The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Chapter 26

  When Webster’s gives two pronunciations, the joke went, the first pronunciation is Boston and the second is New England. Gove, now general editor of Merriam, attributed the remark to a college professor in Kentucky, which would have made sense, as Merriam-Webster dictionaries had long neglected the southern accent.1 Yet it could have originated with Merriam’s own staff, who gladly repeated the line. Because it was true.

  The pronunciations in Webster’s Second were not international or even national; they reflected a regional bias that had seemed perfectly correct when American intellectual culture was still a footnote to Boston culture, but not anymore. What made sense in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s day had become outdated and provincial in the age of Faulkner and Steinbeck and the New York intellectuals, as American standards of speech and pronunciation were being influenced first by radio and then Hollywood.

  Since the early 1930s, a decent variety of accents played in Hollywood movies. Many performers adopted a hoity-toity Anglophone style of pronunciation, of a kind long encouraged in American theatrical training but later used for the comic shaming of those who put on airs. Society accents could be heard from Joan Crawford of Texas and Oklahoma, Clark Gable of Ohio, William Powell of Pennsylvania, Cary Grant of Bristol, England, and Katharine Hepburn of Connecticut, at best giving the actor a smart, Waspy edge of old-fashioned class. A competing American naturalism was heard in the place-specific accents of Humphrey Bogart (born in New York City), James Stewart (borough of Indiana, Pennsylvania), Spencer Tracy (Milwaukee), Henry Fonda (Grand Island, Nebraska), and John Wayne (Winterset, Iowa). Certain genres, detective and gangster films, worked against the old-fashioned proper way of talking. Uppity pronunciation faded gradually. In the 1940s and ’50s, the newer movies used more soldiers than socialites, and more cowboys than anything else.

  After the release of Webster’s Second, Merriam had tested the market for more representative pronunciation guidance by publishing and distributing a slim pronouncing dictionary that had been developed out of house by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott. Kenyon was an esteemed phonetician and Knott, of course, was a former general editor at Merriam, the most senior editor after William Allan Neilson, but, unlike Neilson, an actual full-time lexicographer.

  Kenyon and Knott’s book used the International Phonetic Alphabet, breaking each word into phonemes represented by letters and symbols, some strange-looking, like the upside-down and backward e symbol—ə—called a schwa, which actually represented a range of vowel sounds that might commonly be spelled with an e or an i or even an o, but described as the second vowel in custom. The system took getting used to—the letter i stood for the long “e” sound as in bee, while the letter e stood for the long “a” sound as in rate—but the dictionary eased the way by including a key line on each page, referencing each symbol to the sound of a familiar short word.

  The pronouncing dictionary sought to correct the stuffy New England bias of Webster’s Second, replacing its standard of “formal platform speech” with a preference for “cultivated colloquial English.” The first pronunciation of aunt in Kenyon-Knott made the vowel sound like the a in sat. Then came eastern pronunciations: aunt that sounds like rant, as many New Yorkers would pronounce it, and then aunt that sounds like art, as a stuffy old New Englander would pronounce it.

  The introduction quoted George Kittredge: “Every educated person speaks his mother tongue in at least two ways, and the difference between the dignified and the colloquial style is considerable.” The editors located the source for modern literary expression in conversational language. “Good prose,” said the introduction, quoting the writer and scholar William Ellery Leonard, “is becoming more and more a skillful adaptation of the vigorous, compact, racy idiom of the best spoken speech.”

  Racy was often used to describe American English: H. L. Mencken more than once called it that. Webster’s Second defined racy as “manifesting the quality of a thing in its native, original, genuine, most characteristic state,” citing a weirdly fitting phrase from the Victorian thinker Walter Pater: “racy morsels of the vernacular.”

  The only problem, said Twaddell, in an Editorial Board meeting on May 14, 1953, is “the Kenyon-Knott system is still a little too much to ask of anyone to handle in a general dictionary.”2 Munroe was also skeptical. He could remember sending copies out to broadcasters. “Nearly all were sent back, with all sorts of wisecracks, some to the effect that they didn’t want to stand on their heads to find out the pronunciation of a term.”3

  The IPA alphabet had a mixed history in American dictionaries. Funk & Wagnalls had once adopted it in their Standard dictionary, only to retreat under criticism and revert to their previous pronunciation system—a situation Merriam’s salesmen had gladly exploited. Merriam’s closest competitor in the college market, the American College Dictionary, under the influence of Charles C. Fries, had introduced the schwa as one of its pronunciation symbols, but there was negative reaction and the company now feared going any further. Twaddell, who was back at his regular job at Brown University but still consulting for Merriam, said he was glad Merriam had not adopted the IPA system, for historically it was so complex as to be unusable. Yet he acknowledged that something ought to be done to improve on the pronunciations of Webster’s Second.

  Pronunciation editor Edward Artin had developed a simplified IPA system for Webster’s Third. Gove told the board that it had been “carefully analyzed by men in this office who represent all of the leading schools of thought in the United States today,” and proudly listed the bona fides of editors whose training placed them in the mainstream of American linguistics and near some of its leading lights. Everyone agreed there was a potential competitive advantage in being the first major dictionary to really exploit the modern understanding of phonetics, but there was also danger.

  Munroe and others did not want the new dictionary to seem “radical.”

  This kind of talk irritated Gove. Artin’s system was about 80 percent the same as the old system. As he had said at the last meeting, “The radicalness is in about twenty percent. And who knows what is radical anyway?”

  The Editorial Board, which Gove only consulted on major policy questions, considered a proposal to survey a group of influential dictionary users, mainly booksellers, publishers, and educators. But going outside the building for expertise that could be found inside the building was so Webster’s Second. It was like writing to William Allan Neilson for advice when Thomas Knott was standing next to you.

  Gove objected. “There is no group in the world better equipped to handle this matter than the people in our Editorial Department right now. Never before in the history of the company have we had better qualified men. Mr. Munroe, you would discount any reports that would include the linguists, would you?”

  “You are representing the linguists,” said Munroe, voicing what everyone took to be obvious, that Gove’s views as a lexicographer were powerfully influenced by contemporary linguistics.

  Gove insisted that he favored Artin’s system because it was, in fact, simpler than the old system, which he described as chaotic and confusing despite its familiarity.

  But making the pronunciations more “scientific,” said Victor Weidman, the head of educational sales, would not necessarily result in a simpler dictionary.

  “Apparently,” said Gove, who did not mind employing the contemptuous we when others dared to speak to him like this, “we fell into the popular error of misusing the word scientific.” It “doesn’t mean the key is any more difficult; it only means that it is more accurate.”

  Take that.

  All the same, teams from Merriam traveled for weeks to interview dictionary users and report on their preferences. Of 120 people surveyed, 78 favored some kind of change to the present system while only 12 favored retention of the Webster’s Second system. But Ingham C. Baker, from the business side of Merriam, considered the findings i
ndefinite. Few respondents, he noted, had revealed strong feelings about what exactly should be done. Sadly, there was nothing to do but “battle it out right here.”5

  The heart of the problem, Baker said, was that while people did seem to feel some kind of change was in order, “it is hard to get a system that the average person will understand.”

  Twaddell spoke up: “Weren’t you struck by the number of people who wanted the key on the page?”

  Baker was. “I dislike its being removed from the bottom of the page.”

  This was a rearguard action, however. The pronouncing key had already been removed from the Collegiate Dictionary to save space. No one spoke further on its behalf, despite its obvious relevance to the problem of orienting users to a new pronunciation system.

  Gove read aloud from a letter written by a college professor, saying that if Webster’s adopted some version of IPA, “they will win the enduring love, affection, and vocal espousal of phoneticians, who are a growlingly powerful group in the pedagogical system.”

  Twaddell knew the letter-writer, Francis Lee Utley, a professor at Ohio State, and confirmed that he was a sane person whose views should be respectfully heard. “There is nothing long-haired or wild about Utley,” he said.

  Munroe reminded everyone of the negative reaction after Funk & Wagnalls had begun using IPA. He also mentioned that one reason Merriam had published Kenyon-Knott was that it would answer the question, To what extent does the public want such advice? Judging from sales of the pronouncing dictionary—less than five thousand per year—the answer was, Not much.

  “I honestly feel we are running a big risk to throw the present system overboard and take on a new system,” Munroe said. “Make some changes but don’t go all the way in what Mr. Artin proposes. You must remember, while these people you are talking about—the linguists, scholars, and so forth—have a powerful following, they are nothing in comparison with the general public, and it is to the general public that we have got to sell this dictionary.”

  Artin had also drawn Munroe’s ire by mentioning the possibility of printing the new pronunciation key on a separable page so it could be referred to while looking up words. “I should like to comment on that suggestion of yours for something in the dictionary that is separate from the dictionary. That is an extremely bad idea.”

  Said Artin, “I wasn’t suggesting that seriously. I merely mentioned it as one of the possibilities.”

  Munroe was quite worked up, tired of opposing these linguistically trained lexicographers, having to speak up for company values that were commonplace in his time. It was good the new men were dedicated to improving the dictionary, but their impatience with tradition was all too zealous. He told them, “You will say that compromise is not satisfactory, but nearly all history is made up of compromises.”

  Twaddell, a noted linguist who did not have to apologize for his sympathy with Munroe, returned to Gove’s earlier comment about what percentage of Artin’s system could be described, or not described, as radical. “I think the figure of twenty or thirty percent is about what I would feel makes sense . . . about what an automobile manufacturer would do in a comparable period of time.”

  Gordon Gallan—Merriam’s president for the last few months, who had been pretty quiet throughout the meeting—spoke up. “One thing that disturbs me is Utley’s statement that Webster’s can get away with the change. I don’t go along with the idea that merely because we lend our name to something, success is assured.”

  Gallan had been talking to a lot of advertising agencies, looking to select a new one for Merriam. He described survey research showing that of all the dictionaries in use, one-third were five to ten years old, while another 25 percent were more than ten years old.

  Dictionary users apparently felt little urgency about getting the newest advice. Moreover, Gallan pointed out, guidance on pronunciation ranked low in the reasons people consulted dictionaries, fourth to be exact, behind finding out the meanings of strange words, finding out secondary meanings of familiar words, and learning the correct spelling of words. A lot of money was being spent on highfalutin scholarship, he said, expenditures that could only be justified if Webster’s Third reached a mass market.

  “We are interested in why people buy dictionaries, and today we feel our greatest potential is in the home market, the masses.”

  Gallan wanted Weidman to weigh in. As head of educational sales he was in a position to comment on how the Artin system might affect sales. He was already on record as favoring moderate changes to the pronunciation system, but then he had been rudely corrected by Gove. He now said the Artin system would have at best a neutral effect on sales if not a wholly negative one. “I feel we would be making a much bigger mistake to use the Artin system than to leave pronunciation as it is,” he said.

  Dictionary buyers were, indeed, conservative. As Weidman pointed out, one out of every six Merriam-Webster dictionaries were sold to the U.S. government, not exactly the avant-garde. If the new unabridged dictionary did not end up in a great number of American living rooms, it would not make back its investment.

  Charles Sleeth, the chief etymologist working on Webster’s Third, made a run at reconciling these views. Hired by Twaddell and J. P. Bethel, Sleeth was a former Rhodes scholar who had studied under C. T. Onions, the Oxford English Dictionary editor, before studying at Princeton with Harold Bender, the chief etymologist of Webster’s Second.6 One of Gove’s early confidants, he urged the Editorial Board to see that even if pronunciation was only the fourth-most-important reason why people bought dictionaries, without reform of the old Webster’s pronouncing system they would be resigning Merriam-Webster to a second- or third-place finish behind the competition in this albeit fourth-most-important category.

  It seemed to Sleeth that the American College Dictionary and the Webster’s New World “were in the position of someone who got up the nerve to take a 15-foot diving board; later they will get up nerve enough to take the 30-foot diving board, unless we take it first.” Like Gove, he was positive Merriam-Webster should be the one to go first off the thirty-foot diving board.

  “Why is it,” he asked rhetorically, “that those of us in the Editorial Department feel confident that we can keep the Merriam Company in first position by going along pretty substantially with Ed Artin’s proposals? The reason is this: There has been considerable development in IPA.”

  The last twenty years had been very good for IPA. “It was in 1933 that Bloomfield’s Language appeared,” Sleeth pointed out. “Bloomfield was the first in this country to bring out the highly important difference between significant and non-significant sound varieties. There is no need to discuss phonemes and the like. The point is that these old-style IPA systems were calculated to be used in the production of any little incidental unimportant variation in sound.” With Bloomfield, researchers had begun to reduce the variety to those most salient differences in pronunciation. “We are not dealing here with anything faddish or anything that is likely to be superseded, because the present tendencies are not toward dissent but toward greater unanimity, and therefore we have something more practical for general use than anything that has been available before the linguistic events of the last twenty years.”

  Twaddell immediately said, “I endorse that historical survey.” Gove followed with more scholarly testimony, quoting an English professor from Duke University: “If Merriam leads the way in converting to IPA (or a slight modification), it should be no more than a few years before all dictionaries of any consequence follow suit.”

  In the end, the issue was settled the old way, in private. Munroe and Gove stepped out into the hallway to discuss. Gordon Gallan joined them. When they came back Twaddell motioned for the room to vote on a basic principle of 70 to 80 percent continuity. Former president Munroe seconded the motion, and it carried by a vote of nine to one.

  Chapter 27

  The editorial
offices at Merriam were always quiet. Production was constant, as the only machines in use whirred away silently in the heads of Merriam staff. Oral communication was reduced to a minimum. To interrupt a fellow editor, you handed him or her a note saying you needed to talk. The two of you then met in the hallway.

  The making of a dictionary was quiet and uneventful. Books were marked up; citations sorted into senses; draft entries circulated to special editors; the work of definers, pronunciation editors, etymologists, and usage editors all collated by an assembling editor and then proofread. And proofread again. And again. It could take years for some batches of entries to be completed, and each step required patience, concentration, and a high tolerance for tedium.

  Lexicography, as one drudge put it, “was writing for a living and not to be confused with belles lettres.”1 It was intellectual work that could rarely be done without a large amount of formal education, but more than a few highly educated people of vaguely literary bent found the work too boring to accept. To succeed, you had to not mind the boredom.

  It always sounded more lively than it was. People would hear you’re a lexicographer and say, “Oh, isn’t that interesting? That would be the perfect job for me. I love to flip through the dictionary and look at all those words.” When you hear this, you think, Lady, you wouldn’t last the morning. But you don’t say that out loud. Repressing the urge to knock people over with words is something you learned as a lexicographer if not well before becoming one.

  The question was no longer how to make the best dictionary possible. It was how to make this dictionary as Philip Gove said it should be made. And Gove would know if you didn’t follow his directions, for he had vowed to read every single word in the dictionary he was editing.

  Procedures were codified in dense technical memoranda that had to be reviewed again and again as particular words and sentences begged for more individual treatment. These were numbered and collected in Merriam’s “Black Books,” which under no circumstances were to leave the building. Gove had to upbraid one definer who had taken a Black Book home to study, risking exposure of Merriam’s confidential procedures to unscrupulous competitors. That the Black Books could be hard to read and understand was no excuse. All such work, however difficult, had to be done on the premises.