The title of Peter Martin’s new book, The Dictionary Wars, is not a stretch by any definition. This deeply researched volume about the heady days when “meter” split from “metre” and “labor” from “labour” also describes a period during which America was coming to terms with itself as a real power in the world. Most Americans have used or owned a Webster’s Dictionary. Martin’s book tells a very human story, mostly tracing the life of Noah Webster, an innovator and a zealot for the creation of an American tongue.
It’s easy to think writing a dictionary would be just about the least contentious project a person could take on because a dictionary is fundamentally a boring book used for reference, not storytelling. But it wasn’t a dull undertaking in the least. Webster made a lot of enemies and left many of them in his wake. Martin vividly describes a trail of somewhat bitchy intellectual arguments Webster had with lexicographers and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.
This has partly to do with an American inferiority complex toward the British motherland and tetchy English disdain in the other direction. The phrase “great American novel” exists because of the once-widespread belief that there would not and could never be such a thing. In the first section of the book, Martin chronicles how the British felt about their ex-colonial offspring and the way its people seemed to pollute the language with incorrect usage and dilute it with ungainly new words. Americans resented the notion, but only because they at least partly agreed with it. One priceless anecdote Martin recalls is of an acerbic New England woman who was complimented on her English by a British army officer and “asked if she was unusual in this respect. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘but then I had unusual advantages. There was an English missionary stationed near my tribe.'”
The primary complaint about dictionaryless early American English tended to be that it manufactured too many new words, usually ugly or barbaric ones. Thomas Jefferson broadly agreed with Webster that America needed its own English, although he was not fond of Webster the man. The president coined the word “neologize” for the way Americans expanded the vocabulary, just one of the hundreds of interesting facts readers will learn in this volume.
The book’s chronology is sometimes hard to track, but it’s mostly written as a narrative story. And it is gripping, full of larger-than-history characters and surprising tidbits about words and the development of American culture that produced them. It features a wide selection of well-chosen quotations that pay off the author’s impressive sitzfleisch.
After describing the prevailing literary and lexical attitudes of the time, the second and most extended section of The Dictionary Wars homes in directly on personal details. Webster was a compulsively flamboyant self-promoter, and he was not, he claimed, merely chronicling words for reference. He was “America’s schoolmaster.” He was one of America’s great trinity of fathers, alongside Christopher Columbus and George Washington. He revealed “the gospel of nationalism in language and politics.” Webster was mostly unaware of scholarly developments in the field of etymology, and most of his pronouncements about the history of language reflected his gut feelings. In our era, which has developed an obsession with (politically) correct usage, we might be said to be fighting over the “gospel of language in politics and nationalism.” We have much to learn from the ultimate failure of the grandest ideas Webster had about changing culture by changing a language.
As Martin unspools the yarns that Webster tangled in his unscientific approach to etymology and spelling, the book reveals a man at once public spirited and arrogant. Webster wanted to defeat Samuel Johnson and crush his fellow American lexicographers. Webster loved himself excessively, but he loved America more, and he wanted America to be fluent in itself.
As one reads Martin’s narrative, it is hard to see how Webster would eventually prove victorious, although of course we know he did. In the final section, as the business of reference writing becomes more professional, Webster’s most radical lexical ideas fall away. Teams of rigorous scholars make new editions of his opus into the sort of dictionaries we know today: the “inky war” over these issues played out in journals, magazines, and printing houses, and among Webster’s acquaintances.
It was mostly a civil war between Americans, and, like the real Civil War, which raged at the same time, its result turned on whether Europe might weigh in. The venal Merriam brothers, keen to publish Webster’s work, took over the fight after he died, but then revised or expurgated most of his outre ideas.
So what was left of Webster? His grand claims to define the American language. In establishing the definitive American dictionary, the Merriams cherry-picked incidents to make their case for Websterian supremacy, publishing, advertising, and politicking aggressively. When the London publisher of Webster’s chief rival Joseph Emerson Worcester was caught selling Worcester dictionaries under Webster’s name, the Merriams spun the story to claim Webster’s international supremacy.
What Martin does best is to demonstrate that while characters win or lose, the very viciousness of the fight ended up benefiting the whole language and all of us who use it. For those of us nerdy and wordy enough to love the language as well as use it, this is profound.
Webster’s dictionary succeeded most when it took on the most significant criticisms and adapted. Linguistic debate deepens us all. This point can never be repeated enough, and Martin does readers a service by vividly illustrating the story of the birth of American English. The war raged long ago, but the battle continues on today.
Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
