(From previous issue)
Consider the word fetch, meaning to “go get and bring to.” Until recently a standard word of full dignity (“Fetch me, I pray thee, a little water in a vessel”-I Kings 17:10), it has become slightly tainted. Perhaps the command latent in it is resented as undemocratic. Or maybe its use in training dogs to retrieve has made some people feel that it is an undignified word to apply to human beings. But, whatever the reason, there is a growing uncertainty about its status, and hence it is the sort of word that conscientious people look up in a dictionary.
Will they find it labeled “good” or “bad”? Neither, of course, because either applied indiscriminately would be untrue. The Third International lists nineteen different meanings of the verb to fetch. Of these some are labeled “dialectal,” some “chiefly dialectal,” some “obsolete,” one “chiefly Scottish,” and two “not in formal use.” The primary meaning-“to go after and bring back”-is not labeled and hence can be accepted as standard, accepted with the more assurance because the many shades of labeling show us that the word’s status has been carefully considered.
On grammatical questions the Third International tries to be equally exact and thorough. Sometimes a construction is listed without comment, meaning that in the opinion of the editors it is unquestionably respectable. Some-times a construction carries the comment “used by speakers and writers on all educational levels though disapproved by some grammarians.” Or the comment may be “used in substandard speech and formerly also by reputable writers.” Or “less often in standard than in substandard speech.” Or simply “dial.”
And this very accurate reporting is based on evidence which is presented for our examination. One may feel that the evidence is inadequate or that the evaluation of it is erroneous. But surely, in the face of classification so much more elaborate and careful than any known heretofore, one cannot fly into a rage and insist that the dictionary is “out to destroy . . . every vestige of linguistic punctilio . . . every criterion for distinguishing between better usages and worse.”
Words, as we have said, are continually shifting their meanings and connotations and hence their status. A word which has dignity, say, in the vocabulary of an older person may go down in other people’s estimation. Like fetch. The older speaker is not likely to be aware of this and will probably be inclined to ascribe the snickers of the young at his speech to that degeneration of manners which every generation has deplored in its juniors. But a word which is coming up in the scale-like iazz, say, or, more recently, crap-will strike his ear at once. We are much more aware of offenses given us than of those we give. And if he turns to a dictionary and finds the offending word listed as standard-or even listed, apparently-his response is likely to be an outburst of indignation.
But the dictionary can neither snicker nor fulminate, It records. It will of-fend many, no doubt, to find the expression wise up, meaning to inform or to become informed, listed in the Third International with no restricting label. To my aging ears it still sounds like slang. But the evidence-quotations from the Kiplinger Washington Letter and The Wall Street Journal-convinces me that it is I who am out of step, lagging behind. If such publications have taken to using wise up in serious contexts, with no punctuation indication of irregularity, then it is obviously respectable. And finding it so listed and supported, I can only say that it’s nice to be informed and sigh to realize that I am becoming an old fogy. But, of course, I don’t have to use it (and I’ll be damned if I will! “Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling”).
In part, the trouble is due to the fact that there is no standard for standard. Ideas of what is proper to use in serious, dignified speech and writing are changing-and with breathtaking rapidity. This is one of the major facts of contemporary American English. But it is no more the dictionary’s business to oppose this process than to speed it up.
Even in our standard speech some words are more dignified and some more informal than others, and dictionaries have tried to guide us through these uncertainties by marking certain words and constructions as “colloquial,” meaning “inappropriate in a formal situation.” But this distinction, in the opinion of most scholars, has done more harm than good. It has created the notion that these particular words are inferior, when actually they might be the best possible words in an informal statement. And so-to the rage of many reviewers-the Third International has dropped this label. Not all labels, as angrily charged, but only this one out of a score. And the doing so may have been an error, but it certainly didn’t constitute “betrayal” or “abandoning of all distinctions.” It was intended to end a certain confusion.
In all the finer shades of meaning, of which the status of a word is only one, the user is on his own, whether he likes it or not. Despite Life’s artless assumption about the Gettysburg Address, nothing worth writing is written from a dictionary. The dictionary, rather, comes along afterwards and describes what has been written.
Words in themselves are not dignified, or silly, or wise, or malicious. But they can be used in dignified, silly, wise, or malicious ways by dignified, silly, wise, or malicious people. Egghead, for example, is a perfectly legitimate word, as legitimate as highbrow or longhaired. But there is something very wrong and very undignified, by civilized standards, in a belligerent dislike for intelligence and education. Yak is an amusing word for persistent chatter. Anyone could say, “We were just yakking over a cup of coffee,” with no harm to his dignity. But to call a Supreme Court decision yakking is to be vulgarly insulting and so, undignified. Again, there’s nothing wrong with confab when it’s appropriate. But when the work of a great research project, employing hundreds of distinguished scholars over several decades and involving the honor of one of the greatest publishing houses in the world, is described as confabbing (as The New York Times editorially described the preparation of the Third International), the use of this particular word asserts that the lexicographers had merely sat around and talked idly. And the statement becomes undignified-if not, indeed, slanderous.
The lack of dignity in such statements is not in the words, nor in the dictionaries that list them, but in the hostility that deliberately seeks this tone of expression. And in expressing itself the hostility frequently shows that those who are expressing it don’t know how to use a dictionary. Most of the reviewers seem unable to read the Third International and unwilling to read the Second.
The American Bar Association Journal, for instance, in a typical outburst (“a deplorable abdication of responsibility”), picked out for special scorn the inclusion in the Third International of the word irregardless. “As far as the new Webster’s is concerned,” said the Journal, this meaningless word “is just as legitimate as any other word in the dictionary.” Thirty seconds spent in examining the book they were so roundly condemning would have shown them that in it irregardless is labeled “nonstand” -which means “nonstandard,” which means “not conforming to the usage generally characteristic of educated native speakers of the language.” Is that “just as legitimate as any other word in the dictionary”?
The most disturbing fact of all is that the editors of a dozen of the most influential publications in America today are under the impression that authoritative must mean authoritarian. Even the “permissive” Third International doesn’t recognize this identification-editors’ attitudes being not yet, fortunately, those of the American people. But the Fourth International may have to.
The new dictionary may have many faults. Nothing that tries to meet an ever-changing situation over a terrain as vast as contemporary English can hope to be free of them. And much in it is open to honest, and informed, disagreement. There can be linguistic objection to the eradication of proper names. The removal of guides to pronunciation from the foot of every page may not have been worth the valuable space it saved. The new method of defining words of many meanings has disadvantages as well as advantages. And of the half million or more definitions, hundreds, possibly thousands, may seem inadequate or imprecise. To some (of whom I am one) the omission of the label “colloquial” will seem meritorious; to others it will seem a loss.
But one thing is certain: anyone who solemnly announces in the year 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense. (Concluded)
-Types of Literature
Consider the word fetch, meaning to “go get and bring to.” Until recently a standard word of full dignity (“Fetch me, I pray thee, a little water in a vessel”-I Kings 17:10), it has become slightly tainted. Perhaps the command latent in it is resented as undemocratic. Or maybe its use in training dogs to retrieve has made some people feel that it is an undignified word to apply to human beings. But, whatever the reason, there is a growing uncertainty about its status, and hence it is the sort of word that conscientious people look up in a dictionary.
Will they find it labeled “good” or “bad”? Neither, of course, because either applied indiscriminately would be untrue. The Third International lists nineteen different meanings of the verb to fetch. Of these some are labeled “dialectal,” some “chiefly dialectal,” some “obsolete,” one “chiefly Scottish,” and two “not in formal use.” The primary meaning-“to go after and bring back”-is not labeled and hence can be accepted as standard, accepted with the more assurance because the many shades of labeling show us that the word’s status has been carefully considered.
On grammatical questions the Third International tries to be equally exact and thorough. Sometimes a construction is listed without comment, meaning that in the opinion of the editors it is unquestionably respectable. Some-times a construction carries the comment “used by speakers and writers on all educational levels though disapproved by some grammarians.” Or the comment may be “used in substandard speech and formerly also by reputable writers.” Or “less often in standard than in substandard speech.” Or simply “dial.”
And this very accurate reporting is based on evidence which is presented for our examination. One may feel that the evidence is inadequate or that the evaluation of it is erroneous. But surely, in the face of classification so much more elaborate and careful than any known heretofore, one cannot fly into a rage and insist that the dictionary is “out to destroy . . . every vestige of linguistic punctilio . . . every criterion for distinguishing between better usages and worse.”
Words, as we have said, are continually shifting their meanings and connotations and hence their status. A word which has dignity, say, in the vocabulary of an older person may go down in other people’s estimation. Like fetch. The older speaker is not likely to be aware of this and will probably be inclined to ascribe the snickers of the young at his speech to that degeneration of manners which every generation has deplored in its juniors. But a word which is coming up in the scale-like iazz, say, or, more recently, crap-will strike his ear at once. We are much more aware of offenses given us than of those we give. And if he turns to a dictionary and finds the offending word listed as standard-or even listed, apparently-his response is likely to be an outburst of indignation.
But the dictionary can neither snicker nor fulminate, It records. It will of-fend many, no doubt, to find the expression wise up, meaning to inform or to become informed, listed in the Third International with no restricting label. To my aging ears it still sounds like slang. But the evidence-quotations from the Kiplinger Washington Letter and The Wall Street Journal-convinces me that it is I who am out of step, lagging behind. If such publications have taken to using wise up in serious contexts, with no punctuation indication of irregularity, then it is obviously respectable. And finding it so listed and supported, I can only say that it’s nice to be informed and sigh to realize that I am becoming an old fogy. But, of course, I don’t have to use it (and I’ll be damned if I will! “Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling”).
In part, the trouble is due to the fact that there is no standard for standard. Ideas of what is proper to use in serious, dignified speech and writing are changing-and with breathtaking rapidity. This is one of the major facts of contemporary American English. But it is no more the dictionary’s business to oppose this process than to speed it up.
Even in our standard speech some words are more dignified and some more informal than others, and dictionaries have tried to guide us through these uncertainties by marking certain words and constructions as “colloquial,” meaning “inappropriate in a formal situation.” But this distinction, in the opinion of most scholars, has done more harm than good. It has created the notion that these particular words are inferior, when actually they might be the best possible words in an informal statement. And so-to the rage of many reviewers-the Third International has dropped this label. Not all labels, as angrily charged, but only this one out of a score. And the doing so may have been an error, but it certainly didn’t constitute “betrayal” or “abandoning of all distinctions.” It was intended to end a certain confusion.
In all the finer shades of meaning, of which the status of a word is only one, the user is on his own, whether he likes it or not. Despite Life’s artless assumption about the Gettysburg Address, nothing worth writing is written from a dictionary. The dictionary, rather, comes along afterwards and describes what has been written.
Words in themselves are not dignified, or silly, or wise, or malicious. But they can be used in dignified, silly, wise, or malicious ways by dignified, silly, wise, or malicious people. Egghead, for example, is a perfectly legitimate word, as legitimate as highbrow or longhaired. But there is something very wrong and very undignified, by civilized standards, in a belligerent dislike for intelligence and education. Yak is an amusing word for persistent chatter. Anyone could say, “We were just yakking over a cup of coffee,” with no harm to his dignity. But to call a Supreme Court decision yakking is to be vulgarly insulting and so, undignified. Again, there’s nothing wrong with confab when it’s appropriate. But when the work of a great research project, employing hundreds of distinguished scholars over several decades and involving the honor of one of the greatest publishing houses in the world, is described as confabbing (as The New York Times editorially described the preparation of the Third International), the use of this particular word asserts that the lexicographers had merely sat around and talked idly. And the statement becomes undignified-if not, indeed, slanderous.
The lack of dignity in such statements is not in the words, nor in the dictionaries that list them, but in the hostility that deliberately seeks this tone of expression. And in expressing itself the hostility frequently shows that those who are expressing it don’t know how to use a dictionary. Most of the reviewers seem unable to read the Third International and unwilling to read the Second.
The American Bar Association Journal, for instance, in a typical outburst (“a deplorable abdication of responsibility”), picked out for special scorn the inclusion in the Third International of the word irregardless. “As far as the new Webster’s is concerned,” said the Journal, this meaningless word “is just as legitimate as any other word in the dictionary.” Thirty seconds spent in examining the book they were so roundly condemning would have shown them that in it irregardless is labeled “nonstand” -which means “nonstandard,” which means “not conforming to the usage generally characteristic of educated native speakers of the language.” Is that “just as legitimate as any other word in the dictionary”?
The most disturbing fact of all is that the editors of a dozen of the most influential publications in America today are under the impression that authoritative must mean authoritarian. Even the “permissive” Third International doesn’t recognize this identification-editors’ attitudes being not yet, fortunately, those of the American people. But the Fourth International may have to.
The new dictionary may have many faults. Nothing that tries to meet an ever-changing situation over a terrain as vast as contemporary English can hope to be free of them. And much in it is open to honest, and informed, disagreement. There can be linguistic objection to the eradication of proper names. The removal of guides to pronunciation from the foot of every page may not have been worth the valuable space it saved. The new method of defining words of many meanings has disadvantages as well as advantages. And of the half million or more definitions, hundreds, possibly thousands, may seem inadequate or imprecise. To some (of whom I am one) the omission of the label “colloquial” will seem meritorious; to others it will seem a loss.
But one thing is certain: anyone who solemnly announces in the year 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense. (Concluded)
-Types of Literature
