Founding Grammars (35 page)

Although the second edition had listed many words not normally considered part of standard English, it had conveyed subtle usage judgments with a variety of status labels—
improper, jocular, colloquial, illiterate, dialectal, erroneous.
Most of these labels were missing from the new edition.
Slang, nonstandard,
and
substandard
still appeared in
Webster's Third,
but not often. Instead, example sentences demonstrated typical uses of the word. The editors' idea was that readers would identify slang or informal speech from the context, but this subtlety escaped many dictionary users, who assumed that unlabeled words were being treated as totally acceptable.

The release of the dictionary on September 28 triggered a second round of hostile comments.
The New York Times
printed another, much colder, review in its editorial pages. It opens with a sentence concocted from words that the
Times
was disturbed to find in
Webster's
—“A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass. have been confabbing and yakking … and now they have finalized Webster's Third New International Dictionary.” (Like the slogan “Hang onto your
Webster's Second!,
” this ferociously jocular opening would soon become a reviewing clich
é
. Even though the reviewers disapproved of slang in the dictionary, they couldn't resist indulging in a little themselves.)

The editorial then gets serious. The
Times
editors accuse the Merriam Company of surrendering to “the permissive school that has been busily extending its beachhead on English instruction in the schools.” They complain that “intentionally or unintentionally,” the new dictionary reinforces the notion that “good English is whatever is popular.”

Although the
Times
recognizes that a deluge of new words has entered the language since 1934, it believes that the dictionary, as the “peerless authority” on American English, should have been much more restrictive in its choices and much more critical of the nonstandard words that were included. The dictionary's editors, in the
Times
editors' opinion, have dismally failed in their responsibility to the public. The review ends with a plea to the dictionary's editors not to throw out the printing plates for
Webster's Second
just yet.
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The dictionary's other innovations only added to reviewers' annoyance. They grumbled that the new pronunciation symbols were confusing and the technique of writing definitions as a single phrase made entries hard to read. They thought that quoting movie stars rather than great British authors gave the dictionary an air of frivolity. Some were upset by Merriam's decision to cut encyclopedia-type materials—the biographical and geographical appendixes, foreign quotations, proverbs, famous fictional characters, and similar items—to make room for the new entries. The main target of their fury, however, remained the status granted to bad grammar and incorrect usage.

“Webster's, joining the say-as-you-go school of permissive English, has now all but abandoned any effort to distinguish between good and bad usage,” laments a
Life
magazine reviewer. The reviewer accepts
ain't
as a “justifiable” contraction, but scolds the dictionary's editors for including “monstrous non-words” like
irregardless
and
finalize.
The magazine
Science,
although generally approving of the dictionary, especially its handling of scientific terms, hopes that “the next edition will distinguish more sharply … between illiterate and literate usage.”
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Atlantic
writer Wilson Follett published an influential review that could have been inspired by the shade of Richard Grant White. Follett identifies the book's main improvement as the plethora of new technical and scientific words. The merits of these, he says, can only be judged by specialists. On the other hand, the book's shortcomings are immediately evident to everyone. They are in the area of “standard, staple, traditional language.” We can all make judgments about this area of language, declares Follett, because we all use it. Like White, Follett felt confident matching his native good taste against the expertise of specialists.

In Follett's view, the new dictionary was a catastrophe. “Webster III,” he thunders, is 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.”

Follett provides a long list of nonstandard expressions—
wise up, ants in one's pants, hepcat
—that have entered the dictionary with no qualifying label to mark their problematic status. He feels that this failure to pronounce on what's correct amounts to “a large-scale abrogation” of the dictionary maker's responsibility. Dictionaries are meant to provide guidance, a ruling on what constitutes good speech. Unwary users of
Webster's Third
may get the impression that all words and phrases are equally acceptable.

Even more objectionable is the inclusion of questionable example sentences.
Due to
is used with the meaning
because of
in “abominations” such as
The event was canceled due to inclement weather. Different than
appears in several examples, such as
different than any other piece we've done lately
(from no less respectable a source than
Harper's
).
Like
is shown introducing embedded clauses, as in
looks like they can raise better tobacco.
The dictionary also gives examples of plural pronouns with
everybody—Everybody has made up their minds—
and
whomever
in subject position—
I go out to talk to whomever it is.

Follett is appalled that
Webster's
has decided to “exert its leverage” in favor of these ungrammatical uses. The fact that people say these things does not necessarily make them worthy of inclusion in an authoritative dictionary. By confining itself to neutrally recording current English,
Webster's Third
has failed in its duty as a gatekeeper. (The dictionary actually does note in several of these instances that the usages are “disapproved by some grammarians.” Either Follett didn't notice these comments or didn't consider them a forcible enough condemnation.)
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Chicago Daily News
columnist Sydney Harris gets to the heart of what troubled Follett and others. Harris starts out with the usual jovial opening—“Lemme recommend a swell new book”—followed by a slang-filled paragraph or two. He closes the review, however, in a more serious vein. Harris tells readers, “Our attitude toward language merely reflects our attitude toward more basic matters.” Sloppy word use is not terribly important in itself, but it indicates a general decay in values. “If everything is a matter of taste and preference and usage,” he insists, “then we are robbing ourselves of all righteous indignation against evil.”
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The real fault of
Webster's Third,
in the view of Harris and other critics, is that it turns a blind eye toward America's linguistic sins.

To Harris, and to many like-minded people before and since, correct usage was a sign of high principles and moral virtue. By not sufficiently condemning words like
irregardless—
and the people who say them—
Webster's
seemed to be condoning immoral behavior. It was as though they were claiming that people who use words and grammar correctly are no more virtuous than people who say
ain't.

*   *   *

In 1961 many formerly solid traditions were teetering on the edge of collapse. A new political era seemed to be dawning when John F. Kennedy, the youngest president ever to be elected, beat the older and more established Richard Nixon by a razor-thin margin. Dramatic social changes were also in the offing. Activist college students were striking the first blows against segregation with sit-ins and Freedom Rides throughout the South. On the cultural front, the group of writers and poets known as the Beats were challenging the pieties of mainstream American life, while the new rock 'n' roll music seemed to be tempting young people toward a looser, riskier lifestyle.

Old standards of language use appeared to be crumbling as well. Part of the reason was that modern theories about language were infiltrating the schools and universities. E. B. White may have scorned the Happiness Boys—more typically called structural linguists—but others took them more seriously. Their influence had become a nagging pain to usage conservatives.

Structural linguists were the modern descendants of the philologists. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts, they studied languages methodically. In recent decades, however, the focus had shifted from tracking the historical development of a language to describing and analyzing its current structure.

Descriptive linguists (as they were also called) studied languages with the aim of describing them as accurately and completely as possible. The acceptability or otherwise of a word or usage was merely one more fact about it, largely irrelevant to what linguists were interested in. They wanted to understand how language works. Labels like
substandard
and
slang
are not intrinsic features of language—they're about the social status of the speakers. To descriptive linguists' minds, anything that people were currently saying must be “good” or “grammatical” language in some context, even if it was rejected in others. They believed with Thomas Lounsbury that “whatever is in usage is right.”

Those who defined grammar as a set of prescribed rules interpreted this neutral view of language use as permissive, or “anything goes.” E. B. White and others with his outlook saw linguists as approving, or even encouraging, violations of traditional grammar. Linguists might have pointed out—as many defenders of
Webster's Third
later did—that neither they nor grammar critics can hold back language change. People who use
ain't
in normal conversation or habitually say
Who did you speak to?
were almost certain to continue saying those things, whether linguists gave them permission or not.

The descriptive approach to language was beginning to influence the way some English teachers thought about grammar. A 1952 curriculum review by the National Council of Teachers of English includes a chapter on “The Modern View of Grammar and Linguistics” that outlines the authors' interpretation of modern linguistic principles—language constantly changes; correctness can only be based on current usage; and all usage is relative.

“The contemporary linguist does not employ the terms ‘good English' and ‘bad English' except in a purely relative sense,” explain the authors, “Good English is … the form of speech which is most clear, effective, and appropriate on any given linguistic occasion.” Bad English is the opposite, “no matter how traditional, ‘correct,' or elegant the words or phrases employed.” Later, they suggest what this idea might mean in practical terms. They propose, “The teaching of correctness must shift in emphasis.… Instead of teaching rules for the avoidance of error, pupils must be taught to observe and understand the way in which their language operates.”
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The possibility that schools would start teaching children to draw their own conclusions about usage was bound to upset anyone raised on old-fashioned grammar books. It invited linguistic anarchy. Even more disturbing, it opened the door to social leveling. This idea was no more appealing to usage arbiters in 1961 than it had been in the 1870s when Richard Grant White was laying down the laws of usage in his
Galaxy
column. While linguists still agreed with Lounsbury, defenders of the traditional standard continued to believe with White that “there is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general.”

Reviewers attacked
Webster's Third
in doom-laden terms partly because they feared that the linguistic principles corrupting English teaching had also tainted the dictionary. Some thought their forebodings were justified when editor-in-chief Philip Gove wrote an article for the October 1961 issue of
Word Study
ominously titled “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography.”

Gove's article did not in fact contain much that should have troubled traditionalists. In it he concludes that modern linguistics has not had much impact on dictionary making so far. It has not affected spelling, which has been fixed for English since the eighteenth century. Definitions, the main reason why monolingual dictionaries exist, have been only marginally affected, mainly through the redefining of a handful of grammatical terms. The biggest impact on
Webster's Third
has been in the area of pronunciation. In an effort to represent the country's multiple pronunciations with greater accuracy, the dictionary has introduced a new pronunciation key based on the technical alphabet used by linguists (called the International Phonetic Alphabet).

Gove's critics, however, were not focused on specifics. What really worried them was the editor-in-chief's attitude. Although Gove argued that modern linguistics had hardly influenced the dictionary at all, he made it clear that he believed in its general principles. He closes the
Word Study
article by admitting that lexicography is not yet a science. It is more of an art, requiring “subjective analysis, arbitrary decisions, and intuitive reasoning.” Still, that's no excuse for intellectual sloppiness. Lexicography “should have no traffic with guesswork, prejudice, or bias or with artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.” He adds, “If the dictionary should neglect the obligation to act as a faithful recorder and interpreter of usage,… it cannot expect to be any longer appealed to as an authority.”
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Usage purists who had relied on the grammatical judgments in
Webster's Second
vehemently disagreed.