Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [110]
(To be entirely fair, perhaps compulsively so: If one reads carefully the five closely printed pages of Explanatory Notes and especially paragraphs 16.0 through 16.6 (twelve inches of impenetrable lexical jargon), one finds that lightface small capitals mean a cross-reference, and if one looks up KNOW—which is given after knowed in light-face small capitals—one does find that knowed is dialect. This is not a very practical or sensible dictionary, one concludes after such scholarly labors, and one wonders why Dr. Gove and his editors did not think of labeling knowed as substandard right where it occurs, and one suspects that they wanted to slightly conceal the fact or at any rate to put off its exposure as long as decently possible.)
The systematic softening or omitting of pejorative labels in 3 could mean: (1) we have come to use English more loosely, to say the least, than we did in 1934; or (2) usage hasn’t changed, but 3 has simply recorded The Facts more accurately; or (3) the notion of what is a relevant Fact has changed between 2 and 3. I suspect it is mostly (3), but in any case I cannot see complected as anything but dialected.
In 1947 the G. & C. Merriam Co. published a little book entitled Noah’s Ark—in reference to Noah Webster, who began it all—celebrating its first hundred years as the publisher of Webster dictionaries. Toward the end, the author, Robert Keith Leavitt, rises to heights of eloquence which have a tinny sound now that “Webster” means not 2 but 3. In one paragraph, which the G. & C. Merriam Co., for some peculiar reason, has refused to let me quote, Mr. Leavitt paints a glowing picture of Webster’s Unabridged as the arbiter of bets, the authority on which courts and legislatures rely, the last resource of businessmen when contracts need defining, and the great wellspring of accurate knowledge for thousands on thousands of “youngsters lying sprawled under the table” happily absorbing information that teachers had vainly tried to impart.
While this picture is a bit idyllic—Clarence Barnhart’s American College Dictionary, put out by Random House, is considered by many to be at least as good as the Webster Collegiate—it had some reality up to 1961. But as of today, courts that Look It Up In Webster will often find themselves little the wiser, since 3 claims no authority and merely records, mostly deadpan, what in fact every Tom, Dick, and Harry is now doing—in all innocence—to the language. That freedom or imprisonment should depend on 3 is an alarming idea. The secretary correcting her boss, if he is a magazine publisher, will collide with the unresolved bimonthly and biweekly problem, and the youngsters sprawled under the table will happily absorb from 3 the information that jerk is standard for “a stupid, foolish, naïve, or unconventional person.” One imagines the themes: “Dr. Johnson admired Goldsmith’s literary talent although he considered him a jerk.” The editors of the New Webster’s Vest Pocket Dictionary, thirty-nine cents at any cigar store, label jerk as coll. But then they aren’t Structural Linguists.
The reviews of 3 in the lay press have not been enthusiastic. Life and the Times have both attacked it editorially as a “say-as-you-go” dictionary that reflects “the permissive school” in language study. The usually solemn editorialists of the Times were goaded to unprecedented wit:
A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass. [the editorial began], have been confabbing and yakking for twenty-seven years—which is not intended to infer that they have not been doing plenty work—and now they have finalized Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, a new edition of that swell and esteemed word book.
Those who regard the foregoing paragraph as acceptable English prose will find that the new Webster’s is just the dictionary for them.
But the lay press doesn’t always prevail. The irreverent may call 3 “Gove’s Goof,” but Dr. Gove and his editors