The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Before writing any drafts, he habitually gathered a formidable pile of notes and clippings. Once, as a younger writer trying to figure out how to organize an essay, he’d been told to divide his notes into aspects of the subject, putting like with like, and then write his essay by going from one aspect to the next. It sounded way too simple at the time, but this seems to have been the method he followed thirty-six years after quitting Fortune.2

  The basic Luce approach of turning simple, telling facts into a little narrative, all tending to a single idea of the story, worked extremely well for him. This nonanalytic, classically journalistic approach was dressed up and made provocative by Macdonald’s man-of-the-world pose and his caustic, condescending humor. His long-maturing style of the journalist cum man of letters proved to be profoundly adaptive as he took on Webster’s Third and used the dictionary to continue his siege on middlebrow culture. But what also made this essay memorable was the breathtaking extremity of its final judgment.

  Webster’s Third, Macdonald started, told us a great deal about changes in American culture since the publication of Webster’s Second. The main difference between the two dictionaries was that most of the words that were labeled slang, colloquial, erroneous, incorrect, or illiterate in Webster’s Second “are accepted in the 1961 edition as perfectly normal, honest, respectable citizens.”3 It was not true that a word’s mere inclusion in the dictionary without a label made it respectable in all contexts, but by the standards of the New York Times, Life, and the Atlantic, Macdonald’s characterization sounded altogether measured.

  Since 1934, he then stated, “a revolution has taken place in the study of English grammar and usage, a revolution that probably represents an advance in scientific method but that has certainly had an unfortunate effect on such nonscientific activities as the teaching of English and the making of dictionaries. . . . This scientific revolution has meshed gears with a trend toward permissiveness, in the name of democracy, that is debasing our language.”

  Others—BusinessWeek, Bergen Evans, et al.—had noted that linguistics had influenced Webster’s Third, but Macdonald fused this insight with the main complaint against Gove’s dictionary, that it ignored the question of usage and failed to make “discriminations.” “The very word has acquired a Jim Crow flavor,” said Macdonald, before arriving at the underlying politics: “It is assumed that true democracy means a majority is right.”

  There was little of the bulging forehead vein or the clenched fist to Macdonald’s personality on the page: It always appeared interested in officially serious, intellectual matters but was happy to show its own well-founded snobbery about, well, stupid things, such as the anti-intellectual premise of majority rule. It was Fortune magazine meets H. L. Mencken—but with only a smidgen of Mencken’s linguistic learning.

  No one better described the making of Webster’s Third than Macdonald in the most reportorial portions of his review, and, after appearing to give it a more or less fair hearing, no one damned it more completely. The essay was lively and fun even, a great accomplishment given that it took up more than twenty pages of magazine. The piece was also intriguing and high-minded, but never academic. Not deeply informed about key principles, it was, in a word, middlebrow.

  An admirer of Samuel Johnson, Macdonald freely opined on standard lexicographical practice, which “assumed there was such a thing as correct English” and that it was the lexicographer’s job to decide what it was. This was a great simplification and wrong in many well-known particulars, but Macdonald cited the telling example of William Allan Neilson, who had, he noted, included many homely words to which he attached warning labels. Gove took a different approach, which Macdonald described by quoting the Word Study article, where Gove said that a dictionary “should have no traffic . . . with artificial notions of correctness and superiority.” Gove, Macdonald explained, was “sympathetic to the school of language study that has become dominant since 1934. It is sometimes called structural linguistics and, sometimes, rather magnificently, Modern Linguistic Science.”

  Not a few treatments of this controversy describe the main drama as that of a scholarly but politically tone-deaf dictionary set upon by a pack of growling media wolves—for which there is much evidence. But in two main instances the words that inspired the most heated disputation—the stimulus that preceded the reaction—came from Merriam itself. First, the press release, which had been seen and approved at Merriam, misquoted the dictionary’s entry for ain’t and broadcast the notion that a word’s appearance in the dictionary equaled its endorsement by the dictionary. And now, the idea that Webster’s Third embodied the principles of structural linguistics was circulating and being used against Webster’s Third, with the help of Philip Gove’s Word Study article.

  Said Macdonald about structural linguistics: “Dr. Gove gives its basic concepts as: 1. Language changes constantly. 2. Change is normal. 3. Spoken language is the language. 4. Correctness rests upon usage. 5. All usage is relative.”

  Of course, Gove was quoting English Language Arts, but Macdonald had collected some good string on the linguistics angle. He drew connections between structural linguistics and the National Council of Teachers of English and even Charles C. Fries. Gove himself had opened this door, but it was still far from clear how much of the weirdness of Webster’s Third was really attributable to structural linguistics.

  Macdonald himself volunteered that he shared the new dictionary’s impatience with the old rules on shall and will and who versus whom. And Gove may have been using the same language as Bloomfield and Fries when he chose the labels nonstandard and substandard, but he was acting as his own man when he rewrote the defining style for Webster’s Third. The absence of capital letters certainly derived from some overinterpreted notion about words not being identical to their appearance in print—a lesson Gove definitely could have picked up from reading linguistics—but the frustrating policy of excluding capital letters from a dictionary and then adding each and every time the laborious usage label usu. cap must surely be blamed on Gove and not his reading habits. Also, it was simply not the case, as the linguist Raven McDavid later pointed out, that Gove himself was a structural linguist—a question Macdonald might have thought to ask after reading the Word Study article. Gove was, however, a rather advanced example of the educated layman that Bloomfield and Fries had been trying to bring around to the scientific view of language. And with Gove they had succeeded.

  “The new school of linguistics,” Macdonald said, “is non-historical if not anti-historical.” This was simply false. Bloomfield credited historical linguistics as one of two major streams of language study that had formed contemporary linguistics, and Fries was nothing if not painstaking with the history of usage. Furthermore, one of the tools that helped make modern linguistics so impressive was its use of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was, of course, organized on historical principles. Last, and most important, Webster’s Third itself was not ahistorical. Its definitions, Macdonald did not seem to realize, were historically ordered, with the oldest coming first.

  Macdonald wasn’t all wrong about linguistics making Webster’s Third into an especially present-minded dictionary. When Philip Gove had explained to the Editorial Board that Webster’s Third would be more up-to-date than Webster’s Second, he cited the criticism of linguists who pointed out that new dictionaries were too conservative to describe the usage of their own times. But, again, the fact that linguistics was in the air doesn’t explain all that was done with it. In the late 1940s, Frederic Cassidy and Albert Marckwardt—both candidates for Gove’s job, and both students of Charles C. Fries—had published a completely inoffensive grammar, complete with the usual linguistic categories and a prohibition on the use of ain’t, even while citing Fries’s American English Grammar as the main piece of research underlying their work. But Gove was too proud and impolitic to camouflage his principles in the policies of Webster’s Third, the greatest accompli
shment of his life.

  Macdonald accused the editors of lacking common sense in their treatment of pronunciations: “The editors of 2 found it necessary to give only two pronunciations for berserk and two for lingerie, but 3 seems to give twenty-five for the first and twenty-six for the second.” This Macdonald connected to the second English Language Arts principle—spoken language is the language—and asked, “Does anybody except a Structural Linguist need to know that much?”

  The pronunciation editors had listened to speech samples from Helen Hayes, Adlai Stevenson, Lionel Trilling, Allen Dulles, Jonas Salk, and many others. And they had adapted the International Phonetic Alphabet, but the result was not the 20 percent change once agreed upon at Merriam. At that meeting with Robert Munroe, among others, playing the skeptic, Gove and Artin had not mentioned any ambition to present a vast array of pronunciations, in the cases of some words many times more than Webster’s Second had presented. Tallying all the variations listed for each discrete sound that makes up a fortiori, one scholar claimed to have counted 132 possible pronunciations in Webster’s Third. The sheer numbers were laughable and made finding a suitable pronunciation maddening, while the absence of a pronunciation key at the bottom of the page also made the pronunciations more difficult to decipher.

  “Things get quite lively when you trip over a schwa,” said Macdonald about the upside-down e. “Bird is given straight as bûrd in 2, but in 3” there were three possible pronunciations, all using a schwa. “This last may be boid, but I’m not sure.” Macdonald must have recognized this classic New York City pronunciation when he tripped over it, but that didn’t stop him from playing the point for laughs.

  Much more so than Follett, Macdonald achieved a cheerful eloquence when listing the little things he liked and disliked. “No great harm is done if a word is labeled slang until its pretensions to being standard have been thoroughly tested. . . . Both 2 and 3 list such women’s-magazine locutions as galore, scads, scrumptious, and too-too, but only 2 labels them slang.”

  Macdonald had read Gove’s letter to the Times, so he should have realized the illustrative quotations were intended to describe usage. In the cases of galore, scads, scrumptious, and too-too, Gove’s method of using quotations to indicate usage status was, actually, rather effective. Galore, for instance (which, pace Macdonald, was labeled colloquial, not slang in Webster’s Second), had two quotations, one describing the word just as Macdonald had (“bargains galore”) and one with a rather different feel (“Philadelphia, which boasts history galore”) from Lewis Mumford, the well-known writer who certainly rated as an educated user of standard English. For someone wondering whether galore was too informal for one occasion or another, the range of evidence was instructive.

  Reading Macdonald’s essay, one might think there was a contest afoot between him and Webster’s Third over who knew more about Freudian psychology or Stalinism or abstract expressionism. Macdonald cited Fichte and Kant to argue that the definition for ego was wanting, while noting that action painting had not been entered though abstract expressionism had, which was not really a criticism. Action painting had fallen out of usage, as Macdonald surely knew, and abstract expressionism had persevered as the preferred term for the art of Pollock and company. Mentioning the matter only showed that Macdonald was hip to the language of modern art.

  The entry for McCarthyism was smug, Macdonald thought, and perhaps it was, but it captured how the term was used to describe “indiscriminate allegations esp. on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.” That the definer didn’t realize he would have to come up with a definition to satisfy Dwight Macdonald’s tormented anticommunism was really not the definer’s fault. Such jabs were among Macdonald’s most enjoyable, and most unfair, passages. Good journalism (like kitsch) predigested what might otherwise seem complicated; the downside was that such facility turns difficult judgments into simple matters of prejudice.

  But while Macdonald played the snob, he also demonstrated that he didn’t always read the dictionary carefully. “There is no mass culture,” he wrote, “and the full entry for the noun masses is ‘pl. of mass.’ ” Actually, under the third sense of the second entry, Gove’s dictionary very ably gave the Marxist-flavored usage of masses, complete with quotations from Harry Warfel and Henry Seidel Canby and a cross-reference to proletariat. Under the adjectival entry for mass, it was true, mass culture was not listed, but the sense was defined and given in mass psychology and mass hysteria and approximated in separate entries such as mass man.

  Knowed, Macdonald complained, was given as the past tense for know, which truly would have been absurd. Knowed, however, was listed as dialectal variant under know and presented in its own alphabetical position at knowed. But in the separate stub entry Macdonald had read past the cross-reference, printed in small capitals, and so thought he was reading the full definition.

  The third edition “gives disinterested as a synonym of uninterested,” said Macdonald. But, again, he had misread a cross-reference as a definition. The word uninterested did appear in the definition for disinterested, in small caps, to instruct the reader to compare one term with the other—to help the reader avoid confusing the two.

  Macdonald did present a convincing case that Webster’s Third was guilty of what he called gnostomania or scholar’s knee. In addition to giving twenty-six pronunciations for lingerie, the dictionary expended thirty-four pages listing words starting with un- and gave definitions for every number up to a hundred, each one reading as if it had been written by Leonard Bloomfield, who had used the example of two as a word that could be defined so long as you knew what one was. In Webster’s Third, sixty was “one more than fifty-nine,” and sixty-one was “one more than sixty,” and so on. Macdonald did not seem to notice, however, that Webster’s Second had given identical definitions for numbers up to twenty, though its editors had the good sense to stop there. Gove apparently liked the principle so much he extended it for another eighty entries. “Pedantry,” wrote Macdonald, “is not a synonym for scholarship.”

  Errors aside, Macdonald’s review was compelling, and it helpfully illuminated the dictionary’s production with neat reportorial findings, such as that Gove claimed to have saved eighty pages by minimizing the use of commas and that staff reading had failed to produce a sufficient number of citations for the most common words in English, leading Gove to convene a set of backup readers for all the most obvious words.

  With the help of research, Macdonald sailed past many earlier misunderstandings, such as the story of ain’t and the basic reason behind the deletion of encyclopedic material, but as he entered less charted waters, he was, indeed, a bit lost. If the piece had ended three or four pages short of the end, the reader might have thought that Macdonald liked a few things about Webster’s Third but that his complaints far outnumbered his compliments. In short, an entertainingly negative review, but not a wholesale rejection. And because of Macdonald’s sometimes lighthearted style the negativity might have seemed attributable to the reviewer’s personal biases.

  But Macdonald did not stop there. He returned to his thesis: that structural linguistics was bad for language instruction and bad for dictionaries. It was superior, perhaps, to the scholarship of old, but “as a scientific discipline structural linguistics can have no truck with values or standards.” Its only concern was “the Facts.” If popular usage paved over older distinctions, structural linguistics was of no help. And “if the language is allowed to shift too rapidly, without challenge from teachers and lexicographers, then the special character of the American people is blurred, since it tends to lose its past.”

  Just then a hush came over the page, as Macdonald reminded the reader of what Webster’s Third had done with knowed (or, rather, what Macdonald thought it had done with knowed). A dictionary that described the language on the basis of citation slips and other evidence, he said, was powerless to stop people from mispronouncing invidious once the mispronunciation
became popular. Linguistic decline became inexorable unless people insisted on standards—such as those enumerated by the “magisterial Fowler,” whom he had cited earlier. Teachers, lexicographers, and writers needed to insist that old niceties be observed. “They might look up Ulysses’ famous defense of conservatism in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.” This moving but profoundly pessimistic speech Macdonald—the onetime Marxist, on-and-off anti-American, and longtime Anglophile—quoted at length.

  “The Heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre

  Observe degree, priority and place

  Insisture, course, proportion, season, form

  Office and custom in all line of order . . .

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets

  In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

  Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

  And make a sop of all this solid globe

  Strength should be lord of imbecility

  And the rude son should strike his father dead.

  Force should be right, or rather right and wrong. . . .

  should lose their names, and so should justice too.

  Then every thing includes itself in power,

  power into will, will into appetite

  And appetite, a universal wolf,

  So doubly seconded with will and power,

  Must make perforce a universal prey

  and, last, eat up himself. . . .”

  This was what Philip Gove had wrought, said Dwight Macdonald. In Webster’s Third, he and his fellow lexicographers had “untuned the string, made a sop of the solid structure of English, and encouraged the language to eat up himself.”