In his new book about America’s most controversial dictionary, David Skinner refers to the lexicographer Noah Webster Jr’s belief that a common language could keep the nation politically and culturally united. “If the Civil War had not proven him wrong,” Skinner writes, “the controversy over Webster’s Third certainly would have given him second thoughts.”
The Story of Ain’t explains why Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, introduced with much fanfare in 1961, was so jam-packed with fighting words. As Skinner’s title indicates, “ain’t” became its most famously egregious entry, even though it was nothing new. In 1934 ain’t had appeared in Webster’s Second, treated pejoratively. And a dictionary of the 1930s could still dictate which words belonged in polite conversation.
But by 1961 the culture wars and the study of linguistics had made such value judgments much more controversial, which is why Skinner treats the critic Dwight Macdonald, who reviewed the dictionary for The New Yorker, as such a major player in the story.
Linguists fought over the dictionary’s methodology and asked whether the recording or the mandating of English usage was its proper role. Many publications, including The New York Times, argued that the volume deserved to be junked. But it was Macdonald who, in a phrase that may not be dictionary worthy but appears in a quotation on this new book’s back cover, “had a cow” over the Webster’s Third and its parade of outrages.
Skinner, the editor of Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ magazine, wrote “Ain’t That the Truth,” a concise article about the Webster’s Third uproar for it in 2009. There he was primarily examining Herbert C Morton’s 1994 book The Story of Webster’s Third, which remains an excellent resource.
Skinner’s expansion of his article to book length can be indirect and convoluted; he has the habit of introducing parties to the reference-book brawl long before explaining the roles they played in the brouhaha. And while it is indeed interesting that one participant was the first person ever to be awarded a doctorate in traffic, The Story of Ain’t needn’t have been as digressive as that.
When it comes to the central conflict between Macdonald and Philip Gove, the editor most responsible for setting the Third’s agenda, he frames their differences with perfect clarity. “Gove had unveiled the great shining accomplishment of his life,” Skinner says. “Dwight MacDonald wrote the best essay of his life, mocking it.”
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It was Gove who refused to dismiss words as slang when they could be designated “nonstandard” or “substandard”, made pronunciations more varied (the Third featured 26 ways to pronounce “lingerie,” 24 more than the Second contained) and otherwise made the Third more abstruse and less fathomable.
Enter “ain’t,” with a definition written by Gove himself, and an idiotic news release that turned the word into a cause célèbre. The release, which said “ain’t gets official recognition at last”, so abbreviated the definition that all hints of editorial denigration were left out, like the fact that ain’t was “disapproved by many and appeared more common in less educated speech.” The press duly interpreted this as an unalloyed endorsement of ain’t, and the battle lines were drawn.
Skinner follows his story to the heights of dudgeon to which the dictionary wars rose. (Bolshevism was invoked at one point, a slur that he calls “amusing, perhaps, but insane”.) But it’s a pity that his book ends where the Third did: eclipsed by plans announced in 1964 for an American Heritage Dictionary, after American Heritage took over Webster’s publisher.
Since then the instant accessibility, crowdsourcing and online formatting of dictionaries have changed everything, but the story goes on. In 2008 plans for a Fourth unabridged Webster’s were announced and the work is under way. Expect tempests in teacups when a whole new Webster’s sees the light of day.
2012 ©The New York Times
THE STORY OF AIN’T: AMERICA, ITS LANGUAGE, AND THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL DICTIONARY EVER PUBLISHED
Author: David Skinner
Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 349
Price: $26.99
