After more than fifty years with the company, Robert C. Munroe, then president and successor to Asa Baker, opened a meeting of the Editorial Board by saying, “I look upon this as one of the most important meetings this company has ever had.” The date was November 20, 1951.
“We are about to develop policies for a new Merriam-Webster dictionary, a dictionary which will probably be one of the most momentous publications in all of the publishing world. Although I am not an overly religious man, I almost feel like opening this meeting with a prayer that we’ll be guided in the right direction.”1
The direction was not entirely clear and the circumstances less than auspicious. “I refer to the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Munroe said, “without any daylight or fresh air, and with the mustiest old books imaginable.” After that enigmatic comparison, he turned the meeting over to Philip Gove.
“It is ironic,” Gove said, “that the very title of the book we are considering contains a series of words which almost defy definition. It starts out with the word Webster, about which there seems to be considerable doubt. The exact meaning of the word New is anyone’s guess. The word International has never been clearly defined. We are not even sure of the precise definition of the word dictionary, and the word English is open to considerable discussion. The word language has had a multitude of interpretations, and, finally, it is almost impossible to define precisely the word Unabridged.”
Strange but true, the current editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, found the meanings of these words to be so debatable that he was openly casting doubt on whether this volume was still Webster’s, actually new, definitively international, really a dictionary, categorically English, or even unabridged.
Much had changed since 1934. Gone was the nineteenth-century confidence that had shaped the information and opinions of Webster’s Second. A “universal” dictionary, a “supreme authority” was impossible if not laughable. There were now countless issues, it seemed to Gove, that could not be settled behind a closed door by a handful of men of goodwill.
“Language is infinitely complicated,” he said, “and the dictionary is therefore infinitely complicated. It demands a type of understanding that defies the ability of any one individual: it demands so much understanding that no one can understand it all and only a few can move about in it comprehendingly.”
These were not philosophical problems better ignored by the lexicographer, or minimized in order to sell dictionaries. Gove was far too principled for such cynicism. The layman’s point of view had been shown to be primitive, superstitious, unsound. It could no longer be placated.
But now the theoretical conundrums that riddled linguists became practical challenges for the lexicographer. The basic problem was this, said Gove: “We can never know fully what any word means to another person. The nine of us could not agree on the word girl on any but an elementary level.”
He said it was “unfortunate” that the company had billed its big dictionary as “the supreme authority,” a comment that by itself represented a 180-degree turn in the zeitgeist that informed the work at Merriam-Webster. An unabridged dictionary, he added, was really only for the “intelligently literate.” More than the ability to read was needed to profit from its use.
Then, finally sounding optimistic, like a man undertaking a long and difficult project, he said the new dictionary would strive for nothing less than “the widest possible coverage of standard language.” So great a feat required the company to “keep step with linguistic advance.” As language changed, so must the vocabulary of a dictionary, so must its sense of how words were used.
Everyone, of course, was in favor of that. Without new words and usages, new dictionaries would not be necessary; and without a need for new dictionaries, Merriam would go out of business. But this was only a short breather. Gove quickly returned to his objection to calling Webster’s the supreme authority.
“Thirty years ago,” he said, “one of the leading linguists in this country, Sapir, warned against identifying a language with its dictionary. Since then the studies of scientific linguists have made this warning even more significant.”
This convenient fiction of the dictionary business, the unexamined idea that prompted loads of paying customers to say, Well, is it in the dictionary? or What does Webster’s say?, the notion that a dictionary was the language in a bottle, or rather a book, the entire English language printed up, spelled out, and defined, this amounted to an intellectual error that G. & C. Merriam could no longer countenance. Philip Gove would not go around claiming his dictionary as a “register of thought” or “the indispensable basis of literature,” as Professor Hart had said about Webster’s Second in 1934.
Gove was not afraid to speak the awful truth. In fact, he seemed to like saying it. A dictionary was not the language; a dictionary, even an unabridged dictionary, was only a selective inventory of the language.
He did not essay for long on the contributions of linguistics, but he mentioned that linguists tended to belittle dictionaries because they failed to keep pace with linguistic change. He alluded to studies like Albert Marckwardt’s, which had documented how our spoken and written language were much more tolerant of deviation from the rules of classroom grammar than educated opinion and the usage notes of dictionaries suggested.
It was a rather tricky phenomenon Gove was hinting at. People thought of themselves as old-fashioned on grammar, swearing fidelity to rules they violated every day. The lexicographer who believed that practice mattered more than stated preferences could end up selling a product people said they didn’t want.
A controversial reputation was already attaching to the work of these scientific linguists, so it was remarkable that their work should now become a major point of reference for a mainstream commercial dictionary. But in promoting Gove, Merriam-Webster had determined that technocratic and scholarly knowledge were more important than worldly knowledge and political instinct. In Gove they found an editor whose principles and personal habits would not allow for a cordial smoothing over of the difference between the old way and the new way.
Gove announced several policy changes, the most important being the new stand on so-called encyclopedic matter, yet another way in which the new dictionary would give up the claim to being universal. Webster’s Third would not pretend to have answers to all possible questions; that claim now seemed a pathetic, empty boast.
Then Gove told a story about an old Merriam hand named William Wheeler who had worked under Noah Porter on the 1864 Webster’s and written a three-hundred-page supplement of encyclopedic material, including character names from fictional literature, names from the Bible, information for a gazetteer, and “gleanings from history and philosophy.” Wheeler expanded this material into an independent book, which was then reabsorbed almost completely in the 1890 Webster’s before becoming an almost permanent feature of the unabridged dictionaries. In Webster’s Second in 1934, about three-quarters of Wheeler’s material, much of which had not been revised in seventy years, had been reprinted.
Leaving out all encyclopedic material—proper names, entries on wars and other historic events, types of ships, and so on—was not entirely possible but such material had to be massively reduced if Webster’s Third were to remain a single-volume dictionary. Gove proposed to omit a number of antiquated learned terms, unanglicized foreign terms, proper names (Webster’s Second had devoted thousands of lines to masculine and feminine names: John, Mary, and so on), epithets such as Athlete of Christendom and entries starting Lady of, the titles of literary works, and the furthest reaches of slang and dialect. “All of these recommendations could be summarized by a recommendation that, in general, we make Webster’s Dictionary primarily a dictionary of the standard language as spoken throughout the English-speaking world.”
After lunch he reached another important item on his agenda, getting the Editorial Board out of his way.
“Of primary importance to the successful determination and guidance of editorial policy was the formation of the Editorial Board,” said the publisher’s statement of Webster’s Second. The board had been an executive committee of company president Asa Baker, editor in chief William Allan Neilson, general editor Thomas A. Knott, and managing editor Paul W. Carhart. These four had brought together business sense, worldliness, and lexicography to handle those delicate decisions that might affect the company’s bottom line, reputation, or intellectual integrity.
But the board had also slowed down the works. The minutes of the Editorial Board’s meetings stretched to two thousand pages, filling eleven volumes.
“To me,” Gove told the current eight members of the board, “that represents a stupendous, if not stultifying, waste of time.” In one instance, he said, the Webster’s Second board had spent at least an hour discussing whether hot dog should be in the dictionary. (In the end hot dog had won admission: “a heated wienerwurst or Frankfurter, esp. one placed in a split roll;—used also interjectionally to express surprise or approval. Slang.”)
Prior to the day’s meeting Gove had circulated a particularly technical memo on how the new dictionary should handle botanical classification. Did the board members really want to read, absorb, and opine on such material? If so, he had other memos they might want to see.
“I have a memo here which consists of thirty single-space pages on the subject ‘Repetition in Definitions,’ referring to the use of the defined word in subsequent definitions of derivative words. Every point is itemized in clear detail, with all possible methods considered. . . . It would take anyone hours to digest and follow it. Do you want that sort of thing mimeographed and circulated before meetings? Can we afford the expense and time of it?”
Gove volunteered that all such memoranda be kept in a master book, a digest of editorial policies the board would be free to consult but not modify. “I don’t want a vote,” he said. “Take the botany classification memo. It’s been shown to you; if anyone objects, the objection is on the record.”
President Munroe readily allowed that handling such questions was really the job of Gove and the editorial staff. But, he wanted to know, if such matters were not brought to the attention of the board, how would the company avoid the inclusion of entries that might hurt sales?
Munroe mentioned the embarrassing entry for journalistic. Few things could be more dangerous than the mistake of antagonizing journalists, who not only exercised great influence over the stylistic direction of the language but among whom there appeared a number of individuals who delighted in writing about language questions and dictionaries.
Gove pointed out that the definition for journalistic was, essentially, a procedural mistake. The proper first sense of the word—characteristic of the work of gathering news and reporting in a periodical—was skipped, and the deprecating sense, which indeed needed defining, was given as the only meaning.
“You must grant that the editorial department consists of human beings,” said Gove, “and they will make a slip once in a while. I think that the consensus seems to be that we do not need to have the detailed analyses of the Second Edition Editorial Board meetings.”
Gove’s appointment, like his comments, marked a major shift for Merriam. The staff expert became the company’s point man (to use a World War II term), chosen not for his reputation among educated consumers but for his highly developed skills as an editor and lexicographer. The technical grumbling usually concealed within a company’s lower ranks now surfaced at the executive level, and the happy face of a company leader was replaced by that of a truth-telling middle manager.
He took an insider’s view of dictionary work, but Gove was not without broad ambitions for Webster’s Third. Its predecessor had called itself “an interpreter of the culture and civilization of today.” The same should be true of “the dictionary of 1960,” Gove said, even if “the culture and civilization of 1960 is not coequal with that of 1930.”