After Webster’s Second was published, William Allan Neilson was often called on to defend the “universal” dictionary. In doing so, he could be rather modest about its powers of correctness.
To Leon Scott of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who wanted to know why negro had not been capitalized in Webster’s Second, he wrote, “All that a dictionary like Webster’s can do is to record actual usage and when opinion differs show its own preference.” To another correspondent, who complained about a technical inaccuracy, Neilson pleaded helplessness: “One of the embarrassing things . . . about a dictionary is that one is not free to state merely what one is convinced is correct but one has to record usages which are widespread even when they are unscholarly and inaccurate.”1
Usage, of course, was not everything. Naughty words and phrases were left out of dictionaries of the time, including Webster’s Second, which had found room for minor dukes, Austrian generals, and Turkish pashas but not such common scatological terms as cunt, dick, or shit. Nor did it allow fuck, penetrate in the sexual sense, hump in the sexual sense, or pecker in the nonwoodpecker sense.
Some words that referred to dirty matters were allowed into Webster’s Second but made to clean up their act first. The definition for peep show made it sound respectable; the definition for orgy mentioned Bacchus and “carousal” but avoided the issue of arousal. Horny had something to do with actual horns but not much else. Both George Bernard Shaw and D. H. Lawrence had used ménage à trois to describe love triangles, but in Webster’s Second the entry for ménage was limited to “a household”—no more, no less.
Neilson’s dictionary claimed to represent “the civilization of today,” but its concept of civilization excluded large stretches of American and international life. The reporter who said it contained the answer to every question he could think of should have asked about show business.
Movie had elbowed out film, an Americanism that was thriving abroad, but the movies was considered slang in Webster’s Second. Bit, extra, gag, grip, stuntman, and numerous others from the silent and talkie eras made it in. Some terms hailed from elsewhere but gained currency with the rise of cinema: Fan originated in baseball and star had been used figuratively for a long time but both became associated with Hollywood, which itself entered the files in 1923, and by 1934 was shorthand for “the American motion-picture industry.”2
But if he had looked for marquee names, the reporter would have found biographical entries for Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin and none for Mary Pickford. None of the pioneering directors or daring businessmen who built and ran the Hollywood studios were listed.
Nor did the reporter ask about sports figures. The Editorial Board had decided not to include even Babe Ruth, who had set the home run record in 1927 and carried the New York Yankees to seven pennants and four World Series victories.3 The great boxers of the era were not named. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney went unmentioned. The great Joe Louis was left out, while room was found for thirteen different French kings named Louis.
And never mind Louis Armstrong. There was no entry for what was called at the time race music (though there was one for race riot). There was no entry for Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Ma Rainey, or Bessie Smith. “Morton, Jelly Roll” was not on this honor roll. Harlem was listed, but one could not tell that it was the birthplace of the “New Negro Movement.” W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington got in, but not Marcus Garvey.
Darky was labeled colloquial in Webster’s Second, which sadly may not have been unthinkable in the 1930s, when the no-nonsense Rhett Butler asked Scarlett O’Hara, “Do you think you can parade through the Yankee army with a sick woman, a baby, and a simple-minded darky?”
Clearly whiteness did not make you civilized, or even mentionable in polite company. Eugene O’Neill, Somerset Maugham, and Oscar Wilde were all listed, rightly, in the pronouncing biographical section, but none of their works or characters were given entries, while hundreds of lines were devoted to entering the titles of and characters from Charles Dickens’s works. William Allan Neilson had arranged for Merriam to hire a few girls from Smith, at forty cents a hour, to read and mark up contemporary prose for Webster’s Second, but it may have been too much to ask a young woman to page her way through Desire Under the Elms or Of Human Bondage or The Picture of Dorian Gray.4
Sometimes Webster’s Second did not seem to be of the twentieth century. Under wrath were four illustrative quotations, not one of which had been written after the sixteenth century.5 Faced with the choice of being up-to-date or safely behind the times, the editors often chose the latter. The dictionary embraced “formal platform speech” just as radio and microphones were making it possible to spare one’s vocal cords and address the public in a more conversational tone and style, as Roosevelt did in his fireside chats, speaking usually in the first person and cozily calling his listeners “my friends.” Ballyhoo they labeled slang, even after FDR used the term, not without dignity, saying, “We cannot ballyhoo ourselves back to prosperity.”6
Yet it was the great American dictionary of its day, and it did cover a major expansion of the standard lexicon. From Armistice Day (when the Allies and Central Powers ceased fighting) to zero hour (the moment when a military plan is enacted), world war had contributed many new phrases. Flame thrower and mustard gas were newly entered, used in the battles that moved Wilfred Owen to write of “blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Webster’s Second even translated “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori”—a line from Homer that Owen borrowed with bitter irony, meaning “It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country”—because it was the kind of thing cultured people want to know. Shock troops, meaning a highly disciplined advance guard, was in the new dictionary, dated 1917 in Merriam’s files, though shock as a term of war went back to Shakespeare’s time. Defeatism summed up the postwar mood in Europe; so did shell-shocked, a term of psychiatry coined early in the Great War to categorize numerous symptoms appearing in veterans.
The answers to war were also in Webster’s Second. Woodrow Wilson’s optimistic Fourteen Points were described, one by one, starting with its famous demand for covenants of peace and ending with the proposed creation of the League of Nations, also defined in Webster’s Second. More lasting than either was the developing concept of the nation-state, which entered Merriam’s files in 1918 and became a fundamental principle of the international system, giving all peoples with a historic national identity a presumptive case for statehood.
The dictionary’s preface referred to “the increased pace in scientific knowledge in the past generation.” Blood sugar, continental drift, radio frequency, sac fungus, and countless scientific and technical terms much less recognizable had joined the language. The twentieth century’s interest in the mental self had begun taking shape as a raft of important psychological terms—collective unconscious, extrovert, gestalt psychology, id, superego—appeared while Sigmund Freud still lived and breathed and himself appeared in the main vocabulary as well as the list of noteworthy persons in Webster’s Second.
Jazz was one of the great new words to enter the language (its first citation dated 1913 in Merriam’s files), while its derivatives jazzy and jazz as a verb were labeled slang in Webster’s Second. Flapper, once a young woman trained to prostitution, was labeled colloquial for “a young girl of about fifteen to eighteen years of age, esp. one who is not yet ‘out’ socially.” The very next sense, labeled slang, was the quintessential 1920s usage: “a girl or young woman whose behavior or costume are characterized by daring freedom or boldness.”
With the Nineteenth Amendment, entered in the dictionary like all the other constitutional amendments, the flapper, or at least her mother and older sisters, got the vote. With the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments, alcohol was banned and re-legalized. Speakeasy—labeled slang, of course—dated to the nineteenth century but had gained new relevance in the twenties as the Anti-Saloon League (itself an entry) won passage of the laws that banned the sale of alcoholic spirits. Wet and dry were prominent colloquialisms in the twenties, as adjectives referring to potables, moral attitudes, and political sides of prohibition, itself also defined in Webster’s Second.
The economic meaning of depression, an old usage, was included, but America’s economic troubles had not yet earned the definitive article the or come to be known as “great.” President Roosevelt’s New Deal made for an entry, defined as the policy of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.
Grammar was handled delicately, so as not to offend. Under split infinitive, the editors wrote that it was “widely objected to, but it is sometimes desirable or necessary, esp. to avert ambiguity.” Holding the line on shall and will required an enormously complicated usage note, and under future the entry noted that “this tense is formed with shall and will”—the findings of Charles C. Fries notwithstanding. As Webster’s Second instructed readers on correct usage, it sought to avoid the nagging tone of the schoolmarm, but sometimes it could not be helped.
“The forms of lie are ignorantly or carelessly confounded with those of the transitive verb lay,” said the dictionary. Elsewhere the editors reported actual usage while acknowledging the rules such usage violated. Under got, the dictionary said, “the phrase ‘have got’ . . . is objected to by many grammarians but is common in colloquial use.” Under me could be found a usage note for “It is me,” saying, “although avoided in formal writing and by precise speakers is frequent in colloquial and dialectal speech.” Different from was preferred to different than, and than him was “generally regarded as incorrect.”
Under genteel, Webster’s Second said the word was “now regarded as at least inelegant, except when used humorously or somewhat sarcastically.” Such was the fate of genteel some twenty years after the writer George Santayana decried the “genteel tradition in America” and Van Wyck Brooks followed by criticizing the separation in American life of a prissy, respectable, academic culture of “highbrows” from the popular, streetwise culture of “lowbrows.” In this division, William Allan Neilson was certainly on the side of the highbrows, but in its packaging and retailing of high culture Webster’s Second was also an example of what would come to be called middlebrow culture. And genteel was, in fact, an excellent word to describe its editorial intentions, especially in the first sense listed: “free from vulgarity.”