Bergen Evans

BUT WHAT’S A DICTIONARY FOR?

The storm of abuse in the popular press that greeted the appearance of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is a curious phenomenon. Never has a scholarly work of this structure been attacked with such unbridled fury and contempt. [...] What underlies all this sound and fury? […]

So monstrous a discrepancy in evaluation requires us to examine basic principles. Just what’s a dictionary for? What does it propose to do? What does the common read­er go to a dictionary to find? [...]

Before we look at basic principles, it is necessary to interpose two brief statements. The first of these is that a dictionary is concerned with words. Some dictionaries give various kinds of other useful information. Some have tables of weights and measures on the flyleaves. Some list historical events, and some, home remedies. And there’s nothing wrong with their so doing. But the great increase in our vocabulary in the past three decades compels all dictionaries to make more efficient use of their space. And if something must be eliminated, it is sensible to throw out these extraneous things and stick to words. […]

And so back to our questions: what’s a dictionary for, and how, in 1962, can it best do what it ought to do? The demands are simple. The common reader turns to a dictionary for information about the spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and proper use of words. He wants to know what is current and respectable. But he wants —and has a right to —the truth, the full truth. And the full truth about any language, and especially about American Eng­lish today, is that there are many areas in which cer­tainty is impossible and simplification is misleading.

Even in so settled a matter as spelling, a dictionary cannot always be absolute. Theater is correct, but so is theatre. And so are traveled and travelled, plow and plough, catalog and catalogue, and scores of other variants. [...]. The fact here is that there are many words in our lan­guage which may be spelled, with equal correctness, in either of two ways.

So with pronunciation. A citizen listening to his radio might notice that James B. Conant, Bernard Baruch, and Dwight D. Eisenhower pronounce economics as ECKuhnomiks, while A. Whitney Griswold, Adlai Stevenson, and Herbert Hoover pronounce it EEKuhnomiks. He turns to the dictionary to see which of the two pronunciations is “right” and finds that they are both acceptable.

Has he been betrayed? Has the dictionary abdicated its responsibility? Should it say that one must speak like the president of Harvard or like the president of Yale, like the thirty-first President of the United States or like the thirty-fourth? Surely it’s none of its business to make a choice: Because so widespread and conspicuous a use of two pronunciations among people of this elevation shows that there are two pronunciations. Their speaking estab­lishes the fact which the dictionary must record. [...]

The average purchaser of a dictionary uses it most often, probably, to find out what a word “means”. As a reader, he wants to know what an author intended to convey. As a speaker or writer, he wants to know what a word will convey to his auditors. And this, too, is com­plex, subtle, and forever changing.

An illustration is furnished by an editorial in the Wash­ington Post (January 17, 1962).... the editorial charges the Third International with “pretentious and obscure verbosity” and specifically instances its definition of “so simple an object as a door”.

The definition reads:

A movable piece of firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open for passage into or out of a building, room, or other covered enclosure or a car, airplane, ele­vator, or other vehicle.

[....] The writer takes the plain, downright, man-in-the-street attitude that a door is a door and any damn fool knows that.

But if so, he has walked into one of lexicography’s biggest booby traps: the belief that the obvious is easy to define. Whereas the opposite is true. Anyone can give a fair description of the strange, the new, or the unique. It’s the commonplace, the habitual, that challenges definition. [...]

Anyone who attempts sincerely to state what the word door means in the United States of America today can’t take refuge in a log cabin. There has been an enormous proliferation of closing and demarking devices and struc­tures in the past twenty years [...].

Is the entrace to a tent a door, for instance? And what of the thing that seals the exit of an airplane? Is this a door? Or what of those sheets and jets of air that are now being used, in place of old-fashioned oak and hinges, to screen entrances and exits? Are they doors? And what of those accordion-like things that set off various sections of many modern appartments? [...]'

[...] I go to the Second International, which the editor, of the Post urges me to use in preference to the Third International. Here I find that a door is:

The movable frame or barrier of boards, or other material, usually turning on hinges or pivots or sliding, by which an entranceway into a house or apartment is closed and opened; also, a similar part of a piece of furniture, as in a cabinet or bookcase.

This is only forty-six words, but though it includes the cellar door, it excludes the barn door and the accordion-like thing.

So I go on to the Third International. I see at once that the new definition is longer. But I’m looking for accuracy, and if I must sacrifice brevity to get it, then I must. And, sure enough, in the definition which raised the Post’s blood pressure, I find the words “folding like an accordion”. The thing is a door [...].