Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [107]
The argument has now shifted from whether a dictionary should be an authority as against a reporter (in Dr. Gove’s terms, prescriptive v. descriptive) to the validity of the prescriptive guidance that 3 does in fact give. For Dr. Gove and his colleagues have not ventured to omit all qualitative discriminations; they have cut them down drastically from 2, but they have felt obliged to include many. Perhaps by 1988, if the Structural Linguists remain dominant, there will be a fourth edition, which will simply record, without labels or warnings, all words and nonwords that are used widely in “the American language community,” including such favorites of a recent President as nucular (warfare), inviduous, and mischievious. But it is still 1962, and 3 often does discriminate. The trouble is that its willingness to do so has been weakened by its scientific conscience, so that it palters and equivocates; this is often more misleading than would be the omission of all discriminations.
One drawback to the permissive approach of the Structural Linguists is that it impoverishes the language by not objecting to errors if they are common enough. (“And how should I presume?”—T. S. Eliot.) There is a natural tendency to confuse similar-sounding words. Up to now, dictionaries have distinguished nauseous (causing nausea) from nauseated (experiencing nausea); but 3 gives as its first definition of nauseous, without label, “affected with or inclining to nausea.” So the language is balled up and nauseous is telescoped into nauseated and nobody knows who means which exactly. The magisterial Fowler—magisterial, that is, until the Structural Linguists got to work—has an entry on Pairs & Snares that makes sad reading now. He calls deprecate and depreciate “one of the altogether false pairs,” but 3 gives the latter as a synonym of the first. It similarly blurs the distinction between Fowler’s forcible (“effected by force”) and forceful (“full of force”), unexceptional (“constituting no exception to the general rule”) and unexceptionable (“not open or liable to objection,” which is quite a different thing). A Pair & Snare Fowler doesn’t give is disinterested (impartial) and uninterested (not interested); 3 gives disinterested as a synonym of uninterested.[2]
Each such confusion makes the language less efficient; and it is a dictionary’s job to define words, which means, literally, to set limits to them. 3 still distinguishes capital from capitol and principle from principal, but how many more language-community members must join the present sizable band that habitually confuses these words before they go down the drain with the others? Perhaps nothing much is lost if almost everybody calls Frankenstein the monster rather than the man who made the monster, even though Mrs. Shelley wrote it the other way, but how is one to deal with the bimonthly problem? 2 defines it as “once in two months,” which is correct. 3 gives this as the first meaning and then adds, gritting its teeth, “sometimes: twice a month.” (It defines biweekly as “every two weeks” and adds “2: twice a week.”) It does seem a little awkward to have a word that can mean every two weeks or every eight weeks, and it would have been convenient if 3 had compromised with scientific integrity enough to replace its perfectly accurate sometimes with a firm erroneous. But this would have implied authority, and authority is the last thing 3’s modest recorders want. (“Let this cup pass from me.”—New Testament.)