But What's a Dictionary For?
Bergen Evans
The storm of abuse in the popular press that greeted the appearance of Webster's Third
New International Dictionary is a curious phenomenon. Never has a scholarly work of this
stature been attacked with such unbridled fury and contempt. An article in the Atlantic
viewed it as a "disappointment," a "shock," a " calamity ," "a scandal and a disaster. " The
New York Times, in a special editorial, felt that the work would " accelerate the
deterioration " of the language and sternly accused the editors of betraying a public trust.
The Journal of the American Bar Association saw the publication as " deplorable ," "a
flagrant example of lexicographic irresponsibility," "a serious blow to the cause of good English." Life called it "a non-word deluge " monstrous ", " abominable ," and "a cause for dismay." They doubted that "Lincoln could have modelled his Gettysburg Address" on it –a concept of how things get written th
at throws very little light on Lincoln but a great deal
on Life.
What underlies all this sound and fury? Is the claim of the G. R C. Merriam Company, probably the world's greatest dictionary maker, that the preparation of the work cost $3.5
million, that it required the efforts of three hundred scholar s over a period of twenty –seven years, working on the largest collection of citations ever assembled in any language
-- is all this a fraud, a hoax ?
So monstrous a discrepancy in evaluation requires us to examine basic principles.
Just what's a dictionary for? What does it propose to do? What does the common reader
go to a dictionary to find? What has the purchaser of a dictionary a right to expect for his
money?
Before we look at basic principles, it is necessary to interpose two brief statements.
The first of these is that a dictionary is concerned with words. Some dictionaries give
various kinds of other useful information. Some have tables of weights and measures on
the flyleaves . Some list historical events and some, home remedies . And there’s nothing wrong with their so doing. But the great increase in our vocabulary in the past three
decades compels all dictionaries to make more efficient use of their space. And if
something must be eliminated , it is sensible to throw out these extraneous things and
stick to words.
The second brief statement is that there has been even more progress in the making
of dictionaries in the past thirty years than there has been in the making of automobiles
The difference, for example, between the much-touted Second International (1934) and
the much-clouted Third International (1961) is not like the difference between yearly
models but like the difference between the horse and buggy and the automobile. Between
the appearance of these two editions a whole new science related to the making of
editorially
dictionaries, the science of descriptive linguistics, has come into being.
Modern linguistics gets its charter from Leonard Bloomfield's Language (1933).
Bloomfield's for thirteen years professor of Germanic philology at the University of
Chicago and for nine years professor of linguistics at Yale, was one of those inseminating
scholars who can’ t be relegated to any department and don't dream of accepting
established categories and procedures just because they're established. He was as much
an anthropologist as a linguist, and his concepts of language were shaped not by Strunk's
Elements of Style but by his knowledge of Cree Indian dialects.
The broad general findings of the new science are:
1. All languages are systems of human conventions , not systems of natural laws.
The first -- and essential – step in the study of any language is observing and setting down precisely what happens when native speakers speak it.
2. Each language is unique in its pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. It cannot
be described in terms of logic or of some theoretical, ideal language. It cannot be
described in terms of any other language, or even in terms of its own past.
3. All languages are dynamic rather than static, and hence a "rule" in any language can
only be a statement of contemporary practice. Change is constant -- and normal
4. "Correctness" can rest only upon usage, for the simple reason that there is nothing else for it to rest on. And all usage is relative.
From these propositions it follows that a dictionary is good only insofar as it is a comprehensive and accurate description of current usage. And to be comprehensive it
must include some indication of social and regional associations.
New dictionaries are needed because English changed more in the past two generations than at any other time in its history. It has had to adapt to extraordinary
cultural and technological changes, two world wars, unparalleled changes in
transportation and communication, and unprecedented movements of populations.
More subtly , but pervasively, it has changed under the influence of mass education and the growth of democracy. As written English is used by increasing millions and f-or
more reasons than ever before, the language has become more utilitarian and more
informal. Every publication in America today includes pages that would appear, to the purist of forty years ago, unbuttoned gibberish . Not that they are; they simply show that you can't hold the language of one generation up as a model for the next.
It's not that you mustn't. You can't. For example, in the issue in which Life stated editorially that it would folly the Second International, there were over forty words constructions, and meanings which are in the Third International but not in the Second. The issue of the New York Times which hailed the Second International as the authority to which it would adhere and the Third International as a scandal
and a betrayal which it would reject used one hundred and fifty-three separate words, phrases, and constructions which are listed in the Third International but not g the Second and nineteen others which are condemned in the Second. Many of them are used many times, more than three hundred such uses in all. The Washington Post, in an editorial captioned "Keep Your Old Webster's, " says, in the first sentence, "don't throw it away," and in the second, "hang on to it." But the old Webster's labels don't "colloquial" and doesn't include "hang on to," in this sense, at all.
In short, all of these publications are written in the language that the Third International describes, even the very editorials which scorn it. And this is no coincidence , because the Third International isn't setting up any new standards at all; it is simply describing what Life, the Washing-ton Post, and the New York Times are doing. Much of the dictionary's material comes from these very publications, the Times, in particular, furnishing more of its illustrative quotations than any other newspaper.
And the papers have no choice. No journal or periodical could sell a single issue
today if it restricted itself to the American language of twenty-eight years ago. It couldn't discuss halt the things we are inter ester in, and its style would seem stiff and cumbrous .
If the editorials were serious, the public -- and the stockholders -- have reason to be
grateful that the writers on these publications are more literate than the editors.
And so back to our questions: what's a dictionary for, and how, in 1962, can it best do
what it ought to do? The demands are simple. The common reader turns to a dictionary
for information about the spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and proper use of words. He
wants to know what is current and respectable. But he wants – and has a right to – the truth, the full truth. And the full truth about any language, and especially about American English today, is that there are many areas in which certainty is impossible and
simplification is misleading.
Even in so settled a matter as spelling, a dictionary cannot always be absolute.
Theater is correct, but so is theatre. And so are traveled and travelled, plow and plough, catalog and catalogue, and scores of other variants The reader may want a single
certainty. He may have taken an unyielding position in an argument, he may have
wagered in support of his conviction and may demand that the dictionary "settle" the
matter. But neither his vanity nor his purse is any concern of the dictionary's; it must
record the facts. And the fact here is that there are many words in our language which
may be spelled, with equal correctness, in either of two ways.
So with pronunciation. A citizen listening to his radio might notice that James B.
Conant, Bernard Baruch, and Dwight D. Eisenhower pronounce economics as ECKuhnomiks, while A. Whitney Griswold, Adlai Stevenson, and Herbert Hoover

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