James Sledd was in full combat mode. He wrote a sixty-five-page rebuttal of the reviews of Webster’s Third and was co-editing a collection of critical and defensive writing from the controversy, to be published by Scott, Foresman. A southerner and, in his own words, a conservative, Sledd was in a lather after reading Dwight Macdonald’s review.
“In my view,” he told Macdonald, “you’ve led a mob in an intellectual lynching. You haven’t just attacked the Third International. You’ve attacked history itself, and you didn’t even get your facts straight.”1
Macdonald answered that he’d never been accused of “attacking history itself,” but that it was “rather flattering.” Sledd’s suggestion that he’d committed errors was more troubling. “Heads will roll” in the magazine’s fact-checking department, said Macdonald, if that was the case—a statement that rather bothered Sledd, who was more than a little sensitive about how underlings should be treated. But in all modesty, asked Macdonald, wasn’t it really the case that he had only followed the mob? So many others came first.2
“It’s not much of a defense, is it,” answered Sledd, “to say you didn’t catch the victim and tie his hands—you just shot him?” His point was that Macdonald had given credibility to the anti-intellectual hysteria swirling around Webster’s Third. “Friends of mine in four major universities have cited your essay to me. They think it’s brilliant. Of course, they haven’t studied the dictionaries, either; but they won’t bother to now. You’ve told them what to think, so they’re happily thinking it and repeating it to their students.” He did not want to get any fact-checkers fired, but Sledd mentioned that Macdonald had missed some cross-references and that he needed to reread the definition of ego—a suggestion he meant literally.
Sledd had spent serious time in the guts of both Webster’s Third and Webster’s Second. He cited page numbers and prefaces, pulling out of the “downstairs” footer of page 111 in Webster’s Second a stub entry for an’t, a variant of ain’t that it called a “colloquial contraction of are not, am not”—which amounted to a much more liberal treatment of ain’t than found in the main entry.
Macdonald didn’t know the first thing about structural linguistics, said Sledd, as he put the phrase in quotes, so absurd did he find Macdonald’s use of it. Then returning to his academic friends, he told Macdonald that he owed it to them to admit that he was against English linguistics and dictionaries in general. “They ought to know, for instance, that poor old Gove’s five little precepts (from a ten-year-old book for middle-aged schoolmarms) can all be matched quite nicely in W2.”3
This became the classic defense of Webster’s Third: the argument that it was really not so different from Webster’s Second. Gove’s five truisms were such banal propaganda that approximate versions of the same ideas could be found even in William Allan Neilson’s dictionary. Ergo, there was no proof that Webster’s Third had been created under the spell of structural linguistics.
Macdonald told Sledd he should reread his own letter. “What you seem to be saying is that I should be ashamed of myself because my article has been influential in academic-intellectual circles. . . . Now honestly. The alternatives you present are to write an ineffective article, or to accept guilt as a leader of a lynch mob—really, as a leader. But I wrote my piece, after much thinking and research, because I was, and still am, convinced that Webster 3 is one more example of the debasement of standards in our cultural life (others are RSV Bible and the Adler-Hutchins Great Books, both of which I’ve dealt with).”
He had no bias against Gove, said Macdonald. “I liked Gove when I spent most of a day with him in Springfield early in the course of my research, and I am convinced he is a sincere and even idealistic lexicographer. Which still doesn’t prevent him from being, alas, more than a bit of a dope.”
Macdonald conceded to Sledd that he had been wrong about ego and masses, but if Webster’s Second had called an’t colloquial, then it had attached “a warning label,” warning people that the word was inappropriate for formal use, in keeping with everything else Macdonald had said about Webster’s Second. And Gove’s truisms, Macdonald had said in his article, were reasonable in themselves. As for their connection to structural linguistics, this was something he had gotten from Gove.
“I’m not, of course, ‘against English dictionaries and English linguistics generally’ and therefore see no reason I should confess to ‘innocent friends’ that I am. (They must be not only innocent, but also stupid, in your terms, to have been taken in by my spiel. In fact you sound paranoiac—conspiracies everywhere, people who should Know Better being seduced by glib arguments, which you assume, as paranoiacs do, are not sincerely meant by the author—otherwise why should I feel guilty because my arguments have convinced people?)”
Macdonald then must have taken a deep breath. “Sorry,” he wrote in the next sentence, “got sore. But you do put a strain on one’s reasonableness.” Then he asked Sledd if he had read another essay he’d just written, this one for Life, about the scientific view of language. (Sledd, of course, hated the piece.) Then Macdonald referred back to some business relating to the volume Sledd was assembling, in which Macdonald’s New Yorker essay would be published along with a feisty back-and-forth with Sledd.
Then Macdonald said, in the closing of his letter, “Sorry to sound irritable—but you do irritate me.”