The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Then Evans looked to corner Follett on the singularity of none and like as a conjunction. The case that none should be construed as a singular had the example of Latin nemo and logic in its favor, so “the prescriptive grammarians are emphatic that it should be singular.” The historical record did show that from 1450 to 1650, none was three times as often treated as singular, but then in the last three hundred years, none was treated as a plural almost twice as often. The imbalance had since increased to the point where Evans could happily say that today none are was the preferred form.

  If the literary critic was at his best in taking science to task for ignoring taste, the scientist was at his best in amassing evidence for these discrete pitched battles over single instances of disputed usage.

  “Anyone who tells a child—or anyone else—that like is used in English only as a preposition has grossly misinformed him.” Then Evans touched on the example of “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should,” the famous ad line that was always mentioned in this context. “Anyone who complains,” said Evans, “that its use as a conjunction is a corruption introduced by Winston cigarettes ought, in all fairness, to explain how Shakespeare, Keats, and the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible came to be in the employ of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.”

  As reviews of Webster’s Third came out in the fall of 1961, Evans and Follett again sharpened their sticks and headed into the fray. Evans wrote Philip Gove praising the new dictionary. But Follett thought it a terrible, terrible book, much worse than even the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage.

  Chapter 34

  The New York Times pursued Webster’s Third like a blood vendetta—well, maybe I overstate, but that’s what writers and journalists do—while the dictionary was denounced in one newspaper, magazine, and trade publication after another, and the condemnation grew ever more dark, thunderous, and weird.

  After running a pair of editorials piling up examples of questionable terms that appeared in Webster’s Third without usage labels, the Times fired two more salvos in late November. The first called President Kennedy to account for publicly using one of the Webster’s Third stinkers. “In the course of his highly articulate news conference today, President Kennedy struck one grating note for lovers of the English language. He used that bureaucratic favorite ‘finalize.’ ”

  Under finalize, Webster’s Third had cited words of President Eisenhower: “soon my conclusions will be finalized.”

  One day later, yet another editorial ran in the Times. “Mr. President,” it said, “are you sure you gave the old place a housecleaning after you moved in? . . . When you said yesterday, ‘We have not finalized any plans,’ it sounded for all the world like a previous occupant who once said, as quoted in Webster’s Third (or Bolshevik) International . . .”1

  Take that.

  It would be near impossible for any dictionary, even Webster’s Third, to be like Ike and Bolshevik at the same time. And perhaps the newspaper of Stalin apologist Walter Duranty, who had denied all reports of famine in Russia, should have been a little more reluctant to red-bait a dictionary with an innocent Cold War record. But newspapers not only report news, they generate news, and they do so by picking causes and pursuing them with all the bluster of a wisecracking politician. Subtlety goes out the window. To do something well is to overdo it. To state well is to overstate. Sketching pencils and watercolors are put away; only the strongest pigments will suffice. If red, after a decade of McCarthyism and several months after the Bay of Pigs incident, seems particularly eye-catching, well, then get the red.

  Mario Pei had reviewed the dictionary for the New York Times Book Review. He repeated the story of ain’t as told in the press release, but pointed out that ain’t had “consistently appeared in dictionaries” before this. He emphasized the dictionary’s embrace of informal language, saying, “it leaves me wondering just how far the process of informality can go before it incurs the charge of outright vulgarism.” Fair enough. Pei listed some commendable features and some less commendable. Don in the British sense of professor was included in Webster’s Third, along with the Spanish meaning señor, but why not the Italian-American slang for mafia boss? The Columbia professor missed the encyclopedic matter but was impressed by the Polly Adler–assisted entry for shake, a word whose expansion of meanings he found startling. It was a qualified though positive review. But Pei came around. Months later, he was saying that Webster’s Third “blurs to the point of obliteration the older distinction between standard, substandard, colloquial, vulgar, and slang.” By the lights of its editors, Pei wrote, “good and bad, right and wrong, correct and incorrect no longer exist.”2

  In the meantime, Theodore M. Bernstein, the Times’ well-known assistant managing editor, took to the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to expand the paper’s case against “permissiveness gone mad.” Webster’s Third, he wrote, “has methodically removed all guideposts to usage except for an infinitesimal number labeling the most obvious pieces of slang and vulgarity and has turned the dictionary into a bewildering wilderness of words.”3

  In January, Bernstein issued a directive to the staff of the Times, addressing whether the arrival of Webster’s Third would affect the paper’s style. “The answer is no. Editors representing the news, Sunday and editorial departments have decided without a dissent to continue using Webster’s Second Edition for spelling and usage.” (Oh, to have seen the editors voting on this! “A motion to reject Webster’s Third and all its works and pledge allegiance to Webster’s Second until a suitable alternative is put forth: All in favor say aye.” “Aye.” “All against, say nay.” Silence.)

  This same month Wilson Follett published his review in the Atlantic. It raised the serial denunciation of Webster’s Third to a new intensity. Ever so briefly, the article faked a tone of scholarly detachment. Follett granted that it was impossible to know all the merits of such a book except after years of use but then said, “On the other hand, it costs only minutes to find out that what will rank as the great event of American linguistic history in this decade, and perhaps in this quarter century, is in many crucial particulars a very great calamity.”

  Indeed, a very great calamity.

  Follett pounced on the loss of encyclopedic material. “Think—if you can—of an unabridged dictionary from which you cannot learn who Mark Twain was . . . or what were the names of the apostles or that the Virgin was Mary the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, or what and where the District of Columbia is!” But “unabridged” was always a term of art, and one had only to think of the well-known Oxford English Dictionary to think of a scholarly dictionary that did not provide encyclopedic information. But the underlying point was solid: This was not the Webster’s dictionary you grew up with.

  Follett looked back to Webster’s Second. He might have been raising his water glass at the Hotel Kimball as he spoke of William Allan Neilson and “the most important reference book in the world to American writers, editors, teachers, students, and general readers—everyone to whom American English was a matter of serious interest.”

  Where the Second Edition had “provided accurate, impartial accounts of the endless guerilla war between grammarian and antigrammarian,” the Third Edition set out to “destroy . . . every obstinate vestige of linguistic punctilio, every surviving influence that makes for the upholding of standards, every criterion for distinguishing between better usages and worse.” It had “gone over bodily to the school that construes traditions as enslaving, the rudimentary principles of syntax as crippling, and taste as irrelevant.”

  Good grammar had become bad, and bad usages were good. The dubious notion—introduced by Merriam’s own press release—that a word’s mere inclusion in the dictionary equaled endorsement by the dictionary was linked to the use of fewer and less judgmental usage labels. A perfectly logical connection, its meaning was however exaggerated to say that the descriptivist Webster’
s Third was positively prescriptivist when it served the critic’s point.

  The most frivolous words and phrases, according to Follett, enjoyed all the status once belonging to only the most polished and public of utterances. Follett, in high dudgeon, listed wise up, get hep, ants in one’s pants, one for the book, hugeous, nixie, hep cat, anyplace, and someplace, all of which appeared unlabeled in Webster’s Third. “These and a swarm of their kind it admits to full canonical standing by the suppression of such qualifying status labels as colloquial, slang, cant, facetious, and substandard.” Thus did ants in one’s pants (entered under ant with an uncharacteristically formal one) become “officially applauded English.”

  On a host of issues, Webster’s Third (like the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage) had ignored traditional classroom rules: on singular-plural agreement in everybody had made up their minds, on different than (instead of different from), and the use of like as a conjunction, which Follett described wonderfully though nuttily as “that darling of advanced libertarians.” The “saboteurs of Springfield,” as Follett called Gove and his co-conspirators, had knocked down one after another of the “traditionary controls.” But, like the obsolescent traditionary, much of Follett’s indictment revealed him to be an absolute mossback. The commonplace use of due to in the event was canceled due to inclement weather was, Follett thought, an “abomination.”

  But Follett’s traditionary argument also recognized the extent to which Webster’s Third was, by design, an especially present-minded dictionary. According to Merriam, most of the 14,000 authors represented in the dictionary’s illustrative quotations, as Follett noted, came from the mid-twentieth century. Which is exactly how Gove wanted it. Also, Follett’s case did not rest exclusively on the long list he had assembled of the Third Edition’s criminal handling of like, due to, and so on, for there was plenty of other evidence to show that Webster’s Third was possessed by tendentious thinking.

  The new defining style, Follett wrote, produced “a great unmanageable and unpunctuated bloc of words strung out beyond the retentive powers of most minds that would need the definition at all.” It is hard to know whether Follett knew he was practically demonstrating this breathless declarative style in his own sentence, but he gave an excellent example with the dictionary’s entry for rabbit punch: “a short chopping blow delivered to the back of the neck or the base of the skull with the edge of the hand opposite the thumb that is illegal in boxing.” So weird-sounding, it was a definite mark against Gove’s dictionary. The new defining style and its aversion to commas helped give Webster’s Third the slightly robotic air of an intellectual who lacks basic social skills.

  In February, J. Donald Adams penned an article for the New York Times Book Review that quoted Follett at length and questioned why Webster’s Third relied so heavily on quotations collected in the last few decades. These, Adams assumed (not unreasonably), were for the sake of reinforcing definitions, not for describing usage as a label might (as Gove intended). Bemoaning the reduction of usage labels and the dictionary’s “atrocious” prose, Adams said with the wounded air of a jilted lover, “I shall never turn again to the new Merriam-Webster.”

  The Times was tracking the circulation of its own pronouncements, admiring the shadow it cast across this debate. The paper reported that two other journals had joined the protest: the American Bar Association Journal and the Library Journal. The ABA journal accused Webster’s Third of devaluing the verbal currency of the English language, as a nation’s currency might be devalued by corrupt monetary policy—a rather bizarre analogy with not a few preposterous legal implications, which would suggest that Merriam, a private company with not even a monopoly on American lexicography or even the Webster name, was a kind of U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve for American English. The ABA journal had cited Life magazine’s error-ridden editorial, repeating its mistaken claim that Webster’s Third offered enormity as a synonym for enormousness, and, whaddaya know, it also referenced the New York Times’ own editorials. If President Kennedy was to be faulted for not reading or learning from the New York Times editorials, then the ABA journal had certainly earned a favorable mention.5

  The ABA journal did light upon one of the most notorious pairs of entries to be found in Webster’s Third, those for imply and infer, which the Times and Life had also mentioned, though too briefly for its subversive style to be fully appreciated. Imply was defined in Webster’s Third as “to indicate . . . by logical inference,” while infer was defined as “to derive . . . by implication.” For those who insist that imply and infer are forever as separate as oil and water, what could be more annoying than to define each word using the other?

  The case against Webster’s Third spread to the Richmond News Leader and the Washington Post, both of which cited Follett’s damning review, while the latter accused the new dictionary of “pretentious and obscure verbosity.” The Post added substantially to the communal argument by simply quoting the dictionary’s circuitous and giggle-inducing definition for door: “a movable piece of firm material or a structure supported usually along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open for passage into or out of a building, room, or other covered enclosure or a car, airplane, elevator, or other vehicle.”6 Mixing the essential and nonessential in one long, barely readable, determinative phrase, it was a definition of door written by someone who seemed to doubt that door can be defined.

  The case against Webster’s Third was most persuasive when focused on individual absurdities like the definition for door or the entries for imply and infer. These demonstrated how the whole Philip Gove approach seemed to rob language of its surety. Instead of making the language simpler, it became more complex, harder to grasp, to use, and to trust. In such odd and complicated entries as door (see also hotel), Webster’s Third seemed nervous and uncertain, puffing itself up with great shows of specificity and literalness as it groped with the slippery edges of meaning.

  But if Webster’s Third was at times more than a little awkward, much of the criticism of its principles was bizarre. Webster’s Third “makes no pretense of being a guardian of the language, and does not pass judgment on what is correct,” wrote the Right Reverend Richard S. Emrich in the Detroit News. “It is not a dictionary as Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster conceived of one; it is a catalog. It is a kind of Kinsey Report in linguistics.”7

  This line of argument quickly gave way to more hysterical, Timesian suggestions that this new dictionary was the lexicographical embodiment of Soviet Russia. The Reverend Emrich borrowed words from William Ralph Inge, a British newspaper columnist who was a fierce anticommunist and skeptical of philosophies, like Marxism, that trafficked in pseudoscientific certainty.

  Wrote the Reverend Emrich: “The Bolshevik spirit . . . is to be found everywhere, not just in Russia. Wherever our standards are discarded in family life, the care of the soul, art, literature, or education, there is the Bolshevik spirit. Wherever men believe that what is, is right, there is bolshevism. It is a spirit that corrupts everything it touches.” Including dictionaries.

  One wishes Emrich had understood all the changes that had been wrought in Webster’s Third. Then he might have fully translated Inge’s parallelism to fit his analogy. He could have written, “Wherever disputed rules of grammar are discarded and simple words are complicated, there is the bolshevik spirit. Wherever overconfident labels have been jettisoned in favor of less judgmental and less helpful ones, there again is bolshevism. Wherever good prose has been replaced by bad, and wherever typographic peculiarity lowers the upper-case, there is still more bolshevism. And wherever encyclopedic matter has been dropped so an unabridged dictionary might fit between two covers, there is—did you see this one coming?—even more bolshevism. Oh, there is so much bolshevism! It is a spirit that corrupts everything it touche
s, threatening the whole English language as spoken by tens of millions of people. If those bolsheviks Lenin and Stalin had been lexicographers, Webster’s Third would have been the result.”

  Amusing, perhaps, but insane.

  Chapter 35

  In December 1961, James Parton said to his own board of directors that American Heritage’s chances of taking over G. & C. Merriam Company were less than 50 percent.1 By Massachusetts law, they would need support of two-thirds of the company’s stockholders—which, even if things went according to plan, would be a stretch. Merriam was reassuring its stockholders with extra dividends, and it had just announced a special stockholders’ meeting. Also, the release of Webster’s Third—for all the Sturm und Drang surrounding it, or rather because of it—was going well. Sales were way up.

  An interesting piece of cocktail party gossip had reached Parton: that Merriam had seriously underestimated sales of the new dictionary and that their printer, Riverside Press, was getting ready for another printing just three months after publication.2 Also complicating matters, word of Parton’s approaches to major stockholders was getting back to Merriam.

  President Gallan wrote Parton to say that he was wrong that the company’s sales were poor. They had, in fact, doubled since he became president, Gallan said. Parton had claimed the company was underperforming in a letter offering to buy Robert Merriam’s stock, a letter that Merriam, a loyalist to the firm that bore his family’s name, had forwarded to Gallan. But, according to Parton’s numbers, the growth in sales from 1956 to 1960 only came to 9 percent while the industry as a whole was up about 56 percent.3

  Gallan also insisted that scholarly reaction to Webster’s Third was positive. Parton returned shot by mentioning Follett. “May I invite your attention to the January 1962 Atlantic Monthly, published today, with a six-page article entitled ‘Sabotage in Springfield—Webster’s Third Edition’ and describing the book as ‘a dismaying assortment of the questionable, the perverse, the unworthy and the downright outrageous.’ ”