One evening in the spring of 1977, at the elegant St. Regis Hotel in New York, 40 or so intelligent, distinguished persons came together and, with drinks in hand, talked about the English language. They were especially interested in words and phrases that reflect poorly on people who use them. on this peculiar subject—of what not to say and when—several attendees were reputed to be experts. All of them, however, could claim at least some degree of authority as members of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.
It may have been the only time the usage panel—which was terminated, without ceremony, on February 1 of this year—met in person. Fortunately, Mark Singer, a writer for the New Yorker, was on the scene, and to him we are indebted for the unsigned article that appeared in the Talk of the Town section a few weeks later.
Guests made light of the term collectible, which had appeared on the most recent usage ballot. Was it in bad taste? Bruce Bohle, who wrote the ballots for the usage panel, played the “harmless drudge,” which is how Samuel Johnson once defined lexicographer. Bohle was stirring his drink with his index finger when the reporter asked him what it means to be the usage editor. He said, “It means that I get used a lot.” Usage panelist Theodore Bernstein, former copy chief of the New York Times, discussed the controversy surrounding hopefully and then, by accident, dropped his wine glass. “Hopefully, that won’t happen again,” said another guest.
The chairman of the usage panel, Edwin Newman, was on hand. His book Strictly Speaking was the Eats, Shoots & Leaves of its day, a number-one bestseller. In it, Newman lodged the usual complaints against hopefully, malapropisms, redundant phrasing, and cliché-mongering (marathon talks, swank hotel, uneasy truce). He asked in the book’s first sentence, “Will American be the death of English?”
American English, however, was not really the problem, as any careful reader would have discerned. What truly bothered Newman was the scripted melodrama of press secretaries, speechwriters, and journalists. He disapproved of how these spokesmen of the educated class recycled favored tropes and hyped their own minor insights into major revelations. And he reserved a special contempt for the legalese of the Watergate proceedings, not just the infamous banality “at that point in time,” but the whole pompous subspecies of circuitous Nixonian blather.
“In Watergate,” Newman observed, “nobody ever discussed a subject. It was always subject matter. The discussion never took place before a particular date. It was always prior to. Nor was anything said, it was indicated; just as nothing was done, it was undertaken. If it was undertaken, it was never after the indications about the subject matter; it was subsequent to them.”
To an outsider, the usage panel would seem to be an important institution within the American Heritage Dictionary. The impression they made together, of a well-bred snobbery about correctness and a willingness to take pains in the name of getting things right, was an essential part of the dictionary’s marketing. Yet inside the dictionary’s leadership the value of the usage panel was a point of contention. Even as the publisher maneuvered to place usage panelists on The Today Show, internal documents reveal that the modest cost and effort of keeping the panel going was scrutinized and debated.
And it was not just the green eyeshades who questioned the value of the usage panel. There were also complaints from the full-time editorial staff: Quite often the dictionary’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, let stand or even promoted the idea that the usage panel played a major role in the making of the dictionary. In fact, the panel played a very modest role that quietly factored into the creation of a couple hundred usage notes, written not by the usage panelists themselves but by the dictionary’s editors.
The working stiffs on the masthead possessed much more influence over the dictionary than the usage panel, especially after the first edition, published in 1969. “We report, but do not always endorse, their findings,” said executive editor Alma Graham in 1973 in a memo where she also objected “to Houghton’s crediting them with work they did not do.”
The New Yorker did not mention Graham in its short article, so I don’t know whether she was there, chatting with her colleague Bruce Bohle or trading peeves with Edwin Newman and Ted Bernstein. As it happened, Graham was a big linguistic story in her own right, one that touches on another piece of political history.
Starting in 1969, as the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary was hitting bookstores, editor Peter Davies and Graham began work on the American Heritage School Dictionary. In an article for Ms. magazine, Graham described how American Heritage lexicographers used computers to examine 10,000 passages of 500 words each, drawn from textbooks and readers for children. This corpus, though tiny by today’s standards, was examined to answer questions about word frequency, vocabulary, grammar, and other interesting topics, such as how men and women were represented in classroom literature.
“Overall,” Graham wrote, “the ratio in schoolbooks of he to she, him to her, and his to hers was almost four to one. Even in home economics, the traditional preserve of the female, the pronoun he predominated by nearly two to one.” one might ask whether the totals were at all distorted by sentences using a generic he, but a separate examination of 100,000 words found that only 3 to 4 percent of he’s referred to an unspecified gender.
“The reason,” said Graham, “most of the pronouns in schoolbooks were male in gender was because most of the subjects being written about were men and boys.” Thus began an extensive effort to achieve gender parity in the dictionaries and textbooks brought out by American Heritage and Houghton Mifflin, pointing the way for many other publishers to follow suit.
Time, obviously, makes it own decisions about what is right and wrong in usage, and tracking the many changes wrought by history as it comes barreling through a dictionary is a major part of the work of professional lexicographers. In 1972, for instance, usage editor Bohle pointed out that the courtesy title Ms. had become common enough that it could no longer be ignored by a standard English dictionary—this was shortly before Ms. magazine popularized the term even further. Graham wrote the entry, and Ms. appeared for the first time in a dictionary, along with the first definitions for sexism and liberated woman.
Graham took up the argument for female equality outside the dictionary as well. The New York Times refused to use Ms. for women of unknown or ambiguous marital status. on March 8, 1974, about 50 feminists lined up outside the New York Times building on West 43rd Street to protest this editorial policy. Graham issued a press release on American Heritage letterhead, saying, “Ms. is in the dictionary,” and “it is the New York Times that is behind the times.”
Working on the second edition, Graham warned her supervisors in 1974 that usage notes reflecting the findings of the panel needed to be updated or else they would become painfully out of date. For example, in 1965, only 48 percent of the usage panel had approved of the transitive verb bus as in the phrase “to bus children.” As the logic of Brown v. Board of Education reverberated across school systems, however, it became much harder to ignore this usage, to which 91 percent of the usage panel gave its approval in 1970. But this dramatic shift in opinion, Graham noted, had not yet been captured in the usage note of their marquee dictionary.
Graham also pointed out that 57 percent of the panel had once disapproved of the term sexism “because they didn’t know what it meant.” Writing just a few months after she had called out the New York Times on Ms., Graham added, surely with some satisfaction, “that situation has changed.”
Progress and change were not on the calling card for the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. Correctness and authority were, in answer to a growing complaint that dictionaries and grammars were unable and, increasingly, unwilling to deliver clear advice on what constituted good English.
In 1956, an English professor named Austin C. Dobbins wrote a journal article called “The Language of the Cultivated.” A simple piece of research, it highlighted confusion and disagreement among college handbooks and popular dictionaries on words and phrases of questionable respectability—by which I mean those words usually called slang.
To illustrate the farrago of advice between one desk reference and the next, Dobbins made a list of 10 terms, any of which might be considered out of place in a formal piece of writing: boondoggle, corny, frisk, liquidate, pinhead, bonehead, carpetbagger, pleb, slush fund, and snide.
Now came the problem. In the American College Dictionary, the first five were labeled slang, but the second five were not labeled at all. And in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, the first five were not labeled at all but the latter five were all labeled slang.
“How is the student,” an exasperated Dobbins asked, “to recognize these terms which are inappropriate to the highest level of usage and style—inappropriate to the writing of cultivated people?”
It is easy to see why Dobbins was frustrated. Was it really so hard to say categorically that bonehead—so juvenile and insulting—was once and for all slang? Wasn’t it just, you know, written down somewhere?
The answer is yes and no. Some lexicographer or grammarian may have written down that bonehead is slang, but that by itself wouldn’t make it so, and it wouldn’t stop some other expert from clearing her throat and saying, “Ahem, I disagree.” Worse yet, it wouldn’t stop the word’s status from shifting all on its own, making the label utterly misleading.
A “slang” label may, in the best scenario, help by addressing the great likelihood that a blunt term like bonehead will come across as impertinent and humorous, i.e., slang, but labels also carry an air of certainty that makes the careful lexicographer nervous. And in the 1950s, smarting from the many instances when their confident pronouncements were shown to have been ill-informed or even prejudiced, lexicographers were very nervous indeed.
In an acute case of lexicographical hesitation, Philip Gove, the editor in charge of Webster’s Third, whose production was underway at the time, responded by dropping the “colloquial” label out of Webster’s Third, radically reducing the use of “slang,” and employing a “substandard” or “nonstandard” label. When the dictionary was published in 1961, language guardians were scandalized by its reluctance to pass judgment.
The direct descendant of Noah Webster’s pioneering work in American lexicography, Webster’s Third became notorious for describing ain’t as “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain’t I.”
The latter part irked, especially “used orally . . . by many cultivated speakers.”
Was there really room in the language of the cultivated for ain’t, which for decades had been, in classrooms and at kitchen tables, the most ill-regarded and censured non-expletive in the English language, possibly the most condemned of all words?
“Cultivated, our foot,” said the Chicago Daily News, one of countless newspapers and magazines to shake its masthead at the new unabridged dictionary. “Ain’t still makes its user stand out like Simple Simon in a roomful of nuclear physicists.”
Yet the controversy over Webster’s Third was about much more than its awkward, equivocating usage note for ain’t. A major issue it raised again and again was the disintegrating consensus among educated people regarding proper usage and good English.
On the one hand you had linguists and lexicographers such as Philip Gove, pointing to the record of usage itself as the only legitimate source of authority. In which case, if educated people sometimes said ain’t, well, then ain’t had some standing, some measure of respectability, however hard to delineate.
On the other hand, you had traditionalists such as Dwight Macdonald in the New Yorker, Wilson Follett in the Atlantic, and Jacques Barzun in the American Scholar insisting that Gove’s refusal to carry the flag for proper usage was an abdication, a failure of conviction, and a crisis of authority that, in the case of Webster’s Third, had enabled a dangerous sneak attack on the language itself.
While the denunciations continued, publisher James Parton mounted an increasingly serious attempt to buy a controlling share of stock in Merriam-Webster. President of the American Heritage Publishing Company, Parton had been sniffing around the dictionary business for years, looking for a way in. Strange as it may sound today, the book business, especially the college market, was hot stuff in the late fifties and sixties, as returning veterans took advantage of the GI Bill and baby boomers began their ascent through higher education.
Parton was a buccaneering entrepreneur with a genuine feel for history. He thought Merriam-Webster, the greatest brand in American dictionaries, was ripe for a takeover. It didn’t turn out that way, but the startling controversy over the new edition had shown that people were clamoring for what Philip Gove and Merriam-Webster had refused to give them: clear and forthright guidance on what language was cultivated and what was not. After considering his options James Parton decided that American Heritage would bring out its own dictionary.
The circumstances of its birth led many a linguist to raise a wary eyebrow at the American Heritage Dictionary. Professors of linguistics, by and large, had rejected the overheated criticism of Webster’s Third. It is even fair to say they were wounded by the overheated criticism of Webster’s Third.
In a 1964 report to the National Commission on the Humanities, the Linguistic Society of America stated that because of the furor over Webster’s Third, “a fair portion of highly educated laymen see in linguistics the great enemy of all they hold dear.” But given the chance to take revenge on the American Heritage Dictionary, many linguists found there was not all that much in it to complain about.
Anyone expecting an encyclopedia of stock wisdom and tired old shibboleths must have been surprised by how up-to-date American Heritage Dictionary was in its methods. one of the first dictionaries to benefit from corpus research conducted by computer, its editorial team knew more about word frequency than possibly any lexicographers before them. It was also an exceptionally readable dictionary: Well written and well illustrated, with generous margins and legible type, the first edition was designed to make this dictionary “an agreeable companion,” as editor William Morris put it. No mere reference work, its pages were designed to “invite reading.”
Even its defining method was congenial: Working off definitions copied out of the old but esteemed Century Dictionary among other sources, American Heritage definers began with what they took to be the “central meaning,” after which they presented other meanings of the same word. This helped distinguish the new dictionary from the elaborately nerdy style of Webster’s Third, an unabridged dictionary that, like the Oxford English Dictionary and other historical dictionaries, began with the earliest meaning and moved forward from there.
Though marketed to squares, the American Heritage Dictionary was hip to the F-word and willing to report the most common non-Latin used for sex acts such as fellatio (see blowjob) and cunnilingus (see eat, sense 4). No doubt this spread of lexical coverage led to an increase in sales as the new dictionary sat on the bestseller list for months. Morris took to saying that if he had only known that putting fuck in a dictionary would help him sell so many books (an estimated five million copies by the time the second edition was published), he would have demanded royalties.
But what always seemed most remarkable about the American Heritage Dictionary was its promise to be more discriminating than other dictionaries, and the evidence for this was always its panel of expert language users whose opinions were solicited on many contentious points of usage. This usage panel was presented as a major feature of the dictionary and became a point for endorsement and criticism.
The history of debate over good English is mostly written in the pages of grammars, textbooks, professional style guides, and that whole genre of single-author monographs that can be lumped under the banner of How You Really Ought to Speak and Write Your Own Native Language. Yet, apparently, this is not enough. Every once in a while, some well-meaning soul has to come forward with the bright idea that what the English language really needs is an academy along the lines of the Académie française, an official body of so-called immortals who expound rules and maintain an official dictionary for the French language.
Fed, apparently, by the same impulse that leads to blue-ribbon commissions, innocuous motions in favor of the metric system, and arguments for a two-person presidency, these proposals for an academy of English embody an otherwise sane observation, which is that certain people know a lot more about usage than others. But none of these proposals, from Jonathan Swift’s in the 18th century to Jean Stafford’s call in 1973 for “a new kind of censorship” to fight unwelcome euphemisms and jargon, has succeeded in establishing a body of any authority or landed any punches stronger than a glancing blow on the language itself.
The usage panel of American Heritage Dictionary, though modest in scope, may be the closest anyone has come to establishing such an academy. Its purpose was to discover and present an enlightened consensus on “how the language is used today,” as editor Morris put it, “especially with regard to dubious or controversial locutions.” Although Parton himself understood the commercial advantages of recruiting intellectual all-stars to his roster, it was Morris who came up with the idea, according to American Heritage correspondence with the usage panel.
From its first ballot in 1964, the usage panel survived through February of this year, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the dictionary’s sole publisher since the second edition, announced that it was ending the usage panel, citing the “continuing decline in consumer demand for print dictionaries.” This news caused hardly a yawn, even in lexicography circles, yet it marks the end of a striking episode in the history of American English when the idea of organizing a distinguished group of expert users to provide guidance on disputed usages was put to the test.
If you imagine that the point of an academy is to uphold classroom rules, especially those trampled by the young and the careless, the original American Heritage panel would have been to your liking. Its biases were writ large with the inclusion of Jacques Barzun, Sheridan Baker, Dwight Macdonald, and several other critics of Webster’s Third. A handful of others came armed with usage guides of their own. Theodore Bernstein of the New York Times, also a critic of Webster’s Third, was the author of a few popular books on usage. Roy Copperud, the words columnist for Editor & Publisher, had written his own dictionary of usage.
The usage panel was more august than representative. It included several Pulitzer Prize winners (Walter Lippmann, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson), one Nobel Prize winner (Glenn T. Seaborg), a gaggle of poets (John Ciardi, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Allen Tate), and the usual overstock of former association presidents and suspiciously prominent journalists.
The group was very male and very old and, of course, very white. Of 105 members, only 11 were women. The scholar Patrick Kilburn investigated the ages of the original panelists and discovered that 28 had been born in the 19th century. only 6 of the 105 were under 50 years old. “What,” Kilburn asked, “could such a huddle of arthritic ancients tell about the language of 1970?”
It was a good question: The usage panel was so old that just a couple years after the dictionary was published, more than 10 percent of the panelists had died and needed to be replaced.
But the panel was never marketed as an up-to-the-minute weather report on the state of American English. Instead it was described as a body of “professional speakers and writers who have demonstrated their sensitiveness to the language and their power to wield it effectively and beautifully.” A good bit of gray hair and the occasional walking stick were perfectly consistent with the desired image of a fairly large body of experts all of whom qualified as Persons of Consequence.
What else they had in common was a foreboding about the future of the language. “They tend to feel,” wrote usage panel member Morris Bishop in an essay at the front of the first edition, “that the English language is going to hell if ‘we’ don’t do something to stop it.” Whether this was hyperbole or paranoia is hard to say, since eternal damnation is a common reference point for the worriers of our linguistic culture.
In preparation for the first edition, usage panelists reviewed 600 items, organized alphabetically and portioned out over the course of several questionnaires. It was a slow march and the selection of items was not entirely systematic, as more than one critic later pointed out. Yet it did capture the most prominent language peeves of the time, starting with those items singled out in the clamor over Webster’s Third: ain’t, irregardless, uninterested versus disinterested, like versus as, due to, imply versus infer, and several others. The usage notes in the first edition all came down firmly against more permissive interpretations of these disputed terms, and the usage panel’s reaction was reported in percentages.
Ninety-nine percent of the panel disapproved of the example sentence “It ain’t likely,” though a not-trivial 16 percent approved of ain’t used orally in the first person (ain’t I?), thus agreeing with the notorious usage note in Webster’s Third. Where the usage panel split, many of its most interesting and useful opinions were found. Panel opinion was 50-50 on the split infinitive in “To better understand the miners’ plight, he went to live in their district.” Using will instead of shall to indicate futurity in “We will be in London next week” was acceptable to 62 percent. Sixty-one percent disapproved of comprise in “Fifty states comprise the union.”
As a snapshot of educated opinion on disputed usages, the usage panel warned the conscientious writer that some might disapprove of a given word while also letting peevologists know, especially in later editions, when the ground was moving beneath their feet.
Linguists sometimes profess a completely neutral attitude toward language. Yet spotting errors, flabbiness, and questionable assumptions in other people’s words is an important part of how we educate ourselves as language users. William Morris and the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary collected favored putdowns and observations by panelists and circulated them to other panelists. on the topic of myself as in “He invited Mary and myself,” Katherine Anne Porter called the usage “detestable,” while Gilbert Highet complained about “prissy evasions of me and I.”
These brickbats read like so many tweets—brief, intensely judgmental, dismissive even—but quite smart in a likably old-fashioned way. About the term nicely, as in “The dinner turned out nicely,” the usage panelist Basil Davenport said, “This is a lost battle. Nice had ceased to mean anything at all by the time of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” To which the only proper response is to draw on your pipe and say, “Quite right, sir.”
William Morris grew so fond of usage panel comments that after he left American Heritage he started co-editing, with his wife Mary, Harper’s Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, which had its own rival usage panel whom the Morrises quoted for pages and pages as one illustrious writer after another set torch to countless ｅxpressions.
Not everyone liked this kind of thing. It didn’t help that when the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary came out, several panel members published reviews of the new dictionary, praising it. And to some, the very idea of a usage panel was offensive. Wasn’t a “non-randomly chosen panel,” asked Anthony Wolk, an English professor at Portland State University, “inevitably a biased and hence suspect instrument”?
Where William Morris once held up the American Heritage Dictionary as a defender of “linguistic propriety,” Professor Wolk accused the usage panel of “linguistic racism.” Wolk wrote that he had taught a class of about 40 black students who frequently used ain’t, and not for folksy or humorous effect but because it was a mainstay of their working vocabulary. “I see,” wrote Wolk, “the AHD on ain’t linguistically disenfranchising just about all those students I worked with.”
Today, of course, Wolk’s words sound absolutely woke, but they misunderstand—intentionally, perhaps—the aims of a dictionary. For good or bad, popular dictionaries like American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate are not warehouses of American English in all its earthy and dialectal variety like, say, the great Dictionary of American Regional English. They are products of our print culture, sold as guides to standard American English or what that English professor Austin Dobbins called “the language of the cultivated.”
A desk dictionary or collegiate dictionary need not apologize for fixating on the standard language, even as it “disenfranchises” nonstandard usages: A single dictionary, even an unabridged one (which American Heritage once aimed to become but never was), can only serve so many purposes. Word lovers may applaud every possible expansion of the lexicographical project, but the only reason that an ever-shrinking number of people were ever able to earn a living making dictionaries is that there is a market in helping the young and ignorant sound smart and educated. Consider that in Thackeray’s great novel Vanity Fair, a certain ladies’ school owes its entire reputation to the fact that Samuel Johnson once paid a visit.
Wolk’s complaint also overstated the influence of the usage panel on the dictionary as a whole. Examining the 1971 printing, the scholar Thomas J. Creswell counted 502 usage notes, only 226 of which reported the opinions of the usage panel, and sometimes only in passing, while the remainder, like the rest of the dictionary, were written on the staff’s own authority.
Inside American Heritage during the 1970s—after founding editor William Morris had moved on—the usage panel did not get a lot of respect. As Houghton Mifflin bought the usage panel drinks at the St. Regis, it was shelving a plan to publish a standalone volume on usage that would have expanded on the dictionary’s usage notes and comments from the panel. In the second edition, published in 1982 (for this article, I relied on a 1985 reprint), many usage notes were rewritten to minimize the impact of these crotchety outsiders. Actual percentages were replaced with simple mention of a minority or majority; lively comments from the usage panel were deleted; many usage notes that might have been updated were summarily dropped or had their usage information integrated, without any special emphasis, into the text of the definition.
That was not the only change. The second edition was a shrunken and faceless descendant of the first. The font became scrawny and the page cramped. Instead of listing proper names and place names in the main lexicon, the second edition repackaged all this highly readable material into appendices.
Designed to compete with Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary became merely a corporate product. Anne Soukhanov, a lexicographer who had worked at Merriam-Webster for several years before joining American Heritage in 1979 to work on the second edition, told me it was “a marketing decision and one of the stupidest things anyone ever did.” Commercially, she added, “it was a big flop.”
Former editor William Morris had a very low opinion of the second edition as well, and it is easy to see why. Take irregardless, a malapropism that the first edition treated with an admonitory usage note: “Irregardless, a double negative, is never acceptable except when the intent is clearly humorous.” The second edition shortened this usage information to one word, “nonstandard,” sounding exactly like Webster’s Third, the all too curt dictionary to which American Heritage was supposed to be the antidote. Gone was the air of cultivation, of people talking to one another and thinking about words. The result was yet another categorical label that did nothing to explain to the person who needed, or simply wanted, more information on what exactly was wrong with irregardless.
The second edition was at odds with its own mission. It was and was not James Parton’s or William Morris’s dictionary. Neither Edwin Newman’s nor Alma Graham’s dictionary, it was no one’s dictionary, really, and it made this fact plain by listing no one as its editor.
Whoever was in charge did not think of the usage panel as the dictionary user’s “presumed betters,” which is how usage panelist Morris Bishop had described them in his essay in the first edition. Instead of regarding them as ornery yet interesting, staff editors treated the usage panel like the crazy mean uncle you were embarrassed to be seen with.
In the first edition a usage note for bimonthly had insisted, with 84 percent of the usage panel supporting, that its meaning was restricted to every two months and should not be used to mean every two weeks. The editors of the second edition simply removed the usage note and said the word meant both every two months and every two weeks. Another usage note had reported that the panel was divided 55 percent to 45 percent over using boast to mean “to take pride in possessing”; in the second edition, the controversy went unmentioned and the example sentence that had divided the usage panel (“The college boasts one of the finest auditoriums in New York”) was turned into an example sentence, without comment.
It was better to forget: Such was the attitude of the second edition toward the first. My own close examination of half the usage notes in the first edition shows that approximately 40 percent were jettisoned in the second edition.
The second edition was also less eccentric. A usage note at balding in the first edition said that, as an adjective, balding enjoyed the support of only 55 percent of the usage panel. It quoted Isaac Asimov, who thought the word “distasteful but necessary” and Katherine Anne Porter, who dismissed balding as “entirely vulgar.” This odd but entertaining digression was dropped by the editors of the second edition. In the first edition, only 47 percent of the panel considered senior citizen acceptable, with several complaining that it was an irritating euphemism for old people like, well, the members of the usage panel. In the second edition, senior citizen was defined without any usage note at all.
In several cases when the second edition preserved a usage note from the first, it reported on the feelings of the usage panel with open disapproval: “Première as a verb is unacceptable to a large majority of the Usage Panel, despite its wide usage in the world of entertainment.” The first edition had reported that only 44 percent of the usage panel accepted hopefully in “Hopefully, we shall complete our work in June.” The second edition asserted that this same usage was “justified by analogy to the similar uses of happily and mercifully. However, this usage is by now such a bugbear to traditionalists that it is best avoided on the grounds of civility, if not logic.”
Where the second edition proved expansive and interesting was on the editors’ own preferred set of usage problems. A couple years before the conservative language columnist William Safire gave up the fight over Ms. (Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president had made, Safire said, all other courtesy titles seem inadequate), the second edition provided a fine usage note, without ever saying where the usage panel came down, on Ms.
A usage note at everyone never mentioned the panel but argued for five paragraphs in favor of a more liberal understanding of singular versus plural in pronouns referring to subjects of uncertain number and gender. Thus the same dictionary whose usage panel in 1969 had disapproved, by a landslide of 95 percent to 5, of their own in “nobody thinks the criticism applies to their own work,” was in 1982 staking out a bold position in favor of the gender-neutral “singular they.” (I happen to favor the arguments for “singular they,” but still.)
A generous interpretation would be that the dictionary was developing new strengths; a more sensible interpretation would be that it was doing so at the expense of its old strengths. But even in its diminished state the second edition contained the seeds of renewal for both the dictionary and the usage panel. It was, after all, a book that drew, to varying degrees, on the formidable talents not only of William Morris, but also of the Edwin Newmans and the Alma Grahams of the world: bunk-spotters and timekeepers, critics and lexicographers.
The second edition presented itself not as the heroic voice of civilization but as a neutral party interested in both sides of the debate. The linguist Dwight Bolinger wrote, in an introductory essay, a painfully careful defense of the idea that “the prevailing usage of its speakers should be the chief determinant of acceptability in language.” With more wit, William F. Buckley Jr. defended authority and expertise: “The other way is mobocratic, undifferentiated.” A dictionary needed to embrace its lawgiving role, wrote Buckley. “It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.”
Geoffrey Nunberg, later made chairman of the usage panel, closed the discussion with a longer essay casting the idea of good usage as a doctrine that developed, historically, with the fall of the aristocracy and ever since had been making it difficult to justify one set of usage preferences over any other. The usage panel, Nunberg wrote, was an obviously flawed attempt to deliver answers to a public hungry for guidance. It was, in short, better than nothing.
Nunberg went on to become a well-known critic on usage matters and semantics, his commentaries broadcast on NPR’s Fresh Air program and distilled in several witty, readable books. Under his leadership, but even more importantly that of the American Heritage staff, especially executive editors Anne Soukhanov, Joseph Pickett, and Steve Kleinedler, the dictionary recommitted itself to many aspects of William Morris’s original vision for the dictionary and the usage panel, whose membership was expanded and diversified in several directions. In some ways, the changes jerked the dictionary in a vaguely progressive direction, but that didn’t keep it from being Antonin Scalia’s favorite modern dictionary. (The late justice also favored Webster’s Second, a graceful dictionary published in 1934 that is all but stuck in the 19th century yet has become an unlikely object of veneration among certain literary conservatives.)
At Houghton, the second edition came to be viewed as a regrettable mistake and the values of the first edition were held up once more as “a gold standard.” The original American Heritage Dictionary had done four things well, according to Soukhanov: (1) well-written definitions; (2) usage guidance; (3) interesting and understandable etymologies; and (4) good typography and design. These would be the guiding lights of the third and later editions.
Soukhanov was put in charge of the third edition (1992) and given the resources and authority to conduct fresh research and rebuild the brand. Pages became larger and more spacious. A celebrated feature of the first edition, an essay and materials about Indo-European roots by the scholar Calvert Watkins, was brought back and expanded after being dropped from the second edition. Encyclopedic information about people and places was expanded and returned to the main lexicon. Usage notes became more discursive and interestingly historical, as it was now possible to discuss how the usage panel’s feelings (reported more often in exact percentages) had shifted over time. once again, the dictionary page was written and designed to “invite reading.” The fourth edition (2000) introduced color imagery. And William Morris’s quixotic attempt to build an informal academy, augmented by lexicographical thoroughness and the scholarly insights of Nunberg, among many others, started paying real dividends to the dictionary user.
I confess that I did not take a great interest in the American Heritage Dictionary or the usage panel before being invited to join in 2004. My work as a staff editor at The Weekly Standard, however, had made me a close reader of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries at the office and deeply interested in what is revealed unintentionally by one’s choice of words. one day an article in the Washington Post about a contested PSAT question caught my eye. An English teacher had successfully argued that according to some authorities, there was a grammatical error in the sentence “Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.” on the multiple choice question where this sentence appeared, the official correct answer was “This sentence contained no errors.”
Whether it was acceptable to use her when the only possible referent was Toni Morrison’s genius as opposed to Toni Morrison (a question of possessive antecedents) did not delay me as I wrote a short essay attacking the logic of the sentence—in short, the idea that merely writing about a given subject (“the injustices African Americans have endured”) was an act of genius. This brought me an invigorating pile of hate mail, especially from Toni Morrison fans, and numerous accusations that I was a “prescriptivist authoritarian.” I vaguely remember one blogger writing that he simply could not get over the fact that a person like me lived and breathed and that, of all things, I had woken up that morning and decided that mocking socially approved literary preferences as stated in insipid example sentences was a reasonable way to spend my time. I still smile at the memory.
A week or two later I opened the New York Times to discover that I was now being schooled on the grammatical aspect by no less an authority than Geoffrey Nunberg. Not knowing much about him, I read several of his commentaries for NPR and other outlets. Impressed by his work, I reached out to him and we talked by phone and then began an email correspondence. I continued looking for usage stories to write about and the next year I was invited to join the usage panel.
Clearly I had not been chosen for my prestige, having no major or even minor prizes to my credit. That I was both young and politically conservative counted in my favor: Not long afterward, I was asked to recommend other conservatives and Republicans who might make good usage panelists. The irony of a once-conservative body making a special effort to recruit conservatives did not, at the time, register with me.
Although I felt honored to be on the panel, it made me nervous to fill out the surveys, which arrived in the mail the first few times, maybe once a year, before they were sent out via email. The first ballot I received contained a question about possessive antecedents, and I could certainly handle that one, but often I felt like the slow kid in class. Example sentences in which I saw nothing wrong drove me to ransack other dictionaries and usage guides, looking for whatever the problem might be.
Even as I matured in my knowledge of usage and grammar, one difficulty stood out: In example sentences, it was hard to focus on the ostensible usage problem when there was anything else in the sentence that smacked of bad writing. “Members of the League of Women voters will be manning the registration desk,” read one example sentence, with the survey asking if manning was acceptable in this context. Acceptable? I wondered. only if the writer was trying to gently mock the League of Women Voters.
The performance anxiety I experienced about being a good panelist helped make me, over time, a better student of usage controversies and, as it happened, more forgiving of others’ shortcomings in putting thoughts into words. But while I became less of a snob about other people’s usage (and less likely to troll fans of famous writers), I tried to become more discriminating in my own usage, not by slavishly following any old rule handed down by Fowler or Strunk and White or Theodore Bernstein, but by reading more carefully and listening more closely to American English, especially but not exclusively of the standard variety.
Another thing I noticed, from this and other work involving dictionaries, is how rarely the failure to be articulate is caused by a single word or phrase. Yes, jargon, euphemisms, and ill-chosen clichés can gum up the works, but writing that is thoughtful and interesting to begin with can overcome any number of little flaws. We often think about writing as if excellence were the same thing as being free of error. They are, I came to think, very different, actually. Studying the dreary history of fruitless, irrational groaning over terms like hopefully and “singular they” helped me see beyond such modest concerns.
Even as the usage panel was coming back to life in preparation for the third edition, the terms of the debate were changing. The very idea of a traditionalist usage panel became incrementally less relevant as preferred usages of gender, race, and ethnicity grew into the most prominent features of a new prescriptivism on the left. The source of this trend could be traced to those 1970s feminists investigating, airing, and prosecuting a case against sexist assumptions encoded in the language. In this way, Alma Graham’s importance went well beyond the internal history of the textbook industry. She was hardly alone, but her work at the American Heritage Dictionary and on a McGraw-Hill guide to gender-neutral writing might even serve as early sketches for the ideas of those who monitor language for evidence of unsavory attitudes towards women and minorities and seek to use language prescriptions as a lever to reverse those attitudes.
Today’s liberals may not recognize themselves as the heirs of Lindley Murray and Richard Grant White, to name two influential 19th-century American grammarians, or as the descendants of the tradition-mad Wilson Follett and Dwight Macdonald, both of whom saw great blows to civilization in the lexicographical peculiarities of Webster’s Third, but theirs is the court where the rules of usage are promulgated. Theirs are the original writings positing usage conventions as a moral and cultural code for The Good and The Decent. No one gets busted for splitting an infinitive anymore, but choose the wrong pronoun in some places and serious tut-tutting will ensue.
Yet on many such questions of usage and identity the American Heritage usage panel has played a productive role. The usage notes for he, man, they, and other key terms in the fourth and fifth editions exemplify how a dictionary can provide thoughtful guidance on usage debates without a heavy hand, while acknowledging differing and shifting views. Of course, this and all of American Heritage’s other triumphs have been realized in an era when the book business is not a hot market. As the American Heritage Dictionary has become more beautiful and intelligent, dictionary content, though usually of a degraded sort, has become free for the googling.
American Heritage, as its fiftieth anniversary is celebrated with a new printing of the fifth edition, gives away most of its content on its website and app and, like other dictionaries, licenses its databases to other websites and software developers. Wordnik, the well-regarded search engine dictionary, spits out definitions from the fourth edition of American Heritage minus its usage guidance. The super-brief entry for hopefully mentions a “usage problem” but says no more than that.
It may seem faintly ridiculous to mourn the passage of an inconsequential panel of writers and intellectuals whose bookish opinions can seem like molehills next to the mountains of linguistic and technological change wrought by time itself, but the usage panel ultimately provided an example of traditionalist critics in conversation with lexicography. Thus was the panelist—and more importantly, the dictionary reader—confronted with the reality of ought versus is. Which was good not only for the language critic. Lexicographers, too, need to be reminded that feelings about usage can be as important as the record of usage itself.
The demise of the usage panel, though, especially after so much progress had been made in returning to William Morris’s original vision and upgrading that vision with relevant linguistic scholarship, is unfortunate. Possibly the only kind of English language academy many of us can live with has been toppled and is no more.
David Skinner is the author of The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published. He was also a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.