Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [109]
I don’t mean to imply (see infer) that the compilers of 3 didn’t give much thought to the problem. When they came to a doubtful word, they took a staff poll, asking everybody to check it, after reviewing the accumulated cites, as either slang or standard. This resulted in cornball’s being entered as slang and corny’s being entered as standard. Such scientific, or quantitative, efforts to separate the goats from the sheep produced the absurdities noted above. Professor Austin C. Dobbins raised this point in College English for October, 1956:
But what of such words as boondoggle, corny, frisk, liquidate, pinched, bonehead, carpetbagger, pleb, slush fund, and snide? Which of these words ordinarily would be considered appropriate in themes written by cultivated people? According to the editors of the ACD [the American College Dictionary, the 1953 edition, published by Random House] the first five of these words are slang; the second five are established usage. To the editors of WNCD [Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, published by Merriam-Webster in the same year] the first five of these words represent established usage; the second five are slang. Which authority is the student to follow?
Mr. Dobbins is by no means hostile to Structural Linguistics, and his essay appears in a recent anthology edited by Dr. Harold B. Allen, of the University of Minnesota, an energetic proponent of the new school. “Perhaps the answer,” Mr. Dobbins concludes, “is to advise students to study only one handbook, consult one dictionary, listen to one instructor. An alternate suggestion, of course, is for our textbooks more accurately to base their labels upon studies of usage.” Assuming the first alternative is ironical, I would say the second is impractical unless the resources of a dozen Ford Foundations are devoted to trying to decide the matter scientifically—that is, statistically.
Short of this Land of Cockaigne, where partridges appear in the fields ready-roasted, I see only two logical alternatives: to label all doubtful words slang, as 2 does, or to drop the label entirely, as I suspect Dr. Gove would have liked to do. Using the label sparingly, if it is not to produce bizarre effects, takes a lot more Sprachgefühl than the editors of 3 seem to have possessed. Thus horse as a verb (“to engage in horseplay”) they accept as standard. The citations are from Norman Mailer (“I never horse around much with the women”) and J. D. Salinger (“I horse around quite a lot, just to keep from getting bored”). I doubt whether either Mr. Mailer or Mr. Salinger would use horse straight; in these cites, I venture, it is either put in the mouth of a first-person narrator or used deliberately to get a colloquial effect. Slang is concise and vivid—jalopy has advantages over dilapidated automobile—and a few slang terms salted in a formal paragraph bring out the flavor. But the user must know he is using slang, he must be aware of having introduced a slight discord into his harmonics, or else he coarsens and blurs his expression. This information he will not, for the most part, get from 3. I hate to think what monstrosities of prose foreigners and high-school students will produce if they take 3 seriously as a guide to what is and what is not standard English.
Whenever the compilers of 3 come up against a locution that some (me, or I) might consider simply wrong, they do their best, as Modern Linguists and democrats, to be good fellows. The softening-up process begins with substituting the euphemistic substandard for 2’s blunt erroneous and illiterate. From there it expands into several forms. Complected (for complexioned) is dialect in 2, not often in formal use in 3. Learn (for teach) is now a vulgarism in 2, now chiefly substand. in 3. (Chiefly is the thin end of the wedge, implying that users of standard English on occasion exclaim, “I’ll learn you to use bad English!”) Knowed is listed as the past of know, though broke is labeled substandard for broken—another of those odd discriminations. Doubtless they counted noses, or citation slips,