The Mother Tongue (24 page)

The fact is that the real meanings are often far more complex than the simple dictionary definitions would lead us to suppose. In 1985, the department of English at the University of Birmingham in England ran a computer analysis of words as they are actually used in English and came up with some surprising results. The primary dictionary meaning of words was often far adrift from the sense in which they were actually used.
Keep,
for instance, is usually defined as to retain, but in fact the word is much more often employed in the sense of continuing, as in “keep cool” and “keep smiling.”
See
is only rarely required in the sense of utilizing one's eyes, but much more often used to express the idea of knowing, as in “I see what you mean.”
Give,
even more interestingly, is most often used, to quote the researchers, as “mere verbal padding,” as in “give it a look” or “give a report” [London Sunday
Times,
March 31, 1985].

In short, dictionaries may be said to contain a certain number of definitions, but the true number of meanings contained in those definitions will always be much higher. As the lexicographer J. Ayto put it: “The world's largest data bank of examples in context is dwarfed by the collection we all carry around subconsciously in our heads.”

English is changing all the time and at an increasingly dizzy pace. At the turn of the century words were being added at the rate of about 1,000 a year. Now, according to a report in
The New York Times
[April 3, 1989], the increase is closer to 15,000 to 20,000 a year. In 1987, when Random House produced the second edition of its masterly twelve-pound unabridged dictionary, it included over 50,000 words that had not existed twenty-one years earlier and 75,000 new definitions of old words. Of its 315,000 entries, 210,000 had to be revised. That is a phenomenal amount of change in just two decades. The new entries included
preppy, quark, flexitime, chairperson, sunblocker,
and the names of 800 foods that had not existed or been generally heard of in 1966—
tofu, piña colada, chapati, sushi,
and even
crêpes.

Unabridged dictionaries have about them a stern, immutable air, as if here the language has been captured once and for all, and yet from the day of publication they are inescapably out of date. Samuel Johnson recognized this when he wrote: “No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some are fading away.” That, however, has never stopped anyone from trying, not least Johnson himself.

The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them. From the seventeenth century when Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française, dictionary making has been earnest work indeed. In the English-speaking world, the early dictionaries were almost always the work of one man rather than a ponderous committee of academics, as was the pattern on the Continent. In a kind of instinctive recognition of the mongrel, independent, idiosyncratic genius of the English tongue, these dictionaries were often entrusted to people bearing those very characteristics themselves. Nowhere was this more gloriously true than in the person of the greatest lexicographer of them all, Samuel Johnson.

Johnson, who lived from 1709 to 1784, was an odd candidate for genius. Blind in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, by all accounts coarse in manner, he was an obscure scribbler from an impoverished provincial background when he was given a contract by the London publisher Robert Dodsley to compile a dictionary of English.

Johnson's was by no means the first dictionary in English. From
Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall
in 1604 to his opus a century and a half later there were at least a dozen popular dictionaries, though many of these were either highly specialized or slight (
Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall
contained just 3,000 words and ran to barely a hundred pages). Many also had little claim to scholarship.
Cawdrey's,
for all the credit it gets as the first dictionary, was a fairly sloppy enterprise. It gave the definition of
aberration
twice and failed to alphabetize correctly on other words.

The first dictionary to aim for anything like comprehensiveness was the
Universal Etymological Dictionary
by Nathaniel Bailey, published in 1721, which anticipated Johnson's classic volume by thirty-four years and actually defined more words. So why is it that Johnson's dictionary is the one we remember? That's harder to answer than you might think.

His dictionary was full of shortcomings. He allowed many spelling inconsistencies to be perpetuated—
deceit
but
receipt, deign
but
disdain, hark
but
hearken, convey
but
inveigh, moveable
but
immovable.
He wrote
downhil
with one
l,
but
uphill
with two;
install
with two
l
's, but
reinstal
with one;
fancy
with an
f,
but
phantom
with a
ph.
Generally he was aware of these inconsistencies, but felt that in many cases the inconsistent spellings were already too well established to tamper with. He did try to make spelling somewhat more sensible, institutionalizing the differences between
flower
and
flour
and between
metal
and
mettle
—but essentially he saw his job as recording English spelling as it stood in his day, not changing it. This was in sharp contrast to the attitude taken by the revisers of the Académie Française dictionary a decade or so later, who would revise almost a quarter of French spellings.

There were holes in Johnson's erudition. He professed a preference for what he conceived to be Saxon spellings for words like
music, critic,
and
prosaic,
and thus spelled them with a final
k,
when in fact they were all borrowed from Latin. He was given to flights of editorializing, as when he defined a
patron
as “one who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery” or
oats
as a grain that sustained horses in England and people in Scotland. His etymologies, according to Baugh and Cable, were “often ludicrous” and his proofreading sometimes strikingly careless. He defined a
garret
as a “room on the highest floor in the house” and a
cockloft
as “the room over the garret.” Elsewhere, he gave identical definitions to
leeward
and
windward,
even though they are quite obviously opposites.

Even allowing for the inflated prose of his day, he had a tendency to write passages of remarkable denseness, as here: “The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of our fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together.”
Too little singly?
I would wager good money that that sentence was as puzzling to his contemporaries as it is to us. And yet at least it has the virtue of relative brevity. Often Johnson constructed sentences that ran to 250 words or more, which sound today uncomfortably like the ramblings of a man who has sat up far too late and drunk rather too much port.

Yet for all that, his
Dictionary of the English Language,
published in two volumes in June 1755, is a masterpiece, one of the landmarks of English literature. Its definitions are supremely concise, its erudition magnificent, if not entirely flawless. Without a nearby library to draw on, and with appallingly little financial backing (his publisher paid him a grand total of just £1,575, less than £200 a year, from which he had to pay his assistants), Johnson worked from a garret room off Fleet Street, where he defined some 43,000 words, illustrated with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of literature. It is little wonder that he made some errors and occasionally indulged himself with barbed definitions.

He had achieved in under nine years what the forty members of the Académie Française could not do in less than forty. He captured the majesty of the English language and gave it a dignity that was long overdue. It was a monumental accomplishment and he well deserved his fame.

But its ambitious sweep was soon to be exceeded by a persnickety schoolteacher/lawyer half a world away in Connecticut. Noah Webster (1758–1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man who was not easy to like, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humorless people. A provincial schoolteacher and not-very-successful lawyer from Hartford, he was short, pale, smug, and boastful. (He held himself superior to Benjamin Franklin because he was a Yale man while Franklin was self-educated.) Where Samuel Johnson spent his free hours drinking and discoursing in the company of other great men, Webster was a charmless loner who criticized almost everyone but was himself not above stealing material from others, most notably from a spelling book called
Aby-sel-pha
by an Englishman named Thomas Dilworth. In the marvelously deadpan phrase of H. L. Mencken, Webster was “sufficiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to the extent of lifting whole passages.” He credited himself with coining many words, among them
demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable,
and
expenditure,
which in fact had been in the language for centuries. He was also inclined to boast of learning that he simply did not possess. He claimed to have mastered twenty-three languages, including Latin, Greek, all the Romance languages, Anglo-Saxon, Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and a dozen more. Yet, as Thomas Pyles witheringly puts it, he showed “an ignorance of German which would disgrace a freshman,” and his grasp of other languages was equally tenuous. According to Charlton Laird, he knew far less Anglo-Saxon than Thomas Jefferson, who never pretended to be an expert at it. Pyles calls his
Dissertations on the English Language
“a fascinating farrago of the soundest linguistic common sense and the most egregious poppycock.” It is hard to find anyone saying a good word about him.

Webster's first work,
A Grammatical Institute of the English Language
—consisting of three books: a grammar, a reader, and a speller—appeared between 1783 and 1785, but he didn't capture the public's attention until the publication in 1788 of
The American Spelling Book.
This volume (later called the
Elementary Spelling Book
) went through so many editions and sold so many copies that historians appear to have lost track. But it seems safe to say that there were at least 300 editions between 1788 and 1829 and that by the end of the nineteenth century it had sold more than sixty million copies—though some sources put the figure as high as a hundred million. In either case, with the possible exception of the Bible, it is probably the best-selling book in American history.

Webster is commonly credited with changing American spelling, but what is seldom realized is how wildly variable his own views on the matter were. Sometimes he was in favor of radical and far-reaching changes—insisting on such spellings as
soop, bred, wimmen, groop, definit, fether, fugitiv, tuf, thum, hed, bilt,
and
tung
—but at other times he acted the very soul of orthographic conservatism, going so far as to attack the useful American tendency to drop the
u
from
colour, humour,
and the like. The main book with which he is associated in the popular mind, his massive
American Dictionary of the English Language
of 1828, actually said in the preface that it was “desirable to perpetuate the sameness” of American and British spellings and usages.

Many of the spellings that he insisted on in his
Compendious Dictionary of the English Language
(1806) and its later variants were simply ignored by his loyal readers. They overlooked them, as one might a tic or stammer, and continued to write
group
rather than
groop, crowd
rather than
croud, medicine
rather than
medicin, phantom
for
fantom,
and many hundreds of others. Such changes as Webster did manage to establish were relatively straightforward and often already well underway—for instance, the American tendency to transpose the British
re
in
theatre, centre,
and other such words. Yet even here Webster was by no means consistent. His dictionaries retained many irregular spellings, some of which have stuck in English to this day (
acre, glamour
) and some of which were corrected by the readers themselves (
frolick, wimmen
). Other of his ideas are of questionable benefit. His insistence on dropping one of the
l
's in words such as
traveller
and
jeweller
(which way they are still spelled in England) was a useful shortcut, but it has left many of us unsure whether we should write
excelling
or
exceling,
or
fulfilled, fullfilled,
or
fulfiled.

Webster was responsible also for the American
aluminum
in favor of the British
aluminium.
His choice has the fractional advantage of brevity, but defaults in terms of consistency.
Aluminium
at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements—
potassium, radium,
and the like.

But for the most part the differences that distinguish American spelling from British spelling became common either late in his life or after his death, and would probably have happened anyway.