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By Root 1036 0

climate since the second edition appeared, in 1934. The most important difference between Webster’s Second (hereafter called 2) and Webster’s Third (or 3) is that 3 has accepted as standard English a great many words and expressions to which 2 attached warning labels: slang, colloquial, erroneous, incorrect, illiterate. My impression is that most of the words so labeled in the 1934 edition are accepted in the 1961 edition as perfectly normal, honest, respectable citizens. Between these dates in this country a revolution has taken place in the study of English grammar and usage, a revolution that probably represents an advance in scientific method but that certainly has had an unfortunate effect on such nonscientific activities as the teaching of English and the making of dictionaries—at least on the making of this particular dictionary. This scientific revolution has meshed gears with a trend toward permissiveness, in the name of democracy, that is debasing our language by rendering it less precise and thus less effective as literature and less efficient as communication. It is felt that it is snobbish to insist on making discriminations—the very word has acquired a Jim Crow flavor—about usage. And it is assumed that true democracy means that the majority is right. This feeling seems to me sentimental and this assumption unfounded.

There have been other recent dictionaries calling themselves “unabridged,” but they are to Webster’s 3 as a welterweight is to a heavyweight. 3 is a massive folio volume that weighs thirteen and a half pounds, contains 450,000 entries—an “entry” is a word plus its definition—in 2,662 pages, cost three and a half million dollars to produce, and sells for $47.50 up, according to binding. The only English dictionary now in print that is comparable to 3 is the great Oxford English Dictionary, a unique masterpiece of historical research that is as important in the study of the language as the King James Bible has been in the use of the language. The O.E.D. is much bigger than 3, containing 16,400 pages in thirteen folio volumes. It is bigger because its purpose is historical as well as definitive; it traces the evolution of each word through the centuries, illustrating the changes in meaning with dated quotations. The latest revision of the O.E.D. appeared in 1933, a year before Webster’s 2 appeared. For the language as it has developed in the last quarter of a century, there is no dictionary comparable in scope to 3.

The editor of 2, Dr. William A. Neilson, president of Smith College, followed lexical practice that had obtained since Dr. Johnson’s day and assumed there was such a thing as correct English and that it was his job to decide what it was. When he felt he had to include a substandard word because of its common use, he put it in, but with a warning label: Slang, Dial., or even bluntly Illit. His approach was normative and his dictionary was an authority that pronounced on which words were standard English and which were not. Bets were decided by “looking it up in the dictionary.” It would be hard to decide bets by appealing to 3, whose editor of fifteen years’ standing, Dr. Philip Gove, while as dedicated a scholar as Dr. Neilson, has a quite different approach. A dictionary, he writes, “should have no traffic with...artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.” Dr. Gove and the other makers of 3 are sympathetic to the school of language study that has become dominant since 1934. It is sometimes called Structural Linguistics and sometimes, rather magnificently, just Modern Linguistic Science.

While one must sympathize with the counterattack the Structural Linguists have led against the tyranny of the schoolmarms, who have caused unnecessary suffering to generations of schoolchildren over such matters as shall v. will and the who-whom syndrome—someone has observed that the chief result of the long crusade against “It’s me” is that most Americans now say “Between you and I”—it is remarkable what strange effects have been produced in 3 by