You do remember Stefan Fatsis, right? Maybe from NPR, maybe from Word Freak/Scrabble. Now he has published a must-read called Unabridged. Yes, as you suspect, it’s about dictionaries. In particular, it’s about Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, published by Merriam-Webster and commonly called just “Webster’s Third.”

The New York Times 1962 review of Webster’s Third included the following comment:

Webster became a household name, rising steadily in esteem until the early 1960s, when the notorious Webster’s Third arrived like a brick through a window. The crux of the issue was “ain’t,” which was now in the dictionary, glowering between “ainoid” and “Ainu.” Thus ensued a season of pearl-clutching among the nation’s purists and pedagogues. This newspaper called the Third “disastrous,” as it reinforced “the notion that good English is whatever is popular.”

“Notorious” indeed. Sixty-five years later you may not remember this publishing event, but I certainly do. At age 16 I was deeply influenced by my dad, a writer and editor who owned copies of both Webster’s Second and Webster’s Third and was open-minded about the controversy — but I was also influenced by Rex Stout, whose famous detective Nero Wolfe was certainly not open-minded (not about Webster’s Third nor about many other matters): he was a strict prescriptivist, and his assistant Archie Goodwin in Stout’s novel Gambit comes across the boss tearing pages out of the Third and tossing them into a live fire.

In an act of participatory journalism, Fatsis embedded himself as an employee at Merriam-Webster, where he got to see first-hand how definitions are written (descriptively, of course, not prescriptively) and even wrote some himself. His account of this experience is fascinating. Read it!

Categories: Books, Linguistics