloved Webster’s Second, the editors at Life should have known that normalcy and the -ize suffix, which they were so upset to find included in Webster’s Third, were also to be found in Webster’s Second.

  Merriam thus won back some points it had lost earlier, but it never really played to win. The strategy pursued by Gove and Merriam was to minimize direct combat, as when Gove made nice in his letter to the Times, saying, “We plan to continue reading and marking the Times as the number one exhibit of good standard contemporary cultivated English.” He would not show the New York Times or Life magazine the contempt he had revealed to his daughter’s schoolteacher or the Merriam salesman who dared to misuse scientific in his presence. After all, the Times and Life commanded huge audiences and were in a position to affect sales.

  Gove came closer to showing his contrary side in presentations to such minor bodies as the English Lunch Club in Boston and the nearby Monson Rotary Club. Here in the semiprivacy of local news coverage Gove called the New York Times–led criticism of his dictionary “nitwitted” and complained of “critics whose linguistic notions of propriety were formed three or four decades ago.” But this was not the brazen new editor who had questioned whether Webster’s Third would be literally Webster’s, actually new, in fact international, or even a dictionary as such.

  Saying Webster’s Second had dated more rapidly “than any unabridged dictionary ever produced,” Gove nevertheless described Webster’s Third as a clear successor volume. This did not, however, even gel with the preface for Webster’s Third, where he did not waste a comma to say that “prescriptive and canonical definitions have not been taken over nor have recommendations been followed unless confirmed by independent investigation of usage borne out by genuine citations.”7

  The only alternative to downplaying the differences between his dictionary and Webster’s Second was direct combat, in which Gove would have had to clearly and loudly label the statements of his detractors as humorous but erroneous, and this hesitation to forthrightly battle the know-it-alls seems to have been rooted in his editorial principles. In theory (though not always in practice), Philip Gove had long rejected the kind of self-assertive linguistic authority needed to teach these naughty critics a lesson. Appealing baldly to his own standing as a dictionary editor and thus some kind of all-knowing authority on language was inimical to his most basic beliefs. Instead, he wrote officious letters to critical publications, letters that always ran several pages long, listing countless citations in defense of some faintly etched point thoroughly bleached of any humor or zing.

  In dropping colloquial and replacing the judgmental categories of Webster’s Second with labels such as nonstandard and substandard, Gove, for all his populist gestures, had made it harder for dictionary users to know what Webster’s Third was saying. His own hesitation to play the grammar cop on words like ain’t had resulted in an oddly worded, ambiguous-sounding treatment for the most famous example of a vulgar, illiterate word in the English language. And now this same hesitation to speak from authority—along with his obligations to defend his company’s reputation—was inhibiting his responses.

  It was also emboldening his critics. From the erroneous press release to the hyperventilating doomsayers to the public spanking from the New York Times, the story of ain’t was proving rich, as in “high in entertainment . . . strongly amusing,” and even more so when it was disclosed that the now-infamous entry for ain’t had been written by Gove himself.

  Chapter 33

  Bergen Evans was lying in a hospital bed when he read the Life magazine editorial pasting Merriam-Webster for its handling of irregardless, enormity, the use of like where rule favors as, and for blurring the distinction between imply and infer. It made him angry. He continued reading, pen in hand, and counted.1

  Evans was the co-author with his sister Cornelia of A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, which took a hard line on irregardless (“there is no such word”) but expressed liberal scientific principle in its acceptance of the conjunction like in “You don’t know Nellie like I do.” The three chief sources for this book were the OED, the seven-volume grammar of Otto Jespersen, and the works of Charles C. Fries. The Evanses acknowledged the usual distinction between imply and infer (“The speaker implies; the hearer infers”), while observing that distinguished writers such as Milton and James Mill had violated the rule. Their article on ain’t—like many “dictionaries,” the Evanses’ book freely used ordinary prose in its entries—discussed its nonstandard status in almost all uses, but mentioned that “a few bold spirits” had adopted the word to skip past the awkwardness of Am I not? and Aren’t I?

  In this and other ways, the language was becoming less stuffy. “Forty years ago it was considered courteous to use formal English in speaking to strangers, implying they were solemn and important people. Today it is considered more flattering to address strangers as if they were one’s intimate friends. This is a polite lie, of course; but it is today’s good manners. Modern usage encourages informality wherever possible and reserves formality for very few occasions.”2

  On this particular occasion, Bergen read the whole issue of Life and counted all the words and meanings not in Webster’s Second. His tally came to forty-four. And he determined that the editors of Life were not his friends.

  Wilson Follett was not his friend, either. The literature professor had, a year earlier, reviewed and damned the Evanses’ Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage in the Atlantic, which had magnanimously allowed Bergen Evans to publish a full rejoinder one month later.3

  Follett had begun by complaining that “linguistic scholarship, once an encouragement to the most exacting definitions and standards of workmanship, has for some time been dedicating itself to the abolition of standards.” For a telling illustration of this woeful truth, said Follett, one need only examine the Evanses’ Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage.

  The heart of Follett’s review was a list, filling almost an entire magazine column, of usages tolerated by the Evanses that did not deserve the name of good English. It might have been taken from Sterling Leonard’s lists of disputable
expressions that contemporary educated people increasingly found acceptable. The Evanses had countenanced such usages as He is taller than me (me instead of I in the objective case); the reason is because (faulted for redundancy); neither of them had their tickets (neither must be construed as singular, according to Follett); if one loses his temper (for consistency, instead of if one loses one’s temper); back of (as an adjective to mean behind but considered vulgar); between each house (between must always describe a relation of two things); he failed, due to carelessness (due, an adjective, being misused as an adverb). It was, in other words, a list of commonplace English, much of which could even be found in professionally edited publications.

  Follett scored more points in asking, as few linguists ever did, what positive lessons could be derived from more complete evidence on usage. “Is it not one of the shames of modern scholarship that it has so little to say for what is really good, what is best, and so much to say about what is merely allowable or defensible?” Even if linguistic scholarship could show that like was widely used as a conjunction, as in “You don’t know Nellie like I do,” it refused to show an interest in whether it was better to say, “You don’t know Nellie as I do” or “the way I do.” The argument from usage, indeed, yielded a binary distinction between usages that can be evidenced and usages that cannot, while ignoring on scientific grounds the kind of thinking that led to preferences for one form over another.

  Evans fought crankiness with enthusiasm. He evoked the example of Samuel Johnson, whose idealistic plan to fix the language had given way to an understanding that (in Johnson’s inimitable words) “to enchain syllables and to lash the wind are equally undertakings of pride unwilling to measure its desires by its strengths.” After eight long years of “sluggishly tracking the alphabet,” Johnson said he had come to understand that lexicographers and grammarians “do not form, but register the language.” Johnson, commented Evans, had begun as a “medieval pedant” and emerged as a “modern scientist.”