From The New York Times Sunday Book Review
When a Dictionary Could Outrage
By Geoffrey Nunberg
“A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass., have been confabbing and yakking for 27 years — which is not intended to infer that they have not been doing plenty work.” Thus began an editorial that appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 12, 1961, excoriating the recently published Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
At 2,700 pages and almost 14 pounds, Webster’s Third was a literally weighty work, the product of over 700 editor-years of effort, the publisher boasted. But it was widely denounced for what critics viewed as a lax admissions policy: it opened its columns to parvenus like “litterbug” and “wise up,” declined to condemn “ain’t,” and illustrated its definitions with quotations from down-market sources like Ethel Merman and Betty Grable. That was reason enough for The Times to charge that Merriam had “surrendered to the permissive school” and that the dictionary’s “say as you go” approach would surely accelerate the deterioration already apparent in the language. In The New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote that the editors had “made a sop of the solid structure of English,” and in an Atlantic article called “Sabotage in Springfield,” Wilson Follett called the Third a “fighting document” that was “out to destroy . . . every obstinate vestige of linguistic punctilio, every surviving influence that makes for the upholding of standards.” (The dereliction that most appalled Follett was the Third’s refusal to reject “that darling of the advanced libertarians,” the use of “like” as a conjunction.)...
But in one regard The Times hasn’t changed its attitude over the last half-century. Whether condemning Webster’s Third for including “yak” or applauding the O.E.D. for adding “OMG,” it has always assumed, like most everyone else, that the recognition conferred status as a “real word.” Yet lexicographers themselves disavow any such role — their inclusion of “w00t” or “staycation” means little more than that the words have been popping up a lot lately. Indeed, the day is long past when any dictionary could circumscribe the “official” language. The boundaries are irremediably blurred — between public and private, formal and casual, high, middle and low.
Even so, people continue to grant the dictionary an exalted status. It can trick itself out in jeggings and mankinis, but the public still pictures it wearing a bow tie and a seersucker suit. Understandably, dictionary publishers aren’t above trading on those attitudes to promote their books. But they haven’t quite come to terms with one telling point that Wilson Follett made in his philippic on the Third: “The lexicographer cannot abrogate his authority if he wants to.”
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, teaches at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.