Dimensions
165 x 237 x 29mm
In 1934, Webster's Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It featured a six-inch-wide binding, weighed seventeen pounds, and possessed an almost unanswerable air of authority. If you wanted to know how to pronounce 'chaise longue', it told you, shaz long, end of discussion. When to use 'less' and when to use 'fewer'? It indicated what strict usage prescribed. It defined 'celebrant' as "one who celebrates a public religious rite; esp. the officiating priest,' not just any old party guest. WEBSTER'S SECOND served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work.
Then, in 1961, Webster's Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America's newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary's editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam's long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had "no traffic with...artificial notions of correctness or authority. It must be descriptive not prescriptive." Correct use was determined by how the language was actually spoken, and not by "notions of correctness" set by the learned few. Gove's editorial philosophy hewed closely to the work of C.C. Fries, a famous linguist who wrote, "There can thus never be in grammar an error that is both very bad and very common. The more common it is, the nearer it comes to being the best of grammar."
Gove's editorial approach had many editors and scholars longing for Webster's Second, which they considered the pinnacle of comprehensiveness and authority. Reporters across the country sounded off on Gove and his dictionary. The New York Times complained that Webster's had "surrendered to the permissive school that has been busily extending its beachhead on English instruction," the Times called on Merriam to preserve the printing plates for Webster's Second, so that a new start could be made. And soon Dwight MacDonald emerged as Webster's Third's chief nemesis when he stated in the pages of the New Yorker that Gove and his fellow editors, under the influence of something called "structural linguistics," were carrying out "a revolution . . . in the study of English grammar and usage," one that, "in the name of democracy, is debasing our language." The result was an "untuning of the string" of the instrument known as the English language--that and a great maelstrom of cultural degradation. This new dictionary Macdonald likened to the end of civilization.
All critical parties took particular umbrage at Webster's Third's treatment of "aint," a word that represented everything that was wrong with the dictionary; the definition of which was, in fact, inaccurately related in Gove's press release. It was a sloppy error that caused Gove and Merriam countless pages of undue criticism--and revealed just how lazy critics can be, not bothering to read farther than the press release, yet ready to plunge a knife in
