The dictionary commonly known as “Webster’s Third” — its full title is “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language” — was published in 1961 after years of assiduous preparation and immediately ran into a storm of controversy that its editors could not have anticipated. David Skinner, who edits Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, argues that the damage was largely self-inflicted.
Its publisher, the firm G. & C. Merriam, issued a cutsy-pie news release citing the various new words the editors had decided to include, among them “A-Bomb,” “beatnik” and “satellite”; the various contemporary celebrities (Betty Grable, Mickey Spillane, Dwight Eisenhower) whose utterances or writings had been quoted as usage examples; and “the new dictionary’s surprisingly tolerant, though oddly worded, entry for ‘ain’t,’ which said ‘ain’t’ was ‘used orally in most parts of the U.S. by cultivated speakers.’ ”
The news release, Skinner writes, “so abbreviated the dictionary’s entry for ‘ain’t’ that it amounted to a misquotation,” one that suggested the dictionary had, as the release put it, granted “official recognition at last” to “ain’t.” Yet this was not the first time “ain’t” had been included in a dictionary, as the news release claimed — quite the contrary — and the editors of “Webster’s Third” had not defended the word but defined it. “All of these mistaken claims tended in one direction,” Skinner writes, “implying that ‘Webster’s Third’ was much more permissive than it actually was, and that all other dictionaries, by comparison, were much more censorious than they actually were.” He continues:
“This is how the newspaper controversy over ‘Webster’s Third’ began. The first publication to accuse Merriam-Webster of being linguistically radical was its own press release. By hiring out the work of announcing its own dictionary to PR professionals, President [Gordon] Gallan and Editor [Philip] Gove had lost control of saying what the new dictionary stood for. Instead of presenting a united front of [sic] America’s learned class, they had circulated a saucy and sloppy notice (with more than a couple typos) designed not to command respect but to catch a news editor’s eye.”
The story gets more amusing after that — though Skinner scarcely tells it in an amusing or witty fashion — because it eventually developed that many of those newspaper editorialists and columnists who had been so quick to pounce on the new Webster’s for “permissiveness” had not actually read the dictionary, or had given it only cursory inspection. The first critics in effect reviewed the news release, and the later ones simply picked up where they had begun. Jacques Barzun, a noted scholar and member of the editorial board of the American Scholar, the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa, attended a meeting in which every member of the board demanded that the magazine indicate “their common disapproval” of the dictionary. Barzun wrote: “Never in my experience has the Editorial Board desired to reach a position. What is even more remarkable, none of those present had given the new dictionary more than a casual glance, yet each felt that he knew how he stood on the issue that the work presented to the public.” As Skinner says, “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.”
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