The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  Thanks to all of my Weekly Standard friends, from Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes on down the line, but especially Vic Matus, Andrew Ferguson, and Matt Continetti, all of whom listened and commented thoughtfully while I rattled on about this subject. I should also thank Richard Starr and Claudia Anderson, under whose tutelage I learned a lot of what I know about grammar, editing, and style. I owe a shout-out to the unforgettable Matt Labash. And my regards to Philip Terzian and Kelly Jane Torrance, who have taken a kind interest in this effort and worked with me on other writings during this period.

  My JMAP friends—Jeff Capizzano and Arrow Augerot, Michelle and Peter High, and Barry and Mary Becton—were unerringly supportive. My old friends Ben Rosen and Andrea Heiss were just lovely about this project from the moment they heard me talking about Webster’s Third on WNYC.

  My Rosemont neighbors and the Meryl Street Gang (David and Jen, Toby and Amy, Jim and Alma, Jess and Bill) for all their encouragement. Also thanks to the Maury Eagles and their wonderful parents.

  Rafe Sagalyn and Shannon O’Neill at the Sagalyn Agency were very supportive and critical to helping me think about how to make a feud into a larger story.

  Julia Cheiffetz bought my proposal and provided several fine insights into how the book might work. When Julia left HarperCollins, I lucked out as my manuscript migrated to the desk of Michael Signorelli. Michael has been an especially kind and generous editor, careful, thoughtful, and reliable. And thanks to Douglas Johnson for his fine proofreading and copyediting.

  I have many people to thank for their hospitality and friendship when I was on the road for this book. Matt, Rosie, Ruby, and Fionna Brennan made me at home in Boston. Heather Peske and Charlie Toulmin put me up in Cambridge. Chris Skinner opened his apartment in Queens to me. Diana Paulin and Michael Lynch welcomed me in Connecticut and loaned me one of the family cars.

  The Skinners—my parents and all my brothers and sisters—and the Brennans—my parents-in-law and sisters-in-law—have been especially thoughtful and supportive during this project. Additional thanks to Kerry Brennan for reading a portion of the manuscript and chatting with me about her experiences in ESL education.

  The greatest of thanks to my wife, Cynthia.

  I am lastly but eternally grateful to my three children, Maddy, Ben, and Tommy, for their love and also for steering clear of the cave of books and papers that has been growing in our basement these last two and a half years.

  Notes

  CHAPTER 1

  1. The description of Neilson’s gavel and his compliments to President Baker come from the Springfield Republican, June 26, 1934, as do most of the speeches. Also used in this chapter was material, including the menu and décor, from a commemorative booklet found in the Papers of William Allan Neilson, Smith College Archives.

  2. William Allan Neilson mentioned Baker’s opinion (saying Baker had always “strongly emphasized the ‘literary flavor’ which our dictionaries had built up”) in Minutes for a meeting of the Editorial Board, October 11, 1944, Papers of William Allan Neilson.

  3. See Howard C. Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), for a summary of the “War of the Dictionaries.” See also Joseph H. Friend, The Development of American Lexicography: 1798–1864 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).

  4. Noah Porter, Books and Reading, Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1881), 302.

  5. Article labeled “Springfield News” in Papers of William Allan Neilson.

  6. See Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chapter 1.

  7. See Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, “Crafting Communications Infrastructure: Scientific and Technical Publishing in the United States,” in Kaestle and Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, chapter 12, 248, 253.

  8. Neilson letter to Baker dated February 3, 1934, Papers of William Allan Neilson.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. “The company is passing out leggy photos of Betty Grable, who is quoted in the book,” reported BusinessWeek on September 6, 1961. The article was collected in James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt, eds., Dictionaries and That Dictionary (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1962).

  2. See Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third, chapter “Usage and Final Tasks,” 150.

  3. Quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 1961. No verbatim copy of the press release exists in the Papers of Philip Gove, but the quotes from this chapter appear in several press accounts collected in Dictionaries and That Dictionary. See also chapter 9 of Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third, and “A Review of the Reviews of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language,” a report written for Merriam-Webster by Raven I. McDavid, October 1966, Papers of Philip Gove, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

  4. New York Times, September 7, 1961.

  5. Quoted from Morton’s prologue to The Story of Webster’s Third, 5.

  6. Interview with E. Ward Gilman, who worked on Webster’s Third, training definers. Gilman was later the editor and lead author of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

  7. “The Big Book” and a separate poem that was also part of the entertainment come from Philip Gove’s son, Norwood Gove, whom I also interviewed and corresponded with.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. William Allan Neilson provides a brief description of Eliot at the podium in the preface of Charles W. Eliot: The Man and His Beliefs, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926).

  2. All quotations from this ceremony come from The Inauguration of William Allan Neilson as President of Smith College, Northampton, MA, 1917.

  3. See James H. Hanford, “Harvard Philology Forty Years Ago,” Antioch Review, Autumn 1948.

  4. Quoted in Edwin L. Battistella, Do You Make These Mistakes in English? The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  5. For these few details on Eliot and Neilson’s work on the Harvard Classics I rely on the account given in Margaret Farand Thorp, Neilson of Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

  6. Letters from Eliot to Neilson, August 29 and 30 and September 7, 1909, William Allan Neilson Personal Papers, Smith College Archive.

  7. Paul S. Boyer, “Gilded-Age Consensus, Repressive Campaigns, and Gradual Liberalization: The Shifting Rhythms of Book Censorship,” in Kaestle and Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, 286. The editing of Chief British Poets of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries is discussed in Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 183–184.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. See chapter 13 of Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). I relied on this thoroughgoing biography for basic details of Mencken’s life.

  2. H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 1 vol., abridged ed., edited by Raven I. McDavid Jr. with the assistance of David W. Maurer (New York: Knopf, 1977), 58. See also Betty Gawthorp’s chapter (1911–29) in Raven I. McDavid Jr., ed., An Examination of the Attitudes of the NCTE Toward English (Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1965).

  3. Quoted by Gawthorp in An Examination of the Attitudes of the NCTE Toward Language, 9–10.

  4. See Allen Walker Read, “The Membership in Proposed American Academies,” American Literature (May 1935) and “American Projects for an American Academy to Regulate Speech,” PMLA (December 1936).

  5. Kenneth Cmiel, in Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Mencken both discuss Lincoln’s reception in New York City
in light of rhetorical norms.

  6. Quoted from the version published in 1863 by Dana Barker Gage, who rewrote what Sojourner Truth said at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, adding the recurring line “Ain’t I a Woman.”

  7. Quoted in Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 89.

  8. This number is drawn from Battistella, Do You Make These Mistakes in English?, 122.

  9. Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2009), neatly chronicles the rise of Spencer’s schools and their eventual replacement by the Palmer method. Arthur M. Schlesinger, in Learning How to Behave (New York: Cooper Square, 1968), 42, notes the controversy over spoons.

  10. Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home (1953; reprint, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 5.

  11. See Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave, 57, 60.

  12. This story is told in Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third, 16.

  13. From the preface of Not Under Forty, first published in 1936.

  14. Quoted in Rodgers’s biography of Mencken. It comes from “Talking the United States,” New Republic, July 1936.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. The photo appears in A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, edited by Michael Wreszin (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), a wildly readable collection of letters that I rely on in several chapters of this book. My account of The Hedonists Club is derived from Wreszin’s impressively documented biography of Macdonald, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994). All the quotations from this chapter come from the first chapter of letters in A Moral Temper.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Quoted in Charles C. Fries, “Periphrastic Future with Shall and Will in Modern English,” PMLA (December 1925), 978.

  2. Robert C. Pooley, Grammar and Usage in Textbooks on English (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1933), chapter 4, applies and explicates much of Fries’s findings and also shows the state of contemporary textbook rules on the future tense in English.

  3. Biographical details were found in Richard W. Bailey, “Charles C. Fries: The Life of a Linguist,” in Toward an Understanding of Language: Charles Carpenter Fries in Perspective, edited by Peter Howard Fries in collaboration with Nancy M. Fries (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985). The son of Charles Fries, Professor Fries also assisted me by directing my attention to certain pieces of writing in which his father discussed the shape of his career.

  4. Charles C. Fries, “Implications of Modern Linguistic Science,” College English (March 1947).

  5. See William G. Mouton’s introduction to Studies in Honor of Albert Marckwardt, edited by James E. Alatis (Washington, DC: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, 1972).

  6. Quoted from the preface of Charles C. Fries, The Teaching of the English Language (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1927).

  7. See Fries, The Teaching of the English Language, chapters 3 and 4 (on pronunciation and vocabulary).

  8. Peter Fries told me about the chair routine, a fond family memory, and that the discussion may have first taken place in the 1940s, was probably reprised in the 1950s, and was revisited with C. C. Fries’s grandchildren.

  9. The following discussion of will and shall and all quotes concerning that study come entirely from “The Periphrastic Future with Shall and Will in Modern English.” General observations on usage come from The Teaching of the English Language.

  10. See Norman R. French, The Words and Sounds of Telephone Conversations (N.p.: Bell Telephone System, 1930). This study is cited and discussed in the context of Fries’s study in Pooley, Grammar and Usage in Textbooks on English.

  CHAPTER 7

  1. Macdonald in 1924 had written to Smith what, from his response—found in Dwight Macdonald’s papers at Yale—sounds like a fan letter, asking about Smith’s writings, how he got his start, etc. There is another letter from Smith in Macdonald’s papers, dated 1930.

  2. Quoted from Linda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). The examples of words that Bradley disliked and the quotation from his letters also are drawn from Mugglestone, 176–177.

  3. All other quotations for this chapter come from Henry Seidel Canby, American Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947). See part 3, chapter 2 and chapter 15.

  4. See the “Growth” chapter in Charles Lee, The Hidden Public (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958).

  5. See New York Times profile of James Laughlin by Paul Wilner, June 15, 1979.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. See Thorp, Neilson of Smith, 323. I drew several details about Neilson’s life on campus from this book, including the priceless quotations about smoking (250–251). The chapter “Harvard Again” was very helpful, as were “The President and the Undergraduates,” “The President as Scholar,” and “The President and the Alumnae.”

  2. Nation, May 13, 1925, quoted in Thorp, Neilson of Smith, 253.

  3. Quoted in Thorp, Neilson of Smith, 326.

  4. Quoted in Thorp, Neilson of Smith, 254.

  5. Minutes of the November 20, 1951, Meeting of the Editorial Board of G. and C. Merriam Company. I learned this from a comment by Philip Gove, who had reviewed the transcripts of the Editorial Board meetings for Webster’s Second, Papers of Philip Gove, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

  6. Quoted in Thorp, Neilson of Smith, 260.

  7. William Allan Neilson, “The Theory of Censorship,” Atlantic, January 1930.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. From Macdonald’s profile of Richard Weil Jr., New Yorker, February 9, 1952.

  2. Quotation from letter to Dinsmore Wheeler, January 8, 1929, in Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper, 30.

  3. This tidbit about Luce’s feelings on Babbitt I found in W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Dell, 1974), 61.

  4. A nice journalistic account of the magazine launch was written by Daniel Okrent for CNNMoney.com, September 19, 2005.

  5. Letters to Dinsmore Wheeler, March 13, 1929; December 12, 1929; and June 13, 1930, in Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper, 33–34, 38–39, 42–43.

  6. There’s a nicely rounded account of Macdonald’s time at Fortune in Daniel Bell, ed., Writing for Fortune (New York: Time, 1980), from which these details come.

  7. Quote comes from “Fortune Magazine,” part 2 of a two-part article Macdonald published in the Nation, May 8, 1937.

  8. I found this recording of FDR’s first inaugural at americanrhetoric.com.

  9. The lines about Henry Ford and Nancy Rodman both come from letters to Dinsmore Wheeler, February 2, 1930, and January 8, 1934, in Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. L. H. Robbins, “ ‘It Is Me’ Is Now ‘Pretty Good’ English,” New York Times, December 3, 1932.

  2. Some of the panelists are mentioned by name in Edward Finegan, Attitudes Toward English Usage: The History of a War of Words (New York: Teachers College Press, 1980), 91.

  3. “Exclamation of ‘Oh Yeah’ Traced Back to Saxons; English Teachers Told It Is Not Modern Slang,” New York Times, October 27, 1931.

  4. Current English Usage was reprinted in 1938 by the National Council of Teachers of English with a discussion and further research by Albert H. Marckwardt and Fred G. Wolcott as Facts About Current English Usage. Quotations and survey findings are taken from this book.

  5. Ibid., one: 76; very amused: 102–103; an historical: 98; You was: 91; different than: 121–122.

  6. Ibid., busted: 96; Martha don’t sew: 90; ain’t: 95; It is me: 77; all right: 130; reason why: 111–112; from whence: 110; I wish I was wonderful: 73; shall vs. will: 83–84; on grammar in grammar schools: 136–137.

  CHAPTER 11

  1. From letter to Nancy Rodman, July 1, 1934, in Wreszin, ed
., A Moral Temper, 48–49; most of Macdonald’s words in this chapter also come from this source.

  2. From letter to Nancy Rodman, July 20, 1934, 49; and undated 1936 letter to Henry Luce, 67–71, in Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper.

  3. Letter to Dinsmore Wheeler, October 7, 1929, in Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper.

  4. Quoted in Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 52, which gives a full account of this episode.

  5. From a letter to Dinsmore Wheeler, June 10, 1936, in Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper.

  CHAPTER 12

  1. Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 504.

  2. See Robert A. Hall Jr., A Life for Language: A Biographical Memoir of Leonard Bloomfield, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), 63. I rely on this biography, along with Robert A. Hall, ed., Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on His Life and Work (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987), for the biographical sketch in this chapter.

  3. Quoted in Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 43.

  4. Items found in Robert A. Hall Jr.’s biography A Life for Language include the note about r sounds: 3; Bloomfield’s wartime experience: 19; his comment about a Hitler coming to power in the United States: 56; the Menominee Indians: 26; black Americans: 56; his use of fake bedbugs: 31.

  5. Statements from Leonard Bloomfield, Language, include the discussion of correctness: 3; mention of lexicography and upper-class forms of speech: 7.

  6. Ibid., on normative grammars: 7; Sanskrit: 10–11; Grimm’s law: 18; ain’t: 22; linguistic lack of prejudice: 38.

  7. Ibid., substandard vs. nonstandard: 48, 52.