The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Chapter 38

  James Sledd was in full combat mode. He wrote a sixty-five-page rebuttal of the reviews of Webster’s Third and was co-editing a collection of critical and defensive writing from the controversy, to be published by Scott, Foresman. A southerner and, in his own words, a conservative, Sledd was in a lather after reading Dwight Macdonald’s review.

  “In my view,” he told Macdonald, “you’ve led a mob in an intellectual lynching. You haven’t just attacked the Third International. You’ve attacked history itself, and you didn’t even get your facts straight.”1

  Macdonald answered that he’d never been accused of “attacking history itself,” but that it was “rather flattering.” Sledd’s suggestion that he’d committed errors was more troubling. “Heads will roll” in the magazine’s fact-checking department, said Macdonald, if that was the case—a statement that rather bothered Sledd, who was more than a little sensitive about how underlings should be treated. But in all modesty, asked Macdonald, wasn’t it really the case that he had only followed the mob? So many others came first.2

  “It’s not much of a defense, is it,” answered Sledd, “to say you didn’t catch the victim and tie his hands—you just shot him?” His point was that Macdonald had given credibility to the anti-intellectual hysteria swirling around Webster’s Third. “Friends of mine in four major universities have cited your essay to me. They think it’s brilliant. Of course, they haven’t studied the dictionaries, either; but they won’t bother to now. You’ve told them what to think, so they’re happily thinking it and repeating it to their students.” He did not want to get any fact-checkers fired, but Sledd mentioned that Macdonald had missed some cross-references and that he needed to reread the definition of ego—a suggestion he meant literally.

  Sledd had spent serious time in the guts of both Webster’s Third and Webster’s Second. He cited page numbers and prefaces, pulling out of the “downstairs” footer of page 111 in Webster’s Second a stub entry for an’t, a variant of ain’t that it called a “colloquial contraction of are not, am not”—which amounted to a much more liberal treatment of ain’t than found in the main entry.

  Macdonald didn’t know the first thing about structural linguistics, said Sledd, as he put the phrase in quotes, so absurd did he find Macdonald’s use of it. Then returning to his academic friends, he told Macdonald that he owed it to them to admit that he was against English linguistics and dictionaries in general. “They ought to know, for instance, that poor old Gove’s five little precepts (from a ten-year-old book for middle-aged schoolmarms) can all be matched quite nicely in W2.”3

  This became the classic defense of Webster’s Third: the argument that it was really not so different from Webster’s Second. Gove’s five truisms were such banal propaganda that approximate versions of the same ideas could be found even in William Allan Neilson’s dictionary. Ergo, there was no proof that Webster’s Third had been created under the spell of structural linguistics.

  Macdonald told Sledd he should reread his own letter. “What you seem to be saying is that I should be ashamed of myself because my article has been influential in academic-intellectual circles. . . . Now honestly. The alternatives you present are to write an ineffective article, or to accept guilt as a leader of a lynch mob—really, as a leader. But I wrote my piece, after much thinking and research, because I was, and still am, convinced that Webster 3 is one more example of the debasement of standards in our cultural life (others are RSV Bible and the Adler-Hutchins Great Books, both of which I’ve dealt with).”

  He had no bias against Gove, said Macdonald. “I liked Gove when I spent most of a day with him in Springfield early in the course of my research, and I am convinced he is a sincere and even idealistic lexicographer. Which still doesn’t prevent him from being, alas, more than a bit of a dope.”

  Macdonald conceded to Sledd that he had been wrong about ego and masses, but if Webster’s Second had called an’t colloquial, then it had attached “a warning label,” warning people that the word was inappropriate for formal use, in keeping with everything else Macdonald had said about Webster’s Second. And Gove’s truisms, Macdonald had said in his article, were reasonable in themselves. As for their connection to structural linguistics, this was something he had gotten from Gove.

  “I’m not, of course, ‘against English dictionaries and English linguistics generally’ and therefore see no reason I should confess to ‘innocent friends’ that I am. (They must be not only innocent, but also stupid, in your terms, to have been taken in by my spiel. In fact you sound paranoiac—conspiracies everywhere, people who should Know Better being seduced by glib arguments, which you assume, as paranoiacs do, are not sincerely meant by the author—otherwise why should I feel guilty because my arguments have convinced people?)”

  Macdonald then must have taken a deep breath. “Sorry,” he wrote in the next sentence, “got sore. But you do put a strain on one’s reasonableness.” Then he asked Sledd if he had read another essay he’d just written, this one for Life, about the scientific view of language. (Sledd, of course, hated the piece.) Then Macdonald referred back to some business relating to the volume Sledd was assembling, in which Macdonald’s New Yorker essay would be published along with a feisty back-and-forth with Sledd.

  Then Macdonald said, in the closing of his letter, “Sorry to sound irritable—but you do irritate me.”

  Chapter 39

  James Parton’s efforts were being thwarted not just by Gordon Gallan, but by the family names of Merriam-Webster tradition. Descendants of onetime presidents Orlando M. Baker, H. Curtis Rowley, Asa Baker, and founders George and Charles Merriam one after another refused Parton’s offers to buy them out.

  In March, Jim Bulkley called up Arthur Rowley, who owned close to two thousand shares in Merriam, to say that Parton would like to meet with him. Rowley, who’d long known Bulkley’s family, flew into a rage. Rowley did not want to see Parton or anyone else from American Heritage because, he said, they had badly misrepresented Merriam and were now much resented by the major stockholders.

  Said Bulkley, “Well, I do know they are resented by Mr. Gallan.”

  No, said the old man, “they are resented by all the stockholders, and I refuse to have anything to do with American Heritage.”1

  Resentment continued to run high. A week later, Rowley sent Bulkley a personal note, saying, “your participation in the attempted merger of the American Heritage with the G. and C. Merriam Co. does not meet with my approval. You certainly overstepped the bounds of friendship and good will by your actions.”2

  Bulkley drew two lessons. The first was that these families were deeply appreciative of the financial support that came from their Merriam stock, so much so that they looked upon the company as an almost maternal figure who could do no wrong.

  The second lesson he took away was that “Gordon Gallan is one of the greatest salesmen I have encountered in many a year and has proven to be a much more formidable opponent than I had believed possible.”

  Parton saw the matter differently. “Gallan is making an ogre out of us and is undoubtedly blaming us for a lot of the critical reviews.”3 As it happened, Parton was trying to arrange negative reviews but could not figure out how to pull it off.

  While reading a Times story mentioning an academic defense of Webster’s Third by the Syracuse University professor Sumner Ives, Parton noticed that Ives was identified as one of fifteen members of NCTE’s Commission on the English Language. To him this sounded like an august body of experts whose opinion might carry a lot of weight. “The question I now raise,” he said in a memo, “is how we might adroitly get this authoritative group to express a collective judgment on Merriam’s Third International.” He wondered if he could get the New York Times to poll its members. Or maybe, he thought, the Saturday Review would be willing to do it.4

  Nancy Longley, one of his colleagues at American Heritage, was skeptical
. “I wonder whether their ideas of the Third International would coincide with ours? If they didn’t, maybe we wouldn’t be so anxious to give them a platform.”5

  Parton had someone look up the names of everyone on the commission. In addition to Sumner Ives, it included Albert Marckwardt, James Sledd, Harold B. Allen, and W. Nelson Francis. It was stacked with people friendly to linguistics and the scientific view of language.

  Parton wrote to Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic, begging to know why they had felt it necessary to let Bergen Evans answer the criticisms of Wilson Follett. Because it was a divisive subject, Weeks replied, but he assured Parton that “in our Atlantic usage our sympathies are on the side of Follett.”6

  By June, Parton and company were focusing on some of the midrange stockholders. “I suspect that our biggest ally may turn out to be the Grim Reaper. In other words, if [Harry] Caswell, [Edward] Kronvall, or [James Brewer] Corcoran should go where the woodbine twineth (and their extreme age suggests this may be reasonably soon), it might tip the scales somewhat in our favor.”7

  Bulkley estimated that Corcoran was in his midseventies and the other two were over eighty years old. Together the three old men held about 2,500 shares, but even if they all expired at once and their heirs immediately sold American Heritage their stock, the combined pickup would only marginally improve American Heritage’s position.8

  And Parton’s sales pitch continued to fail with the larger owners. The families most closely associated with Merriam history refused to budge. James Merriam Howard wrote to Parton in September. His financial adviser had reviewed the performances of Merriam and American Heritage and had concluded that “Merriam did not have much to learn about management from American Heritage.”

  Howard then discussed Parton’s accusation that Webster’s Third was a radical dictionary that had abandoned all standards of usage. Actually, wrote Howard, with a professorial air, “the criticisms leveled against it are very similar to those aimed at Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) and its first revision (1840). As you know, Webster’s younger contemporary, Joseph E. Worcester, issued a dictionary along more conservative lines, following Dr. Johnson’s pattern of setting a standard of literary usage. Worcester’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1860) was hailed by Webster’s critics, and for several decades rivaled its popularity. But gradually Worcester faded out and Webster became the acknowledged authority by the end of the nineteenth century.”9

  As the months dragged on, Parton seemed to lose his stamina for taking over Merriam. He made little progress in amassing Merriam stock, and in the fall his wife, only forty-five years old, died from cancer.

  “There is little to report on Merriam,” he wrote to a friend. “We have added little to our holdings and now have a substantial minority position. But it is clear there can be no breakthrough unless one of several very old men . . . dies or the company’s next annual statement indicates some significant change in its financial position. Accordingly, I have reverted to my thought of creating a new dictionary from scratch.”10

  Chapter 40

  One of the problems facing the willing contributor to a controversy is finding fresh logs for the fire. The stakes must somehow be raised, which becomes more difficult the longer a controversy runs. Dwight Macdonald had swept up material from many earlier reviews, but he made sure to fill in many basic details, otherwise unknown, from the story of the dictionary’s creation. And he sought to produce additional evidence of the dictionary’s perfidy.

  He also, in his article, evoked Fowler to argue for a higher standard than popular usage to determine correctness, basically an aristocratic standard of the best users, insisting that we need to be selective about whose usage we follow. This was not an unreasonable response, but alone it would have failed to affect the general perception, already widespread, that Webster’s Third was insufficiently discriminating. Macdonald added something new with his Shakespearean lament, the suggestion that anything short of this preferred standard would result in a savage new order, as right and wrong lost their names and the universal wolf feasted on the universal prey. It was, arguably, a return to the Toronto Globe and Mail doomsday scenario in which Webster’s Third failed to save us from nuclear destruction, but the fact that a well-known intellectual was saying this in the pages of the New Yorker helped make it news.

  That this whole wolf-eating-wolf conclusion was hardly supported by Macdonald’s evidence, which wasn’t half as strong as he thought, seems almost beside the point. Like the definition for door, the controversy over Webster’s Third had become unhinged. Macdonald had moved the controversy into an imaginary, almost mystical realm, where minor details looked like world-destroying monsters.

  Yet Macdonald’s argument somehow did not appear absurd. In fact, it helped goad others to take similar action. In the spring 1963 issue of American Scholar, Jacques Barzun, who did know something of the intellectual roots of Webster’s Third, took the unusual position that actual knowledge of this dictionary was unnecessary to condemn it. Writing as a member of the magazine’s editorial board, he said that at a recent meeting the subject of Webster’s Third had come up and every last member of the board wanted the American Scholar to take notice, expressing their common disapproval.

  “Never in my experience has the Editorial Board desired to reach a position,” wrote Barzun, who was appointed their spokesman. “What is even more remarkable, none of those present had given the new dictionary more than a casual glance, yet each one felt that he knew how he stood on the issue that the work presented to the public.”1

  James Sledd was right. With the help of Dwight Macdonald—Wilson Follett and the New York Times also deserve mention—the vilification of Webster’s Third had reached the point where even the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Society felt no compunction about denouncing a dictionary its officers freely acknowledged not having read.

  Barzun himself weighed in, calling Webster’s Third “the longest political pamphlet ever put together by a party.” Its “scientism” allowed for no compromise. “No one who thinks at all can keep from being a partisan.”

  Barzun pointed to the dictionary’s use of the swung dash symbol—a simple space-saving device that allows the lexicographer to avoid repeating the headword in illustrations and quotations—as typical of the dictionary’s approach. The discriminating, worldly Jacques Barzun, critic of cant and champion of good sense, then argued that the piddling, totally unremarkable swung dash symbolized Webster’s Third and its “attack on The Word.”

  Which, it must be said, was just plain nutty, a term Webster’s Third characteristically did not label slang, despite its intensely flip, dismissive mood. Then again, when a smart guy like Jacques Barzun, on behalf of a host of committed ignoramuses, is calling a dictionary—really, a dictionary—an attack on The Word, capitalized in biblical fashion to suggest the beginning of all Creation, well, then nutty appears to be the new standard.

  Barzun’s essay may have contained the makings of the smartest critical piece to be written about Webster’s Third. But its immoderation placed too great a strain on what little evidence it had mustered. This was a pity, for Barzun understood enough about linguistic controversies to see how Gove’s ambivalence about correctness had thoroughly colored the editorial policies of his dictionary. From its muddled policies on ethnic and racial slurs—nigger and kike were “usu. taken to be offensive,” as if, on some occasions, they were also considered polite—to its lack of capital letters and nonjudgmental labels, Webster’s Third was often baffling to the well-meaning reader in search of forthright advice.

  And yet Barzun was onto something when he wrote that “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language is thus the representation between covers of a cultural revolution.” And he seemed to be reading Gove’s mind as he continued: “From its tendentious title—the work being neither Webster’s nor international, and only
now and then a dictionary—to its silly systems and petty pedantries, the book is a faithful record of our emotional weaknesses and intellectual disarray.”

  Philip Gove would not have put it negatively, but in his words and his dictionary he had said almost as much. Not only had it been a practical and commercial necessity to depart from the traditions of Webster’s Second; it had been, for Philip Gove, an intellectual necessity. And, in his mind, the difference between Webster’s Third and Webster’s Second was enormous.

  Scholarly and international reviews of Webster’s Third began to appear in 1962 and 1963. The international reviews were quite positive, and the American scholarly reviews helped refute a number of charges against Webster’s Third. Language scholars expressed great puzzlement and not a little impatience with the characterization of Webster’s Third as a poster child for structural linguistics, while groaning over the countless simple errors of fact and the great prejudice of its critics in the press.

  Albert Marckwardt said that “the presumed role of structural linguistics in Webster’s Third reflects a most unfortunate confusion, and ironically it is the editor of the dictionary who is in part responsible for it.” The notion that correctness rests upon usage (principle number 5) had been around well before Leonard Bloomfield, Marckwardt said, and it was common among such scholars as Thomas Lounsbury, Louise Pound, Charles C. Fries, and Sterling Leonard. “The structural linguists accepted this as a matter of course, but they did not invent it.” Where structural linguistics specifically could be detected in Webster’s Third, Marckwardt believed, its influence was limited to pronunciations.2

  This, however, ducked the messier and larger question of how linguistics in general and the scientific view of language had indeed shaped many policies of Webster’s Third. And it suggested that the writings of Fries and other linguists less exclusively associated with structural linguistics were totally uncontroversial, which was not true.