Bergen Evans was lying in a hospital bed when he read the Life magazine editorial pasting Merriam-Webster for its handling of irregardless, enormity, the use of like where rule favors as, and for blurring the distinction between imply and infer. It made him angry. He continued reading, pen in hand, and counted.1
Evans was the co-author with his sister Cornelia of A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, which took a hard line on irregardless (“there is no such word”) but expressed liberal scientific principle in its acceptance of the conjunction like in “You don’t know Nellie like I do.” The three chief sources for this book were the OED, the seven-volume grammar of Otto Jespersen, and the works of Charles C. Fries. The Evanses acknowledged the usual distinction between imply and infer (“The speaker implies; the hearer infers”), while observing that distinguished writers such as Milton and James Mill had violated the rule. Their article on ain’t—like many “dictionaries,” the Evanses’ book freely used ordinary prose in its entries—discussed its nonstandard status in almost all uses, but mentioned that “a few bold spirits” had adopted the word to skip past the awkwardness of Am I not? and Aren’t I?
In this and other ways, the language was becoming less stuffy. “Forty years ago it was considered courteous to use formal English in speaking to strangers, implying they were solemn and important people. Today it is considered more flattering to address strangers as if they were one’s intimate friends. This is a polite lie, of course; but it is today’s good manners. Modern usage encourages informality wherever possible and reserves formality for very few occasions.”2
On this particular occasion, Bergen read the whole issue of Life and counted all the words and meanings not in Webster’s Second. His tally came to forty-four. And he determined that the editors of Life were not his friends.
Wilson Follett was not his friend, either. The literature professor had, a year earlier, reviewed and damned the Evanses’ Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage in the Atlantic, which had magnanimously allowed Bergen Evans to publish a full rejoinder one month later.3
Follett had begun by complaining that “linguistic scholarship, once an encouragement to the most exacting definitions and standards of workmanship, has for some time been dedicating itself to the abolition of standards.” For a telling illustration of this woeful truth, said Follett, one need only examine the Evanses’ Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage.
The heart of Follett’s review was a list, filling almost an entire magazine column, of usages tolerated by the Evanses that did not deserve the name of good English. It might have been taken from Sterling Leonard’s lists of disputable expressions that contemporary educated people increasingly found acceptable. The Evanses had countenanced such usages as He is taller than me (me instead of I in the objective case); the reason is because (faulted for redundancy); neither of them had their tickets (neither must be construed as singular, according to Follett); if one loses his temper (for consistency, instead of if one loses one’s temper); back of (as an adjective to mean behind but considered vulgar); between each house (between must always describe a relation of two things); he failed, due to carelessness (due, an adjective, being misused as an adverb). It was, in other words, a list of commonplace English, much of which could even be found in professionally edited publications.
Follett scored more points in asking, as few linguists ever did, what positive lessons could be derived from more complete evidence on usage. “Is it not one of the shames of modern scholarship that it has so little to say for what is really good, what is best, and so much to say about what is merely allowable or defensible?” Even if linguistic scholarship could show that like was widely used as a conjunction, as in “You don’t know Nellie like I do,” it refused to show an interest in whether it was better to say, “You don’t know Nellie as I do” or “the way I do.” The argument from usage, indeed, yielded a binary distinction between usages that can be evidenced and usages that cannot, while ignoring on scientific grounds the kind of thinking that led to preferences for one form over another.
Evans fought crankiness with enthusiasm. He evoked the example of Samuel Johnson, whose idealistic plan to fix the language had given way to an understanding that (in Johnson’s inimitable words) “to enchain syllables and to lash the wind are equally undertakings of pride unwilling to measure its desires by its strengths.” After eight long years of “sluggishly tracking the alphabet,” Johnson said he had come to understand that lexicographers and grammarians “do not form, but register the language.” Johnson, commented Evans, had begun as a “medieval pedant” and emerged as a “modern scientist.”
Then Evans looked to corner Follett on the singularity of none and like as a conjunction. The case that none should be construed as a singular had the example of Latin nemo and logic in its favor, so “the prescriptive grammarians are emphatic that it should be singular.” The historical record did show that from 1450 to 1650, none was three times as often treated as singular, but then in the last three hundred years, none was treated as a plural almost twice as often. The imbalance had since increased to the point where Evans could happily say that today none are was the preferred form.
If the literary critic was at his best in taking science to task for ignoring taste, the scientist was at his best in amassing evidence for these discrete pitched battles over single instances of disputed usage.
“Anyone who tells a child—or anyone else—that like is used in English only as a preposition has grossly misinformed him.” Then Evans touched on the example of “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should,” the famous ad line that was always mentioned in this context. “Anyone who complains,” said Evans, “that its use as a conjunction is a corruption introduced by Winston cigarettes ought, in all fairness, to explain how Shakespeare, Keats, and the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible came to be in the employ of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.”
As reviews of Webster’s Third came out in the fall of 1961, Evans and Follett again sharpened their sticks and headed into the fray. Evans wrote Philip Gove praising the new dictionary. But Follett thought it a terrible, terrible book, much worse than even the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage.