The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Still, it was an uphill battle for American Heritage. Robert Merriam, the largest stockholder, who lived in California, repeatedly turned down Parton’s offer to buy him out. Parton was betting on the usefulness of intermediaries such as James Bulkley, but so far it only meant that communications were circuitous. Merriam’s “no” came from his wife, Helen, who told Earla Rowley Carson, a Springfield family friend, to tell Parton’s agent James Bulkley that Bob was definitely not interested.5

  Parton then tried a more direct approach, asking to visit Mr. Merriam on his next trip to California. Said Robert Merriam: “It is not in the cards for me to sell any Merriam Company stock. This is a firm decision. I hope you will not come out here with ideas of changing my mind. Call me stubborn, if you will, but I must stick with a negative decision, come hell or high water.”6

  On December 26, Gerald Rosen at American Heritage summed up the early action in a memo: “Opposition is hardening to the gentlemanly assault this company has directed at G. and C. Merriam.”

  American Heritage’s initial strategy was to win over the major stockholders, all of whom they called “oldsters” (a nineteenth-century coinage left out of Webster’s Second but included in the Third). Their last names echoed the names of the firm’s founders and later presidents: Merriam, Baker, Rowley. But this strategy had not worked, said Rosen: “Persuasion failed on old Merriam. It has not yet moved Rowley. It is unlikely that it will be successful with Baker. These people require a shove a good deal harder than that coming from a negotiated proposal.”

  James Bulkley said it would be easy to pick up about 25 percent of the total share from small holders. There was also the matter of price. As one of Parton’s confederates put it, “Is Merriam still a good buy at $300, or has the New International laid such an egg that the company is worth a lot less?”7

  On January 30, 1962, American Heritage sent a letter to all Merriam stockholders offering only $150 per share. Parton was prepared to pay much more for sizable lots, and at least one of his delegates was talking of a purchase price starting at $300.

  Two weeks later, Merriam responded. President Gallan sent out a letter to make certain that Parton would not be able to pick up a lot of stock on the cheap. He stated that American Heritage had actually been pursuing a merger for years now, so the attempted takeover was really in no way related to the controversy over Webster’s Third. Also, the purchase offer was far too low, he thought. A conservative pricing, Gallan argued, would equal twenty times earnings, and 1961 was the most profitable year in Merriam’s history. A conservative price for Merriam shares, then, would be around $330 per share.8

  Parton needed to respond, and he knew from a complete list of the stockholders he had only just obtained that Gallan’s letter was, in fact, the first time some stockholders had even heard of the American Heritage offer. Scrambling, he adjusted the deadline for his company’s purchase offer and began making a very blunt case. The January offer was largely a formal, procedural letter. Now Parton looked to exploit the material that had been served up by the controversy, wrapping his entire sales pitch around the idea that Webster’s Third was a radical dictionary, an offense to the English language, and an embarrassment to Merriam. It was an appeal to respectability, based on the not-irrational fear that this prestigious name in American dictionaries was in danger of no longer being considered an authority on the English language.

  Merriam-Webster dictionaries, Parton wrote, were the “lineal descendants of America’s first dictionary, the American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster. . . . Its latest distinguished successor, Merriam’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, first published in 1934 . . . has for many years been universally regarded as the leading authority on our language. For reasons baffling and unknown to us, the Merriam Company has decided to break with this illustrious tradition.”

  Webster’s Third “radically departed from the distinguished Second Edition.” It eliminated capital letters from headwords, it used an “unintelligible pronunciation guide,” and all the general encyclopedic information was deleted. “What distressed us and many others the most, however, was the abdication of all standards, so that, for example, words like ain’t are given status and recognition.” Parton quoted the dictionary’s critics, the Washington Star calling it “literary anarchy”; the Library Journal calling it “deplorable”; the New York Times saying, “a new start is needed”; the American Bar Association complaining that Webster’s Third was “of no use to us”; Wilson Follett, in the Atlantic, calling it “sabotage,” a “scandal,” a “calamity,” a “disaster”; a recent Times article calling it a “gigantic flop.”

  “As I write this,” added Parton, “the New Yorker (March 10th issue) this week carries still another devastating condemnation extending over 24 pages in the Books section beginning on page 130.”

  The flip comment of early reviews, telling readers to hold on to their old Webster’s, had matured into the New York Times’ call to start anew, which now became the rallying cry of Parton and American Heritage. “If we are given the opportunity,” said Parton, “we intend to take the Third Edition off the market immediately. It is a shameful book and we want no part of it. Instead, we would set about producing a Fourth Edition, based on the scholarly principles of the Second, as fast as possible. This would certainly take several years.”9

  Chapter 36

  While newspapers and magazines from Toronto to Chicago to New York to Washington, D.C., shrieked with alarm over Webster’s Third, smaller newspapers in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California remained neutral while reporting on the controversy. And a quiet defense of Webster’s Third began to mount as several positive reviews were published. The Wall Street Journal applauded the new dictionary and, instead of saying it would hasten the decline of Western civilization, observed that it might fortify us against Orwellian distortions of the language. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose shrewd reviewer, the Appalachian-born onetime schoolteacher and all-around character Ethel Strainchamps, knew more about dictionaries than any other journalist writing about Webster’s Third, called the new dictionary a “staggering accomplishment.”

  Life’s sister publication Time gave it a very friendly write-up, happily noting that “the results may pain purists.” As the New York Times had used unlabeled words from Webster’s Third to embarrass Merriam, Time, always voracious for neologisms, demonstrated what the hip new words made possible, such as “cool cats who make stacked chicks flip.” Such words of youthful delinquency (many of which Webster’s Third, indeed, labeled slang) exercised a special charm for the Time writer, who suggested they were at the very heart of the new vernacular and thus essential for a new unabridged dictionary. “Without drips and pads and junkies, who bug victims for bread to buy horse for a fix, the dictionary of 1961 would not be finalized.”

  The Catholic weekly America took a bemused look at the dictionary’s critics: “To the barricades! Man the breastworks! The dignity of the noble English language, at least as she is spoke by us Amuricans, is being assaulted.” Roy Copperud, language columnist for Editor & Publisher, calmly dismissed the “flurry of nitwitted commentary” that wrongly assumed it was the function of a dictionary “to lay down the law.” Copperud had spoken with Gove and knew why the encyclopedic material had been dropped, and he understood the rationale for leaving the colloquial label behind. But, he insisted, there was a need for usage discriminations, perhaps beyond what a dictionary is capable of. At the same time Copperud wondered why all the four-letter words had been included except the one found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and meaning “copulate with.”

  Ethel Strainchamps returned to the subject of Webster’s Third to note the absurdity of journalists who introduced so much novelty to the language suddenly pretending to be so old-fashioned. The critics’ own prose betrayed their pretensions. “A foreigner, or even a native speaker of English, who has been taught formal English and has held his re
ading to the classical works in the tongue, would have a hard time understanding all of almost any article in any issue of the Saturday Review, the New York Times, or Life, and his 1934 Webster’s would be of little help to him on the very words that would puzzle him most.”1

  The New Republic ran a short and bitter notice bragging that it had been quoted twice in the new dictionary and then complaining that “the dictionary’s compilers have abandoned a function indispensable in any advanced society, that of maintaining the quality of its language.” This was no laughing matter. “If that language is primitive, vague, and illogical, so will the thought be.” As an example, the magazine insisted that bimonthly means once every two months, and yet ignorant people went around using bimonthly to mean twice in one month.

  This kind of condescending lecture on other people’s usage really irritated James Sledd. His thoughts forever racing with irony and humor and not a little dram of anger, the Samuel Johnson scholar had faulted Gove for his naïve assessment of eighteenth-century plagiarism and, on another occasion, had faulted Charles C. Fries for forever beating the dead horse of classroom grammar.2 He didn’t love Webster’s Third. The dropping of the colloquial label, despite its inadequacies, seemed to him no solution at all to the problem of describing usage levels. And the phrasing of definitions in Webster’s Third he considered downright awful. But to him Gove’s dictionary was a serious work of scholarship, and it deserved better than these mincing sermons from media bullies who flattered themselves that they knew so much about language when, in fact, every sentence they wrote revealed their pathetic ignorance.

  “In your attack on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary,” Sledd wrote to the New Republic, “you start off by saying that if a language is ‘primitive, vague, and illogical,’ the thought of its speakers will be that way too. Maybe you’ll say more about all this. Linguists swear they’ve never found a ‘primitive, vague, and illogical’ language, but everybody knows he can’t trust a bunch of sneaking professionals. You may have stumbled on something big. Why don’t you just up and name a primitive language and say what makes it primitive? If you do, you’ll make a reputation for yourself; and until you do, the dirty linguists are likely to say you’re another amateur, talking through your hat.”3

  Take that.

  In May, Bergen Evans had his rematch with Wilson Follett, again in the pages of the Atlantic, this time discussing Webster’s Third. The former host of a TV show devoted to current events, Evans had the pleasantly energetic persona of a man enjoying his time on earth. The contrast with Follett could not have been more stark. Follett had known tragedy in his personal life: financial struggles, a broken marriage, and many years earlier, his daughter, a noted young novelist, had walked out of her apartment one day and was never seen again.4

  The condition of American English Follett saw in tragic terms. But for the efforts of trusted guardians such as those who had labored on Webster’s Second, the language would be defenseless against the forces of ignorance, duplicity, and ugliness.

  Evans was the opposite. He frankly admired the contributions of linguistics, having learned a great deal from the work of Bloomfield and others. And he had been humbled more than once, when a language opinion of his was undermined by someone else’s more careful parsing of the evidence. In a note to Philip Gove, he mentioned that he had been reviewing the galleys of his forthcoming book, in which he had collected several words that were so new that they had not yet been recorded in a dictionary. Checking his brand-new Webster’s Third to make sure this was still true, he learned it was not. Every last one was there.5

  Later defenders would insist that Webster’s Third, in its basic methods, was really no different from Webster’s Second. And to whatever extent Webster’s Third was different, it had little to do with linguistics. This was not what Philip Gove thought, and it was not what Evans thought.

  “There has been even more progress,” Evans wrote in the Atlantic, “in the making of dictionaries in the past thirty years than there has been in the making of automobiles.”6 And the difference was modern linguistics, which, he added, found its charter in Leonard Bloomfield’s Language. Bloomfield, Evans noted, did not study language by reading Strunk’s Elements of Style, but by studying dialects of Cree Indian. Evans seemed to overlook how strange this must have sounded: Our new understanding of English comes from studying Cree?

  The answer was, in a way, yes. By examining American English only through observation, as linguists did when studying foreign languages, modern linguistics, as practiced by scholars like Bloomfield and Fries and many others, had come to a radically different view of the language than had hitherto reigned in schools, dictionaries, and usage guides. By 1962, the findings of Bloomfieldian linguistics were, in fact, so well established that they were old hat and were fast being superseded by the work of Noam Chomsky and generative linguistics.

  Nevertheless, Evans ventured to give his own version of the principal findings of linguistics, after having read Gove’s use of the five concepts found in the 1952 NCTE study, English Language Arts. Thus did he continue a publicity effort that dated back to Charles C. Fries’s first efforts in the 1920s: explaining linguistics to laymen raised on traditional classroom grammar.

  First off, Evans said, language was not properly studied by looking up rules and using them, but by “observing and setting down precisely what happens when native speakers speak.” Logic and the grammar of other languages (Latin, obviously) were irrelevant. The only evidence of correctness that counted was evidence from actual use. Even a rule that aptly described actual practice was liable to become inapt over time, so remember, “change is constant—and normal.” And last: “all usage is relative.”

  Evans toured the errors committed by the naysayers. Not only had Life magazine misquoted Webster’s Third on enormity and irregardless; like the New York Times, it had failed to acknowledge that the language it used was not that of Webster’s Second. Life had also asked whether Lincoln could have written the Gettysburg Address using Webster’s Third. Evans easily cut this argument down. Gove had been overwrought and indignant when the Times editorialist employed unlabeled words from Webster’s Third as no native or even foreign speaker would have used them. Much more calmly and directly, Evans pointed out the obvious. “Nothing worth writing is written from a dictionary.”

  Numerous points made by Evans were clearly shaped by communicating with Gove: that Webster’s Third had jettisoned encyclopedic material to save space; that telling the truth about contemporary English required admitting that “there are many areas in which certainty is impossible and simplification is misleading”; that meaning is “complex, subtle, and forever changing.” Evans went so far as to defend the new dictionary’s laughable definition for door, as Gove had tried in an interview with a New York Times reporter.

  Evans—like Gove—interpreted some criticisms too literally. “The New York Times and the Saturday Review both regarded as contemptibly ‘permissive’ the fact that one meaning of one word was illustrated by a quotation from Polly Adler.” Perhaps their objections addressed only one Adler quotation, but Polly Adler had, in fact, been quoted scores of times in Webster’s Third. Also, Gove made the point elsewhere (a point that Evans echoed) that quoting Adler was as legitimate as quoting anyone, and if it was legitimate to quote her book once, it was legitimate (and more efficient) to do so forty times. In fact, Gove had instructed his readers to dump any book that did not readily yield usable material.

  Evans’s broadest point was his most persuasive: that the language itself had changed profoundly since 1934. “It has had to adapt to extraordinary cultural and technological changes, two world wars, unparalleled changes in transportation and communication, and unprecedented movements of populations.” And, he continued, “more subtly, but pervasively, it has changed under the influence of mass education and the growth of democracy.” Whatever its faults might be, Evans argued, Webster’s Thir
d was an enormous effort to capture and describe, in sufficient detail and without undue prejudice, this great shifting thing called contemporary standard American English.

  After receiving an advance copy of Evans’s article, Gove heartily thanked him for it, saying, “It shines like polished silver.”7

  Chapter 37

  One of the most memorable criticisms of Webster’s Third appeared in a New Yorker cartoon. It showed a visitor to G. & C. Merriam Company being told by the receptionist, “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in.” It says a lot about him that Gove didn’t find this at all funny.1 The field was unevenly split between entertaining critics who hated Webster’s Third unreservedly and a smaller band of defenders, who knew more about dictionaries but sometimes sounded like they were working from a common script as they heaped unqualified praise on Gove’s dictionary. Bergen Evans and Ethel Strainchamps, who published her third and longest defense of Webster’s Third in Harper’s, both made solid observations but found almost nothing to complain about in Webster’s Third—which, as reactions go, seems incredible, given the dictionary’s many idiosyncrasies. Like Gove’s complaining letters to the Times and other critical publications, such writing could and did blunt some of the effects of earlier attacks, but it was not so good that it would have lingered in the mind.

  Dwight Macdonald spent many hours and probably several days looking over Webster’s Third, checking on its treatment of important contemporary terms and its handling of classic usage disputes. Such intensive reading could not substitute for years of routine use, of course, but it yielded a lot of material and convincingly demonstrated a sincere engagement with the book. After visiting Springfield and talking with Gove, whom he found pleasant but unexceptional, Macdonald also read Gove’s Word Study article about the contributions of linguistics to lexicography.