The Debate over Webster's Third Twenty-five Years Later: Winnowing the Chaff from the Grain

THE DEBATE OVER WEBSTER'S THIRD TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER: WINNOWING THE CHAFF FROM THE GRAIN David L. Gold James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt's Dictionaries and THAT Dictionary: A Casebook on the Aims ofLexicographers and the Targets ofReviewers (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1962, 274 pp.) contains many of the reviews of Webster's Third (1961), but it appeared too early to include Uriel Weinreich's "Webster's Third: A Critique of Its Semantics" (International Journal of American Linguistics 30 [1964]: 405-409) and perhaps other valuable reviews. Twenty-five years after the controversy over Wi and in anticipation of W4, I would like to distil from the Sledd-Ebbitt reader the criticisms that I feel are valid. Unfortunately, there is more chaff than grain, for, as Sledd, Ebbitt, and many others knew at the time, most of the reviewers were not qualified to pass judgment on the dictionary. Rather than a discussion of significant issues or criticism of major flaws, what we see in the reader is mostly a display of misunderstanding on a colossal scale. Many reviewers criticized Wi and praised W2 but did not realize that some things which they found objectionable in the former were already in the latter (finalize, for example, much criticized by reviewers, is in W2). Even the elementary duty of quoting from Wi accurately or fairly was sometimes ignored. Here and there, however, one does find valid criticism. Unless I note otherwise, I agree with the criticisms mentioned below. Underlabelling One defender of Wi rightly notes that its critics have made the mistake of thinking that there is but "a single 'good English'" (p. 266). Rather, he says, there are "many 'good Englishes,'" i.e., what is good is that which is appropriate for the occasion, though "one may sometimes intentionally depart from the appropriate ... for more effective communication." Agreed. It is she is appropriate in formal English, but it's her is appropriate informally. Whom is appropriate in formal contexts and (oblique) who in informal ones (see pp. 147-48 225 226The Debate Over Webster's Third for Philip B. Gove's enlightened view of who and whom). There is thus standard formal English and standard informal English. If Wi is a descriptive dictionary, as it claims to be, it has underdescribed the language by failing to describe these stylistic differences adequately. Its underlabelling is no less serious than underdefining would be (e.g., triangle 'a geometrical figure' and tiger 'a kind of animal' would be instances of underdefining). I agree with the critics who found that many lexemes or senses of lexemes were unlabelled (hence interpretable as standard formal English) when they should have been qualified in some other way. WTs defenders have seen things otherwise. Their justification for underlabelling is that (a) labels may be misunderstood or have actually been misunderstood in the past (e.g., colloquial has been taken as a sign of disapproval) and (b) it is often hard to assign a label ("no word is invariably slang," "it is impossible to know whether a word out of context is colloquial or not," we cannot distinguish the "many different degrees of standard usage" by status labels but only suggest them by quotations). Neither of these arguments is convincing. What may be misunderstood should be carefully explained in the front matter. Did the compilers of Wi exclude definitions, pronunciations, or etymologies that might be "misunderstood"? Why, then, were labels treated differently from other parts of the entry? As for the second argument, there is a continuum between items that are inherently marked in a certain way, through those that may be marked in certain cases, to those that are even contextually never marked. It is not true that the beginning end of the continuum does not exist ("No word is invariably slang"). Furthermore, if linguists and in particular lexicographers long ago recognized the distinction between lexical and contextual meaning, was it not high time in 1961 to accept such a distinction as applied to labels too? No one should expect a dictionary to report what an item may pick up in context (concordances and glossaries for specific texts do David L. Gold227 this), but it should...