The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Gove could have returned to teaching at New York University but he had not been treated well there. And elsewhere there seemed to be few opportunities for midcareer academics.

  On the plus side, Gove wrote in his letter to Merriam, he had done “considerable research on 17th and 18th century dictionaries” and as a result possessed “about as much knowledge as an outsider could acquire . . . of how dictionaries are made.”

  J. P. Bethel asked Gove for references, and received letters describing “an extremely capable man in all respects.” One shortcoming mentioned was that Gove had, at NYU, been “under the delusion that good teaching would bring advancement.”6

  In August 1946, Gove—principled, but a tad naïve—was offered a position, paying one hundred dollars a week, as an assistant editor.7 Around this same time higher-ups at Merriam were thinking about how to fill the position once held by the late William Allan Neilson.

  President Munroe asked Bethel and senior editor Edward F. Oakes to estimate the duties and potential time commitment of a new editor in chief. Their response was thoroughgoing but pointed. The most important duty the new editor in chief could perform was “to sit in a semijudicial capacity over discussions of editorial policy.”8

  In particular, the new editor in chief should help Merriam loosen the knot they were tied in. “We are building a new and different dictionary for the use of a new generation,” wrote Bethel, “but at the same time we are not discarding the scholarship, features, or methods of New International Second Edition that have proved their adequacy.”

  Opinions differed on many questions, especially on “the essentiality of different features and the desirability of radical change in method.” But editorial policy must represent a consensus, Bethel insisted, reached by way of open discussion, and it must result from compromises made to ensure “the best completed product.”

  The editor in chief must also serve as a representative figure, “the unprejudiced spokesman for the learned class, the leaders of the professions on whose approval, in the opinion of many persons, the prestige of the dictionary depends.” Such personages as William Allan Neilson and Noah Porter had not required lessons in speaking as men of the world, so the memo discussed at much greater length the “umpiring capacity” of the new editor in chief, who would have “to sit back as arbitrator” and finally “to act as a brake on personal idiosyncrasies, excessive zeal, unnecessary refinement of editorial material, and anything else that threatens to prove detrimental to the intelligent consultant of the revised dictionary.”

  Chapter 19

  In a word, prestige. The consensus at Merriam was that the new editor in chief should be “a man not only of established reputation in his own field but one whose name is known fairly widely among the public at large.” President Munroe wrote to Percy Long, who had worked as an editor on Webster’s Second and on the 1909 edition. Long said the primary contribution of an editor in chief was “prestige,” especially academic prestige.

  Yet “there is almost always a choice,” Long added, “between actual qualifications and public réclame.” Quoting Long’s letter in a typewritten memo, Bethel inserted by hand four separate phonetic marks on réclame, using a pen to do so.

  One area of academe possessing a remarkable degree of prestige in these years was science. Bethel and Long agreed that “the day of paramount emphasis in academic circles upon the humanities has passed.”1 Therefore “it might be a shrewd move on our part to select a scientist,” a physical scientist, yet not a biologist and not a social scientist.

  Not everyone thought so. Harold Bender, who had been in charge of etymologies for Webster’s Second, felt Merriam should hire another editor in chief whose training was in philology. Said Bender: “I have given further consideration to the suggestion that the next editor in chief should be a scientist,” but “the more I think about it the more I am opposed to the idea. It would be a sop to current popular interest, but would, I think, serve no other good purpose.”

  Popular interest in science was, indeed, enormous, and the publishing industry had been paying great attention to it. Newspapers had been building this appetite for years with reports on the lives and findings of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie—and Curie had even been the subject of a successful Hollywood biopic in 1943. A whole industry of for-profit scientific and technical publishing had developed since World War I, coming on the heels of an explosive growth in the number of university-sponsored science journals in America. Before there was a Book-of-the-Month Club, there was a Scientific Book Club, founded in 1921 and bought out in the 1940s by Henry Holt & Company.

  In the last few generations the American intellect had turned increasingly scientific. When Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876, the United States was a late-to-the-party imitator of European, especially German, scientific research. By the 1930s, American journals were at the forefront of international science publishing. And academic publishing accounted for only a small fraction of all scientific and technical publishing in the United States.

  American literary figures found themselves enthralled by the discoveries of modern science. In 1925, the same year that the Scopes trial exposed fundamental tensions between science and scripture, Sinclair Lewis made a scientist the hero of his novel Arrowsmith. For this book Lewis had sought the advice of the microbiologist Paul de Kruif, who in 1926 published the bestselling Microbe Hunters about Louis Pasteur and the early history of bacteriology. Its dust jacket displayed a blurb from H. L. Mencken, who called its story “one of the noblest chapters in the history of mankind.”

  Technical publishing addressed both highly specialized professional markets and amateur enthusiasts. During World War II, the publishing industry’s Council on Books in Wartime declared that “books are weapons” and responded to the enormous and precipitous demand for technical manuals. At Macmillan, six thousand pages of manuscript became an eighteen-volume series for aeronautical training in little over a month.

  Civilians too wanted to know more about the science and engineering contributions to the war effort. The physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth produced the official report of the Manhattan Project for the U.S. Government Printing Office after it was rejected by commercial publishers. Their mistake. Atomic Energy for Military Purposes became an instant bestseller and, after being taken over by Princeton University Press, was soon in its fifth printing.2

  Science equaled prestige. Which is why J. Robert Oppenheimer ended up on the list of names that had been suggested for the position of editor in chief of Webster’s Third. Such lists are always a potluck, yet the very first name on Bethel’s list, the dream candidate, was another scientist, the chemist James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University. He would “best fill the bill if you could get him; but I doubt if you could,” said the recommender.

  Several people on the list subscribed to what Charles C. Fries and others called the scientific view of language. Hans Kurath, editor of the Middle English Dictionary, which Fries had also worked on, was “known in academic circles for his work in English grammar.” Only Kurath was a bit of a stiff and incapable of small talk, which Bethel had noted when seeing him at Modern Language Association meetings. H. L. Mencken, whose extremely modern views on language were shaped by correspondence with language scholars, was also on the list. Mencken was, however, too old, and did not live anywhere near Springfield.

  Also, Bethel said, “some of us . . . feel that regardless of age, geographical location, and national reputation, we shall be well advised not to select our editor in chief from among journalists and publicists.” Although the misbegotten definition of journalistic in Webster’s Second had already caused much embarrassment (“characteristic of journalism . . . hence of a style characterized by evidence of haste, superficiality of thought, inaccuracies of detail, colloquialisms, and sensationalism, journalese”), it apparently reflected strongly held feelings.

  Jacques Barzun was recomm
ended by one confidant.3 Not a scientist, Barzun was just the opposite, a supremely eloquent historian and a de facto spokesman for the humanities in their classical mold. He possessed a significant amount of prestige as a Columbia University professor, the author of several widely noted books, and literary editor of Harper’s magazine. According to some people, Barzun even looked prestigious, with a prominent nose, straight hair parted neatly on the side, and the patrician bearing of a European aristocrat. “He looked like his name,” someone said.4 The suggestion to try to hire the Paris-born professor was not seriously considered. One wonders if the person who mentioned Barzun’s name had taken notice of his views of language, circulated through the recent success of his book Teacher in America.

  Barzun had said that “we in the twentieth century must offset not only the constant influence of careless speech and the indifference of parents, but the tremendous output of jargon issuing from the new mechanical means at man’s disposal. Worst of all, circumstances have conspired to put the most corrupting force at the very heart of the school system.”5

  Barzun was more likely to wield his pen against the proliferation of technical language than seek to profit from it. And he despised the hokum (which Merriam-Webster attributes to a combination of hocus-pocus and bunkum and dates to 1909) of educated writing. This hokum, with its intentional abstractions, amounted to a terrible new language that he called Desperanto.

  From a recent master’s thesis Barzun drew an example of this new awful lingo: “In the proposed study I wish to describe and evaluate representative programs in these fields as a means of documenting what seems to me a trend of increasing concern with the role of higher education in the improvement of interpersonal and intergroup relations and of calling attention in this way to outstanding contributions in practice.”

  The passage was bloated from those “expanded forms” that Charles C. Fries found only in standard English. But Barzun did not think such language signaled a careful attempt to draw out abstract relations among words. No, its problem was vagueness. It “says nothing definite. It only embodies the disinclination to think.”

  Barzun especially loathed the phrase in terms of, which he thought epitomized the chronic failure of Desperanto to establish vivid mental connections. Perfectly acceptable as a mathematical shorthand, in terms of had become sloppy cant, meaning “any connection between any two things.” And it was spreading beyond campus. “The objectionable phrase is now to be found in newspapers, business reports, and private correspondence. It is a menace in terms of the whole nation.”

  Barzun cited the increase in public schooling since 1870. Always from the middle class and below, these strivers have “shown worthy intentions. They want to be right and even elegant, and so become at once suspicious of plainness and pedantic. They purchase all sorts of handbooks that make a fetish of spelling, of avoiding split infinitives, of saying ‘It is I’ (with the common result of ‘between you and I’)—in short, dwelling on trivialities or vulgarisms which do not affect style or thought in the slightest.”

  And now they had become victims of progressive education, “the desire to be kind, to sound new, to foster useful attitudes, to appear ‘scientific.’ ” A pathetic ideology, it resulted in bland textbooks incapable of dramatic effect. These invited not reading but the routinized search for “THREE MAIN RESULTS.” Books written by individuals, Barzun noted with Gallic contempt, that reflected the author’s unscripted search for wisdom across all disciplines, these were simply not the stock in trade of the growing textbook business.

  Jacques Barzun was simply not a dictionary man, not in the modern sense, despite all his learning—or it might even be said, because of all his learning. He was a throwback to nineteenth-century ideals of unbounded knowledge. “In the realm of mind as represented by great men, there is no such things as separate isolated ‘subjects.’ . . . The great philosophers and scientists are—or were until recently—universal minds, not in the sense that they knew everything but that they sought to unite all they knew into a mental vision of the universe.”

  Columbia University, like the University of Chicago but even earlier, had institutionalized its own curriculum of classic texts. Barzun was a designer, champion, and teacher of the famed Colloquium on Important Books. Discussing the reading habits of students in Teacher in America, he turned to the question of what books students found at home.

  American parents, especially those recently emigrated to the United States, would gladly pay for anything labeled art or culture, he observed. Especially gullible to the false promises of modern marketing and public relations, they were suckers for books with snob appeal, a term the Merriam-Webster files date to 1933. Barzun called snob appeal “a recognized trade term,” which he thought “should have been in use as far back as Dr. Eliot’s ‘Five-Foot Shelf.’ ”

  The Harvard Classics, observed Barzun, had brought together the expectation that reading would be easy and “that it shall bring prestige.” There was more than a little hucksterism in the whole enterprise, but one great thing could be said for it: “The family that buys the Five Foot Shelf not to read—for it is hard work—but to dazzle their friends, will in time bring forth offspring for whom these books were intended.”

  The next editor in chief would not be identifiable with anything so prestigious as the Harvard Classics. The job was offered to Frederic Cassidy, a former student of Charles C. Fries who had worked on the Linguistic Atlas of New England, a pioneering study of regional dialect in the United States.6 This research project sought linguistic evidence in the usage of ordinary people, eschewing literary sources in favor of authentic speech. An affable scholar in his early forties, Cassidy had also produced a charming yet expert study of place names of Dane County, Wisconsin. He lacked public réclame but possessed actual qualifications, which he would later put to use editing the celebrated Dictionary of American Regional English.

  Cassidy turned down the job. Merriam also approached Albert Marckwardt, another student of Charles C. Fries. Marckwardt, who once said that his name was spelled with as many letters as possible, was best known for a study he co-authored that followed up on Sterling Leonard’s pioneering examination of linguistic opinion.7 Where Leonard had compared the opinions of educated users to the rules of classroom grammar, Marckwardt compared these opinions to what could be discovered about the facts of actual usage in the citations and usage notes of the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Second, and other sources.

  Isolating a list of 121 disputed uses that had not passed muster with a majority of judges in Leonard’s study, Marckwardt and co-author Fred G. Walcott found that 87 percent of these apparently dubious uses were perfectly established, in far better standing than Leonard’s judges, in particular the severe laymen, had allowed. This helped to map a new reality of correctness, as understood by linguists. After Leonard had discovered that educated opinion was more liberal than classroom grammar, Marckwardt and Walcott found that opinions were still not liberal enough, given the record of actual usage. In practice we English-speakers were more tolerant of deviation from classroom standards than our own stated opinions indicated.

  Marckwardt’s attitude toward the language could be gleaned from the first sentence of his recently published Introduction to the English Language: “The study of language is a science.” The inspiration for this book, he said, was a 1928 committee report from the National Council of Teachers of English declaring that college instruction would be deficient if it did not convey “a scientific point of view toward the language.”

  Cassidy and Marckwardt knew each other well, and had even written a book together, the Scribner Handbook of English.8 It too advanced the scientific view of language, but it was far more congenial to the expectations of consumers than the authors’ more scholarly works. The handbook was, in a word, prescriptivist. Its business was to tell student writers how they ought to write. “Avoid trite or hackneyed expressions,” read one sect
ion heading, above a list of clichés such as breakneck speed, budding genius, and captain of industry.

  Marckwardt and Cassidy provided a list of the “worst errors of usage,” based, interestingly, on the vulgar set of letters examined in Fries’s American English Grammar. “Many points of usage are disputed or variable but there is no question about those included in this list.” There was the failure to add an s to make a noun plural (five mile away) and the misuse of an apostrophe to make a noun plural; next came we was, you was, them people, he did it hisself. The list condemned the confusion of lay and lie, which Fries had, in fact, singled out as a typical grammar lesson not worth spending any time on. Apparently neither of these students of his agreed.

  In the book’s glossary of usage, the authors gave an uncompromising entry for ain’t, writing, “Not acceptable, except possibly in one situation, the first person singular interrogative, ain’t I, where it may be considered only as a possible colloquial form.” The alternatives, Marckwardt and Cassidy explained, were also problematic: Aren’t I? mixed plural and singular forms while Am I not? was rather stilted. But this liberal attitude toward ain’t began and ended with the first-person interrogative: “Remember that any other use of ain’t is wholly without justification, and that ain’t should never be used in any formal situation either in speech or writing.”

  Chapter 20

  Under Macdonald’s own byline, Politics journeyed into the messy theoretical heart of the uncommitted radical, a kind of revolutionary without a country. In his most searching piece from this period, a long two-part essay called “The Root Is Man,” Macdonald began to turn away from the Marxist view of injustice as the systematic result of capitalism. He then tended toward a more humanistic view, in which, darkly, man himself is at fault but also, rather optimistically, the only hope.