The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce. Ours is not a phonetic language, like Italian and Spanish and Modern Greek, where certain letters and combinations of letters can be relied on to produce consistent sounds. English has many silent letters. And its motley origins make it fiendishly difficult to untangle. Besides the Germanic roots of our Anglo-Saxon tongue and the influence of Latin (Emperor Hadrian) and French (the Norman invasion), and borrowings from Greek and Italian and Portuguese and even a soup?on of Basque, American English has a lot of Dutch from early settlers in the East; plenty of Spanish, from the conquistadores and missionaries who explored the West; and a huge vocabulary of place-names from Native American languages, often blended with French, for added confusion. As Noah Webster, the stickler-in-chief, pointed out way back in 1783, “Several of our vowels have four or five different sounds; another four sounds are often expressed by five, six or seven different characters. The case is much the same with our consonants.”
A good dictionary can only help. At The New Yorker, we use Webster’s—in fact, we use three editions of Webster’s, following a sort of sacred hierarchy. When I look up a word in the line of duty—after first consulting our style book (a venerable legal-size three-ring binder, its pages encased in plastic sleeves) to make sure that the founders haven’t prescribed a peculiar spelling—I turn to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, now in its eleventh edition. We call it the Little Red Web. (When Eleven came out in 2003, all the Tens were retired. We tried to find good homes for them—you don’t just throw a dictionary away! I reserved a few and recycled them as gifts.) Merriam-Webster constantly updates its basic desk dictionary. Every home should have a Little Red Web, the way a hotel room has a Gideon Bible.
If we cannot find something in the Little Red Web, our next resort is Webster’s New International Dictionary (Unabridged), Second Edition, which we call Web II. First published in 1934, it was the Great American Dictionary and is still an object of desire: 3,194 pages long, with leisurely definitions and detailed illustrations. It was supplanted in 1961 by Webster’s Third, whose editors, led by Philip Gove, caused a huge ruckus in the dictionary world by including commonly used words without warning people about which ones would betray their vulgar origins. On the publication of this dictionary, which we call Web 3, a seismic shift occurred between prescriptivists (who tell you what to do) and descriptivists (who describe what people say, without judging it). In March of 1962, The New Yorker, a bastion of prescriptivism, published an essay by Dwight Macdonald that attacked the dictionary and its linguistic principles: “The objection is not to recording the facts of actual usage. It is to failing to give the information that would enable the reader to decide which usage he wants to adopt.” “Transpire” and “enthuse” are still disapproved of. Since the great dictionary war of the early sixties, there has been an institutional distrust of Web 3. It’s good for some scientific terms, we say, patronizingly. Its look is a lot cleaner than that of Web II. Lexicology aside, it is just not as beautiful. I would not haul a Web 3 home. You can even tell by the way it is abbreviated in our offices that it is less distinguished: Webster’s Second gets the Roman numeral, as if it were royalty, but Webster’s Third must make do with a plain old Arabic numeral.
Some people around the office use the online Webster’s. Nothing wrong with that. The dictionary has come with a disk for years now and has been free online since 1996 (though you have to put up with ads). I’ve never gotten into the habit of looking up words online. I like paper and the opportunities for browsing, and have not been able to bring myself to give it up just yet.
In our hierarchy of dictionaries, if we have exhausted Web II and Web 3, we turn to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary (second edition), which came out in 1987. Its first edition, of 1966, exploited the war over Webs II and 3 by offering a fresh voice, free of conflict. I have a weakness for the Random House, and sometimes, if a word seems recent, I will go straight to RH rather than dabble in Web II or 3. I like it because it includes a lot of proper names, both historical and fictional, as if to thumb its nose at the makers of Scrabble.
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