Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Reviewers attacked Webster’s Third in doom-laden terms partly because they feared that the linguistic principles corrupting English teaching had also tainted the dictionary. Some thought their forebodings were justified when editor-in-chief Philip Gove wrote an article for the October 1961 issue of Word Study ominously titled “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography.”

  Gove’s article did not in fact contain much that should have troubled traditionalists. In it he concludes that modern linguistics has not had much impact on dictionary making so far. It has not affected spelling, which has been fixed for English since the eighteenth century. Definitions, the main reason why monolingual dictionaries exist, have been only marginally affected, mainly through the redefining of a handful of grammatical terms. The biggest impact on Webster’s Third has been in the area of pronunciation. In an effort to represent the country’s multiple pronunciations with greater accuracy, the dictionary has introduced a new pronunciation key based on the technical alphabet used by linguists (called the International Phonetic Alphabet).

  Gove’s critics, however, were not focused on specifics. What really worried them was the editor-in-chief’s attitude. Although Gove argued that modern linguistics had hardly influenced the dictionary at all, he made it clear that he believed in its general principles. He closes the Word Study article by admitting that lexicography is not yet a science. It is more of an art, requiring “subjective analysis, arbitrary decisions, and intuitive reasoning.” Still, that’s no excuse for intellectual sloppiness. Lexicography “should have no traffic with guesswork, prejudice, or bias or with artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.” He adds, “If the dictionary should neglect the obligation to act as a faithful recorder and interpreter of usage,… it cannot expect to be any longer appealed to as an authority.”12 Usage purists who had relied on the grammatical judgments in Webster’s Second vehemently disagreed.

  Gove was an unlikely candidate for linguistic radicalism. Like Noah Webster, he descended from a long line of respectable New Englanders. He was born in New Hampshire in 1902 and grew up there. At the age of sixteen Gove enrolled in Dartmouth College, majoring in English. As some reviewers later noticed, his own usage was exemplary. Gove’s 1946 letter of application to Merriam reveals that he was one of a small minority of Americans in the 1940s who bothered to make the distinction between first person shall/should and second and third person will/would. The letter opens with the sentence, “I should like to know whether there is an opportunity for me to go to work for your company.” Even Strunk and White could not have asked for a more meticulous style. Nonetheless, as a dictionary editor, he accepted other speaking styles as equally valid.13

  After earning a master’s degree at Harvard, Gove began a career as a college teacher that included fifteen years of directing the freshman English program at New York University. At the same time he worked toward, and eventually gained, a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia. He spent several years collecting material on the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson before ultimately deciding to write his dissertation on the topic of imaginary voyages in literature.

  With the start of World War II, Gove joined the navy. When he returned to civilian life after the war, he began to contemplate a career change away from teaching. One of the companies he queried was Merriam. Although his years of research on Johnson didn’t result in a dissertation, he had learned quite a bit about the process of crafting a dictionary. Merriam hired Gove in 1946 as an assistant editor. Five years later, the company asked him to take on the task of overseeing the third edition of their unabridged dictionary.

  Gove’s idea that the dictionary should act as a faithful recorder of actual usage is not much different from Webster’s often repeated maxim that grammar books and dictionaries should be based on the language, not the other way around, but Webster’s dictionary was by this time very different from his original book. By 1951, all radical notions about language use had long since been expunged from its pages. The dictionary had grown into a bastion of conventional American speech and Gove’s point of view now appeared to be an abrupt break with tradition.

  * * *

  As the controversy over the new dictionary gathered steam, the Merriam Company—astounded at first by the outpouring of disapproval—belatedly decided that a response was in order. A starchy letter from Gove appeared in the November 5 New York Times. He expresses astonishment at the slangy opening of the paper’s recent editorial, “in which you pounce on nine words out of 450,000 to announce that we have been confabbing and yakking … to finalize a new dictionary.” He continues, “The paragraph is, of course, a monstrosity.… It hits no mark at all. A similar monstrosity could be contrived by jumbling together inappropriate words from formal literary language, or from the Second Edition.”

  Gove argues that the dictionary is merely doing its job of reflecting real American usage. The much maligned finalize, which had drawn scandalized comments when President Eisenhower used it a few years earlier, “turns up all over the English-speaking world” beginning in the 1920s. President Kennedy had used it only recently. It even turns up occasionally in the pages of the Times. Gove notes that The New York Times has in fact contributed several hundred quotations to Webster’s Third. That’s one of the ways the dictionary’s compilers keep up with current usage.

  Gove assures the Times editor, “We plan to continue reading and marking The Times as the number one exhibit of good standard contemporary cultivated English,” even if the Times management urges its staff writers to continue relying on Webster’s Second. He feels, however, that “the ultimate arbiters of our linguistic standards should not be urged to look back to artificial precepts of a bygone age. They must accept linguistic facts.” He finishes by pointing out, “Whether you or I … like it or not, the contemporary English language of the Nineteen Sixties … is not the language of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties.”14

  Gove makes some of the same points in a much shorter letter responding to the negative review in Life magazine. He notes that irregardless, which Life has stigmatized as a “monstrous non-word,” also appeared in Webster’s Second. Moreover, Webster’s Third marks it as nonstandard. Other words from the third edition that Life condemns are likewise found in earlier editions. Gove then reiterates his position that the purpose of a dictionary is to record the language as it exists. “For us to attempt to prescribe the language,” he says, “would be like Life reporting the news as its editors would prefer it to happen.”

  The Life editors were apparently unimpressed with this response. They appended a note to the letter, explaining that they didn’t intend to give the impression that irregardless and the other words mentioned were not in Webster’s Second. The point of their complaint is that the second edition labels the word “erroneous and humorous,” while Gove’s edition has upgraded it to merely “nonstandard.” They feel that “Editor Gove is saying that if a word is misused often enough, it becomes acceptable.”15

  Gove and the Life editors were shouting across the same gulf that had divided linguistic radicals and conservatives since the late eighteenth century. As always, neither side was prepared to budge an inch. Philip Gove believed in actual use and the editors of Life believed in the rules, and no amount of arguing could change that. Like linguists and verbal critics in the 1870s, the two sides were making vastly different assumptions about language use and grammar. Descriptivists thought attempts to pervert the processes of language change were not only absurd, but useless. Those in favor of prescribed rules believed that standards could and should be imposed.

  Others besides Gove came to the defense of the dictionary. Most were linguists or lexicographers, but not all. Roy H. Copperud, a journalist who would later write a book on American usage and style, was one who swam against the negative tide. In an Editor & Publisher column, he remarks on the “flurry of nitwitted commentary” stirred up by the publication of Webster’s Third. He says, “They whine tha
t the new dictionary is guilty of ‘permissiveness,’ reflecting the wrong-headed, though widely held … conviction that the business of a dictionary is to lay down the law.” He adds, “Twenty minutes spent on the conclusions of any reputable linguist in the last 25 years should convince even the most obtuse that the business of a dictionary is to report how words are used, and not to prescribe or proscribe meanings.” Copperud admits to personal prejudices against certain words, for instance, finalize. He knows, however, that it would be “both stupid and futile” for the dictionary to try to outlaw them.

  Copperud also comments approvingly on some of the changes that other reviewers attacked. He thinks it’s sensible of the editors to leave out encyclopedia-type material to make room for tens of thousands of new words. He finds the new pronunciation symbols baffling, but assumes that users will get accustomed to them eventually. “In general,” he summarizes, “it may be said that this dictionary aims at representing English as it is used by the literate majority in this country.”16

  A handful of other reviews also support the aims and general organization of the dictionary. A brief jokey comment in America starts out sarcastically, “To the barricades! Man the breastworks! The dignity of the English language, at least as she is spoke by us Amuricans, is being assaulted.” The editor then explains to the many reviewers who are apparently confused that the dictionary “does not make language; it records language’s use.” The St. Louis Post Dispatch also comments that the Times seems to have “an egregious misconception of what the purpose of a dictionary is.” The Reporter, laughing at those who cling to Webster’s Second, questions why they don’t go back even further in time. After all, dictionaries of the English language have been in existence for several hundred years.17

  Lexicographer Bergen Evans was a vocal champion of the new dictionary. Several months after Follett’s savage attack, the Atlantic published a rejoinder by Evans. Evans also tackles the question of what purpose a dictionary is supposed to serve. In answering it, he takes on the major criticisms that have been leveled at Webster’s Third. To begin with, he says, a dictionary is concerned with words. If the enormous increase in American vocabulary over the past three decades has compelled the editors of the dictionary to throw out the names of Greek gods, the table of weights and measures, and other extraneous information, so be it.

  As for what has changed or been added, Evans reminds his readers of a basic principle of modern linguistics—correctness can only rest on usage, and usage is relative. Usage has changed enormously between 1934 and 1961. Any dictionary that didn’t reflect this fact would not be doing its job. The very newspapers and magazines that have attacked Webster’s Third include “pages that would appear, to the purist of forty years ago, unbuttoned gibberish.” The issue of the Times in which the editors declare their loyalty to Webster’s Second uses, by Evans’s count, no fewer than 153 words and constructions not listed in that revered tome, as well as nineteen that were listed, but marked as nonstandard.18

  It is not the responsibility of dictionaries to confirm our prejudices, argues Evans. They can’t pretend that certain usages or pronunciations don’t exist because we find them distasteful. Evans considers finalize, which has been singled out for condemnation more than any word except ain’t. He believes that Webster’s Third has handled the word in the only way possible. To omit a word that has been common for two generations—that has been used by two presidents and a secretary-general of the United Nations—would be the true abrogation of the lexicographer’s duty. Nor should the word be marked as substandard. “President Kennedy and U Thant are highly educated men,” he points out, “and both are articulate and literate.” Finalize is not even a freak form. It was created through the same linguistic process that gave the language formalize, verbalize, standardize, and many other –ize words.19

  “Standard,” says Evans, is a slippery concept, because “words are continually shifting their meanings and connotations and hence their status.” People who have been used to considering a certain word or grammatical structure substandard, who then begin to hear and read it everywhere, will no doubt be distressed to finally look up the word and discover that it’s listed in the dictionary with no indication that it’s less than respectable. Changes of this type seem to happen rapidly in the twentieth century, “but it is no more the dictionary’s business to oppose this process than to speed it up.”

  Evans concedes that the dictionary is not perfect. People may reasonably argue that some proper names should have been retained or that the new method of defining words has some disadvantages. One thing is certain though, he concludes roundly—“Anyone who solemnly announces in 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense.”20

  Evans was one of the few who drew parallels between Gove’s tribulations and Noah Webster’s. In a lively article for The New York Times Magazine, he recounts the contempt that greeted Webster’s 1806 dictionary, with its odd spellings and colloquial Americanisms. He quotes the Boston Palladium, calling Webster’s dictionary “superfluous, as we already possess the admirable lexicon of Johnson.” Then he remarks in an aside, “(As we say today: ‘Don’t throw away your Second International!’)” Webster, too, he points out, was attacked for including vulgar new words such as advisory, presidential, and insubordination. He informs readers, “Demoralize, Americanize and deputize, by the way, caused as much agitation in 1806 as finalize was to cause 156 years later.”21 Not much had changed in the world of usage criticism.

  * * *

  Months after its release, the uproar over Webster’s Third raged unabated. In March 1962 New Yorker staff writer Dwight MacDonald wrote one of the most comprehensive reviews of the book, and probably the nastiest. Because the review is detailed, and even offers a few measured words of praise, it comes off as thoughtful, making the total effect all the more devastating. MacDonald got many of his facts wrong, as various responders pointed out. However, none of the rebuttals had the wide distribution or powerful impact of the review itself. Decades later, opponents of the dictionary would still be quoting it to make their case.

  MacDonald starts with a sweeping condemnation of the dictionary editors’ methods. “This scientific revolution,” he pronounces, “has meshed gears with a trend toward permissiveness, in the name of democracy, that is debasing our language by rendering it less precise and thus less effective as literature and less effective as communication.”22 He prefers the “forthright” labels of the second edition—colloquial, erroneous, incorrect, illiterate—to the “fuzzier” nonstandard and substandard. He of course fulminates against ain’t, blaming the word’s wishy-washy labeling on Gove’s structural linguistics tendencies.

  Although MacDonald has the usual technical quibbles with the dictionary—too many major authors dropped in favor of people like Ethel Merman and the omission of encyclopedia-type material—his overarching complaint is that Gove and his staff have let the facts of American usage influence the content of entries. The problem with “the permissive approach,” as MacDonald sees it, is that erroneous usages are treated as acceptable if enough people say them. The editors give one meaning of nauseous as “experiencing nausea,” although rightly the word means “causing nausea.” They allow biweekly to mean both “every two weeks” and “semiweekly” when only the first definition is correct. They accept deprecate and depreciate as synonyms. MacDonald believes that this failure to pass judgment on meanings that have traditionally been considered wrong lets the dictionary user down. “If he prefers to use deprecate and depreciate interchangeably, no dictionary can prevent him,” says MacDonald, “but at least he should be warned.”23

  MacDonald takes the same view as Richard Grant White. “Deciding what is correct,” he argues, “is more a matter of a feeling for language … than of the [usage] statistics on which Dr. Gove and his colleagues seem to have chiefly relied.… If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States, including
a recent President, were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right.”24 He might as well have said, as White did, “There is a misuse of words which can be justified … by no usage, however general.”

  Several months after MacDonald’s review appeared, James Sledd, a professor of English and a notable defender of the dictionary, refuted MacDonald’s charges in a conference paper presented at an American Ethnological Society meeting. In it he argues forcefully that MacDonald is ignorant of the nature of structural linguistics, does not understand how lexicographers traditionally work, and—most remarkable of all—is unfamiliar with the contents of Webster’s Second.

  Sledd notes that a number of the words and definitions that MacDonald denounces are also found in the second edition. Webster’s Second, for example, includes the same two definitions for biweekly that so exasperated MacDonald when he read them in Webster’s Third. Sledd also quotes the preface to Webster’s Second to show that the same precepts that MacDonald attributes to the pernicious influence of structural linguistics also formed part of the operating principles of those who compiled the 1934 dictionary. For instance, the second edition was also more concerned with reflecting current usage than acting as a repository of linguistic antiquities. William Allan Neilson, editor of Webster’s Second, had written in the preface, “More important than the retaining of time-honored methods or conventions has been the task of making the dictionary serve as an interpreter of the culture and civilization of today.”