The Story of Ain't

David Skinner

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062345752
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

"It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper….David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection."

—Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman

The captivating, delightful, and surprising story of Merriam Webster's Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked America's greatest language controversy. In those days, Webster's Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600, 000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work.

In 1961, Webster's Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America's newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary's editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam's long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had "no traffic with…artificial notions of correctness or authority. It must be descriptive not prescriptive." Correct use was determined by how the language was actually spoken, and not by "notions of correctness" set by the learned few. Dwight MacDonald, a formidable American critic and writer, emerged as Webster's Third's chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization..

The Story of Ain't describes a great cultural shift in America, when the voice of the masses resounded in the highest halls of culture, when the division between highbrow and lowbrow was inalterably blurred, when the humanities and its figureheads were shunted aside by advances in scientific thinking. All the while, Skinner treats the reader to the chippy banter of the controversy's key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.

CHAPTER 1

THEY SAY IT IS better to pronounce aunt like art. That it’s sometimes okay to split your infinitives to, you know, avoid ambiguity. But okay is strictly colloquial. Snide is always slang, and alright is in wide use but not considered polite. Dirty words they never use or acknowledge. And ain’t they say is dialectal, illiterate.

Who are they? Their names change from one era to the next, but just now they were the Editorial Board of the G. & C. Merriam Company, and they were at the Hotel Kimball in Springfield, Massachusetts, attending a dinner to celebrate the publication of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Unabridged.

It was June 25, 1934, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt occupied the White House, but few Americans knew their president was bound to a wheelchair. In Hollywood, the actress Mae West was trying to make her film It Ain’t No Sin, which after the censors were done with it was called Belle of the Nineties. A federal court had recently ruled it was legal to sell copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States. For more than a dozen years the novel had been banned due to its earthy vernacular and lewd material, beginning with a scene involving masturbation, which Webster’s Second defined with a good whiff of Sunday school as “onanism; self-pollution.”

Editor in chief William Allan Neilson, a short, bald man with a white mustache and a neat triangular beard, called the room to order. Standing confidently before an oil portrait of Noah Webster, he held a ceremonial gavel that had just been given to him as a gift from his employer. It was fashioned from applewood grown in West Hartford, Connecticut, Webster’s birthplace.

The ballroom had been transformed for supper. It was elegantly strewn with roses and crowded with men in dinner jackets. The menu consisted of consommé vermicelli, breast of chicken with bacon and cream sauce, and then, in the French manner, a salad. History did not record if any libations were served. Prohibition had ended a year earlier, but the very idea of drunkenness was still so vulgar that Webster’s Second followed polite tradition and denied that Americans even used drunk as the past perfect for drink.

Neilson was a practiced public speaker and knew what was expected of him. To introduce Merriam’s president, Asa Baker, he used the most flattering language possible under the circumstances. President Baker, he said, was a “dictionary man.” He was raised in a “dictionary atmosphere” and possessed a “dictionary sense.” His solid judgment had affected every aspect of their new unabridged dictionary, even as Baker also bore responsibility for the firm’s finances.¹

Baker then stood, tall, bespectacled, and nervous-looking. He firmly believed that a dictionary should evince a literary quality, and that the writers it quoted should be literary figures, not humble men like himself.² He said only a few words, but used one of his favorites to describe Webster’s Second. It was a “universal” work, he said, meaning it covered all realms of knowledge and provided answers to almost all questions.

If any book could be so described, Webster’s Second was the one. Weighing seventeen pounds, it contained 600,000 entries, which came to 122,000 more than any other dictionary. It had 12,000 illustrations and 35,000 geographical entries. The cost of its production was staggering: $1.3 million (approximately $21 million in today’s dollars). “The greatest single volume ever published,” Merriam called it.

Certainly no other American dictionary approached its rigor or reputation. And there was no greater name in American lexicography than Webster. The publishing company told and retold the story of George and Charles Merriam buying the unsold sheets of Noah Webster’s 1841 American Dictionary of the English Language. The printer-brothers purchased the right to update Webster’s dictionary from Webster’s family, represented on this night by one of the very few women in attendance, Emily Skeel, Noah’s great-granddaughter.

A member of the founding generation, Webster had dedicated his life to the language of the United States. His wildly popular blue-backed spellers taught Americans to be good, mind their books, and remember the virtues of George Washington. In his dictionary he sought to unite the young republic and liberate Americans from their dependence on the British dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and later imitators. “Language is the expression of ideas,” wrote Webster in 1828, “and if the people of one country cannot retain an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.”

Of course, by 1934 there were many languages spoken in the United States. And even the primary language, English, was shot through with breathtaking variety, as linguists had begun to document in the study of American dialectal speech, and as literary critics had come to praise or blame in the experiments of modern fiction and poetry, and as countless readers had begun to notice in the language of journalism. Also, the United States now played a major role in world affairs. Its frame of reference had grown far beyond North America and Western Europe. Since 1890, Webster’s big dictionary was called an international dictionary.

Still, the dictionaries bearing Webster’s name continued to set the standard for English in the United States, its meanings and its niceties of grammar and usage. Webster’s was “the supreme authority on all matters applying to language,” as one newspaper put it. From this opinion there was no substantial or credible dissent—and there hadn’t been for many years, not since a striking controversy around the time of the Civil War.

For decades in the middle of the nineteenth century (as if there was nothing better to fight over), feuding partisans at Harvard and Yale and among certain newspapers aligned behind competing dictionaries, Webster’s and Worcester’s. The latter belonged to Webster’s onetime business associate Joseph Worcester, with whom he had fallen out. For those at Merriam, the hue and cry of this episode reinforced the lesson that a dictionary needed the documented support of leading public figures. The company sought testimonials from presidents, governors, and notable men of letters. The competition with Worcester also compelled Merriam-Webster to improve its lexicography. Its new editions took account of modern scholarship, even while adding more reference material and illustrations, and becoming more elegant as objects.³

A dictionary in the living room became a symbol of genteel aspiration. It was a password for culture, a ticket to knowledge, a compendium of all that was known and worth knowing. Noah Porter, editor of Merriam-Webster’s 1864 and 1890 editions—and who, like William Allan Neilson, was by day a college president—said a dictionary should be found in every home and consulted on a regular basis. For no other habit, he wrote, “is at once so eminently the cause and the indication of careful attention to the language which we use, and efficient training to the best kind of culture.”⁴

A REPORTER covering the dinner for Webster’s Second wondered just how universal the dictionary was. “Who was the twenty-sixth president?” he asked. “Who fought the battle of the Marne?” “What is the scoring in contract bridge?” “What is the difference between a porterhouse and a sirloin steak?” “Who was Pocahontas’s father?”⁵ Webster’s Second had the answer every time, with lists of battles, presidents, dog breeds, and enough flowers to fill a botanical garden.

It contained basic biographical information on thirteen thousand “noteworthy persons”: American presidents, Austrian dukes, Catholic popes, English writers, French kings, and Roman orators. Its pronouncing gazetteer went from Aarhus in Denmark to Zumbo in Mozambique. The main vocabulary identified historical events, characters from Shakespeare’s plays, figures from the Bible, literary allusions, and classical epithets. Its entries drew bright lines for all those tricky distinctions between shall and will, imply and infer, lay and lie, carefully tending all those delicate little fences. Words that were slang or vulgar or colloquial were so labeled. Pronunciations were few but prestigious, representing “formal platform speech.”

Webster’s Second spoke for America’s learned classes, represented at the head table by dignitaries from education, publishing, and scholarship. Harvard, once home to a number of anti-Webster partisans, had sent two professors: Albert Bushnell Hart, the “grand old man” of American history only a few days short of his eightieth birthday, who had worked on the 1909 edition, and John Livingstone Lowes, a special editor and a scholar of Coleridge and Chaucer whose Cambridge ties were about as old as those of William Allan Neilson. The Scottish-born Neilson, himself a former Harvard professor, was a protégé of the late former president of Harvard, Charles William Eliot.

And there were no sore feelings associated with the New York Times, whose opinions on what belongs in a dictionary had sometimes differed markedly from those of Webster and his successors. The Times’ own associate editor, John H. Finley, a writer turned graduation speaker who collected honorary degrees by the handful, sat at the head table representing the paper of record. All three hundred guests, according to Merriam’s own record of the event, were selected to represent the various professions in a great unified showing of “the country’s most intellectual men.”

Rising from his chair at the head table, principal William C. Hill of Central High School said that the dictionary, after the teacher, was the most important aid to learning. Noah Webster and his successors deserved much credit, he said, for the great increase in the number of Americans who had received a high school education since the Civil War.

The spread of education in America was, indeed, astonishing. In 1880, less than 5 percent of the population had any experience with secondary school. By 1934, more than 20 percent of Americans had completed high school.⁶ So-called adult education—correspondence schools, vocational training—was exposing growing numbers to a new “lifelong process” of modern education, as editor Neilson said in his introduction. Education and the “best kind of culture,” to use Porter’s phrase, were less and less the exclusive possessions of a privileged elite like that assembled at the Hotel Kimball.

A great middle class of intellect—male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and increasingly black—was coming into being, built on American progress toward universal schooling. And the culture reflected it. Little more than a high school diploma was required to enjoy middlebrow offerings such as Henry Seidel Canby’s Saturday Review of Literature and novels from the Book-of-the-Month Club. Radio programs presenting literary discussions became common in the 1930s, as if a popular format built on the art of book reviewing was the most natural thing in the world. Time magazine, while trademarking a smart-aleck prose with no small amount of slang, ran cover stories about the Middle Ages and opera stars.

Science, too, was transforming the image of education and knowledge in these years. Mustard gas and other lab-inspired brutalities of World War I had left science with a public image problem, which American scientists combated through an energetic program of publishing and advertisement. But no public relations campaign was more effective than the lives and stories of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, which the press gratefully reported.⁷ Nor could anything so divisive as the Scopes trial and the fight over evolution in the schools rob technological innovation (airplanes, radio) of its power to amaze the public at large.

Still, this middle class of intellect had old-fashioned notions of quality. Their standards were as much Noah Porter as Cole Porter, something President Baker surely had in mind when he asked William Allan Neilson if he objected to it being mentioned on the first page of Webster’s Second that Neilson had been the associate editor of the well-known and illustrious Harvard Classics.⁸ Potential buyers wanted it on good authority that a book was worth buying.

And Merriam was very much in the business of authority. In its own pages, Webster’s Second was “the Dictionary,” with a capital D and the definite article as if no other existed. But to continue as the linguistic law of the land, the last word on words, the great “they” from whom all correctness comes, Merriam-Webster needed to remain up-to-date and true to its reputation for completeness and accuracy. Professor Hart put it well when he stood and said, “You’ve got to be right. Every contributor to the dictionary knows that. That is why Webster’s dictionary is what it is.”

CHAPTER 2

IN 1961, G. & C. Merriam Company sent out a press release to announce its new dictionary, Webster’s Third. Along with the press release some journalists received a photo of Betty Grable, whose last movie was How to Be Very, Very Popular.¹ The connection was not exactly obvious.

The new dictionary had updated the definition for leggy, but the press release did not point this out. Nor did it mention the fact that sexy was no longer labeled slang. Or even that pinup was one of the new words entered since 1934. But there was this: Betty Grable spoke English.

Twenty-seven years after Webster’s Second, the Cold War (a newish term included in Webster’s Third) was under way and President Kennedy was in his first year of office. Looking back from the New Frontier to the New Deal, Merriam’s president, Gordon J. Gallan, decided against throwing another banquet.²

He had been at Merriam for over a decade but was not an old dictionary hand like Asa Baker. He had no editorial experience. Before becoming president, he had been the publisher’s advertising manager. And what the new dictionary needed, he thought, was a good promotional campaign. So, instead of renting out the Hotel Kimball, he hired Ruth Millard Associates, a public relations firm in New York City.

Expectations were low, but the story had potential. The press release quoted ...