The point I was trying to make was that we are prone to making stories from little factoids about individual words. It’s a kind of literary trope, on par with the old throat-clearer,Webster’s defines charity as giving, but I say it is more than that . . . Berns’s story is more sophisticated and comes to us bearing this beloved brand name of Oxford English, but it’s really just another fable whose telling owes more to the cute way it confirms the suspicion that for a long time now the sophists among us have been passing off savagery as civilization. It’s a kind of parable against the multiculturalists. I am not here to write a brief for the multiculturalists, but it’s worth considering how the same cultural and linguistic scenario that helped lead to the pluralization of civilization made it easier to notice that there was an American type of civilization worthy of the name—a result that Americans and conservatives ought to be proud of.

See my next post.

I am from Queens, but my speech has been shaped by college, life in D.C., novels, and old movies. It's as if I have a phony accent.

Bring it on, Southerner. I also like cain't, which I only learned about from Don't Never Say Cain't by Ethel Strainchamps, a memoir of growing up and out of the Missouri Ozarks. From the back cover: "When I tell people I was born a hillbilly, they are likely to ask merrily, 'You mean you wore a calico dress and went running barefooted through the hills? When I say yes, it doesn't register. But I really did. I wore a calico dress and a calico bonnet, and I ran around barefooted." Strainchamps was probably the best informed journalist to write about Webster's Third, which she heartily defended. It was too bad she wasn't the most exciting. Dwight Macdonald and others knew less, but were much more daring writers.

This distinction was lost on many of the reviewers of Webster's Third. Recognizing that a word merely exists is, of course, quite different from recommending a word. But the first publication to blur this difference was Merriam's own press release.

Interesting question. I heard Bill Clinton use ain't at the Democratic National Convention, applying a nice folksy touch to the old line that "'every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself.' But it ain't so." I have also seen ain't in the New Yorker and the New York Times in the last couple of years. If these examples sound familiar, it's because I mentioned them in a recent Wall Street Journal essay.

Pig Man: The statement can be taken in several ways, but the authors of the principle used it to say that there is no single standard of usage and to mention that "the contemporary linguist does not employ the terms 'good English' and 'bad English,' except in a purely relative sense." This sounds to me a little silly, but not so the rest of the passage, which says, "An educated user of English will vary his speech and writing from extreme formality to literary elegance to extreme informality, including slang and dialectal expressions. He does so knowingly." 

The principles strike me as true but inadequate to the task of explaining what circumstances warrant which kinds of language. They are argumentative and without subtlety.  They were devised by linguists and written into  English Language Arts, which was published by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1952. They became a part of the Webster's Third controversy when Philip Gove quoted them in a discussion of how modern linguistics had affected the making of dictionaries. This gave fodder to critics who argued that Webster's Third was the ugly stepchild of structural linguistics.

Maggie, I wonder if you're right. There is the qualifier "significant," and the additional detail of "right now," but the article and the defensive manner in which the earnings report were released suggested to me the "fraction" was small. Here is the online version of the article in which the quote is reintegrated into the main text.