43. Order out of chaos (part-4)

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

median, 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, fulfilled, 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.

In terms of pronunciation he appears to have left us with our pronunciation of

schedule rather than the English "shedjulle" and with our standard pronunciation

of lieutenant which was then widely pronounced "lefftenant" in America, as it

still is in England today. But just as he sometimes pressed for odd spellings, so

he called for many irregular pronunciations: "deef" for deaf, "nater" for nature,

"heerd" for heard, "booty" for beauty, "voloom" for volume, and others too

numerous (and, I am tempted to add, too laughable) to dwell on. He insisted that

Greenwich and Thames be pronounced as spelled and favored giving quality and

quantity the short "a" of hat, while giving advance, clasp, and grant the broad

"ah" sound of southern England. No less remarkably, Webster accepted a

number of clearly ungrammatical usages, among them "it is me," "we was," and

"them horses." It is a wonder that anyone paid any attention to him at all. Often

they didn't.

Nonetheless his dictionary was the most complete of its age, with 70,000 words

—far more than Johnson had covered—and its definitions were models of clarity

and conciseness. It was an enormous achievement.

All Webster's work was informed by a passionate patriotism and the belief that

American English was at least as good as British English. He worked tirelessly,

churning out endless hectoring books and tracts, as well as working on the more

or less constant revisions of his spellers and dictionaries. In between time he

wrote impassioned letters to congressmen, dabbled in politics, proffered

unwanted advice to presidents, led his church choir, lectured to large audiences,

helped found Amherst College, and produced a sanitized version of the Bible, in

which Onan doesn't spill his seed but simply "frustrates his purpose," in which

men don't have testicles but rather "peculiar members," and in which women

don't have wombs (or evidently anything else with which to contribute to the

reproductive process).

Like Samuel Johnson, he was a better lexicographer than a businessman. Instead

of insisting on royalties he sold the rights outright and never gained the sort of

wealth that his tireless labors merited. After Webster's death in 18 43, two

businessmen from Springfield, Massachusetts, Charles and George Merriam,bought the rights to his dictionaries and employed his son-in-law, the rather

jauntily named Chauncey A. Goodrich, to prepare a new volume (and, not

incidentally, expunge many of the more ridiculous spellings and far-fetched

etymologies). This volume, the first Merriam-Webster dictionary, appeared in

1847 and was an instant success. Soon almost every home had one. There is a

certain neat irony in the thought that the book with which Noah Webster is now

most closely associated wasn't really his work at all and certainly didn't adhere

to many of his most cherished precepts.

In early February 1884, a slim paperback book bearing the title The New English

Dictionary on Historical Principles, containing all the words in the language

(obscenities apart) between A and ant was published in Britain at the steepish

price of twelve shillings and six pence. This was the first of twelve volumes of

the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken,

eventually redubbed the Oxford English Dictionary. The intention was to record

every word used in English since 1150 and to trace it back through all its shifting

meanings, spellings, and uses to its earliest recorded appearance. There was to

be at least one citation for each century of its existence and at least one for each

slight change of meaning. To achieve this, almost every significant piece of

English literature from the last 7 ./z centuries would have to be not so much read

as scoured.

The man chosen to guide this enterprise was James Augustus Henry Murray

(1837-1915), a Scottish-born bank clerk, schoolteacher, and self-taught

philologist. He was an unlikely, and apparently somewhat reluctant, choice to

take on such a daunting task. Murray, in the best tradition of British eccentrics,

had a flowing white beard and liked to be photographed in a long black

housecoat with a mortarboard on his head. He had eleven children, all of whom

were, almost from the moment they learned the alphabet, roped into the endless

business of helping to sift through and alphabetize the several million slips of

paper on which were recorded every twitch and burble of the language over

seven centuries.

Hundreds of volunteers helped with the research, sending in citations from all

over the world. Many of them were, like Murray, amateur philologists and often

they were as eccentric as he. One of the most prolific contributors was James

Platt, who specialized in obscure words. He was said to speak a hundred

languages and certainly knew as much about comparative linguistics as any man

of his age, and yet he owned no books of his own. He worked for his father in

the City of London and each lunchtime collected one book—never more—from

the Reading Room of the British Museum, which he would take home, devour,

and replace with another volume the next day. On weekends he haunted the

opium dens and dockyards of Wapping and Whitechapel looking for native

speakers of obscure tongues whom he would query on small points of semantics.

He provided the histories of many thousands of words. But an even more prolific

contributor was an American expatriate named Dr. W. C. Minor, a man of

immense erudition who provided from his private library the etymologies of tens

of thousands of words. When Murray invited him to a gathering of the

dictionary's contributors, he learned, to his considerable surprise, that Dr. Minor

could not attend for the unfortunate reason that he was an inmate at Broadmoor,

a hospital for the criminally insane, and not sufficiently in possession of his

faculties to be allowed out.