From The Wall Street Journal:
One might well assume that Noah Webster (1758–1843), America’s most famous lexicographer, was a cloistered pedant or quiet scholar poring over books and manuscripts. In fact, he became, over the course of his long life, a quarrelsome, legalistic, grudge-holding man—at times for good reason.
Soon after writing an English grammar in 1784, he saw an expatriate American, Lindley Murray, become the best-selling grammarian of the 19th century—selling more than 13 million grammars at a time when Webster struggled to find a publisher to reprint his own. (Even more galling was that Murray seems to have gotten the idea for his grammar when he sold Webster real estate in downtown Manhattan.) Webster’s “reader,” a selection of pieces aimed at promoting literacy, was never as popular as other English-language readers. His “speller,” a blue-backed spelling book for children and adults alike, was so radically nontraditional in its approach to English orthography that it attracted serious (and telling) revilement from competitors.
Although Webster is best known as America’s writer of dictionaries, he was also an intemperate polemicist who published this kind of thing while living in New York in the 1790s: “From the date of Adam, to this moment, no country was ever so infested with corrupt and wicked men, as the United States. . . . Bankrupt speculators, rich bankrupts, ‘patriotic’ Atheists . . . are spread over the United States . . . deceiving the people with lies.” Thomas Jefferson called Webster “a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices.”
As for Webster’s legendary status as a lexicographer, it was largely unearned: He was a prodigious drafter of entries, but he was sloppy, and the hirelings retained to impose consistency soon realized how rife his work was with problems. He used entries as a means of presenting moralistic mini-essays; he prescribed pronunciations that had little if any currency; he pushed for spellings that nobody else used (aker for acre, croud for crowd); and he included inaccurate etymologies based on his fanciful speculations (for instance, that woman derives from womb + man when in fact it derives from wife + man). By the 1830s, so many versions of his dictionaries were in print—with divergent spellings for the same words—that he couldn’t find a way of reconciling them.
Enter Joseph Worcester, a meek and tireless scholar who, though little known to history, played a major role in the making of the Webster legend. In 1827 Worcester had published an American edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. At the urging of Webster’s son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich and the publisher Sherman Converse, Worcester agreed to postpone his own English-language dictionary and help bring out a one-volume abridgment of Webster’s two-volume dictionary. It was a decision he would come to regret.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry there’s a paywall)
Thinking on it, the dictionary that I most often consult these days is Ambrose Bierce’s compilation.
Like most writers I love dictionaries and as an Aussie often writing in US English, I love my British English A to Zed, and American Heritage Dictionary.For obscure words and derivations, can’t go past Chambers Mid(last)Century and the good old Oxford.When the Aussie Macquarie Dictionary came out, I was a contributor. Still, I was shocked when my darling late husband said looking words up in dictonaries meant you were stupid. English wasn’t his first language, big learning curve there.
It sounds like you are a patient spouse, V.
As the husband of another patient spouse, I have a great appreciation for that character trait.
Patience came in handy on both sides, PG
I admit to being a dictionary nut. I subscribe to both Merriam-Webster Unabridged and the OED online and consult them a dozen times a day. I also have a link to the Urban Dictionary on my browser toolbar. And I have paperback versions of various dictionaries sprinkled all over the house, just in case I want to look up a word.
I keep pdfs on Dropbox of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary; it’s delightful. I’d use it more often, but it is rather slow and awkward to consult. Someone could make money by developing an effective Johnson’s Dictionary app.
In the descriptivist/prescriptivist debate I am firmly on the the descriptivist side. I enjoy hearing the prescriptivists but I care more for meaning than the dictates of self-appointed language masters.
Strangely, my favorite dictionary is an old MW Unabridged 2nd edition, the last prescriptivist MW Unabridged. Nero Wolfe, an arch prescriptivist, burned its replacement, the 3rd edition, in his fireplace. My copy is five and a half inches thick and it must weigh fifteen pounds. It sits quietly next to my writing desk. When I don’t like a word I have chosen in a sentence, even a common word like “duck” or “sunset” and am stuck for a different way of casting the sentence, I look the word up in the 2nd edition. More likely than not, the entry will be kick my brain over enough to find wording that satisfies me. Johnson’s dictionary works the same way, but is too awkward to use often.
It’s always interesting to get a peek at someone’s harmless obsession, D. Thanks for sharing.