When Words Were Worth Fighting Over

I have a quibble with the title of David Skinner’s new book, The Story of Ain’t. In fact, that pariah contraction plays only a supporting role in the story. The book is really an account of one of the oddest episodes in American cultural history, the brouhaha over the appearance of Merriam-Webster’s Third International Dictionary in 1961.

At 2,700 pages, Webster’s Third was literally a monumental work of scholarship. It was the first American unabridged dictionary in 25 years, and the first to make use of the findings of modern linguistics. But critics pilloried it for what they considered an overly permissive approach to usage. They singled it out for its apparent failure to condemn “ain’t,” which it noted was used by many cultivated speakers. But they also attacked it for admitting colloquial items like “litterbug” and “wise up,” and for illustrating some of its definitions with quotations from down-market authorities like Ethel Merman and Bette Grable.

Those charges were actually way overdone, but the dictionary became a national scandal anyway. Life magazine accused it of abandoning any effort to distinguish between good and bad usage, and The New York Times warned that it would accelerate the deterioration of the language. In a long essay in The New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote that the editors had “made a sop of the solid structure of English.” The controversy even made it into a New Yorker cartoon by Alan Dunn. It showed a receptionist at Merriam-Webster telling a visitor, “Sorry, Dr. Gove ain’t in.”