E. B. White on W3

Yesterday I wondered: Did E. B. White have anything to say about Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (W3), the dictionary that some thought marked the decline and fall of American English? White did, in a postscript to his 1957 essay “Will Strunk.” The postscript appears in The Points of My Compass (1962) and as a shorter prefatory note to the essay in Essays of E. B. White (1977). After suggesting that the success of The Elements of Style (1959) resulted from a reaction against “the permissive school of rhetoric,” White writes:

It was during the permissive years that the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary was being put together, along new lines of lexicography, and it was Dr. Gove, the head man, who perhaps expressed the whole thing most succinctly when he remarked that a dictionary “should have no traffic with . . . artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.” This approach struck many people as chaotic and degenerative, and that’s the way it strikes me. Strunk was a fundamentalist; he believed in right and wrong, and so, in the main, do I. Unless someone is willing to entertain notions of superiority, the English language disintegrates, just as a home disintegrates unless someone in the family sets standards of good taste, good conduct, and simple justice.

I realize that despite all my inclinations toward the dowdy, I’m poor company for the likes of White (at least this White), as I am poor company for any kind of fundamentalist. I think that W3 is an idiosyncratic and lively monument — the best kind of monument. That other monument, the Oxford English Dictionary, is a descriptive dictionary too: if things are flying to pieces language-wise, they have been doing so for a very long time.

And now, if you’d like to follow me down a rabbit hole:

The passage that White quotes appears in W3’s editor Philip Gove’s essay “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography” (published in the October 1961 issue of the Merriam-Webster newsletter Word Study). Gove is not writing about the dictionary; the it in this passage refers to lexicography:



White has borrowed the quotation, it seems, from Dwight Macdonald’s “The String Untuned” (New Yorker, March 10, 1962). Here’s Macdonald:



Same mistaken referent, same ellipsis. And very selective quoting, ignoring Gove’s insistence that lexicography “has no reason to scorn sprachgefühl, or to apologize for depending on it.” In the essay “Tense Present” (Harper’s, April 2001), David Foster Wallace appears to borrow from Macdonald and introduce new errors:



In Wallace’s Consider the Lobster (2005), where “Tense Present” becomes the expanded “Authority and American Usage,” the misquotation changes again:



And in both Harper’s and Consider the Lobster, Wallace misidentifies Gove’s essay as the introduction to W3. W3 has no introduction, only a two-page preface, a wholly different document from “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography.” If you’re going to fly by the seat of your pants, I guess you might as well fly first class.

Related posts
DFW blues howler (another problem with sources)
E. B. White, the fact that (on the same postscript)
Review: David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t (on Webster’s Third)

[Gove’s essay is reprinted in Dictionaries and That Dictionary: A Casebook on the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers, ed. James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt (1962). The “/8/” at the end of the passage marks the pagination of the original.]

Stapler contest continues moving forward

The contest that began on Monday continues to move forward. (Has it a choice?) If you fancy the thought of winning a bright red Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature (yes, miniature) staples, enter here, today. (Have you a choice?)

Got Wings ?

[Charles “Buddy” Rogers as Jack Powell, Clara Bow as Mary Preston, Richard Arlen as David Armstrong.]

We wondered why we had to wait so long for Wings (dir. William Wellman, 1927), not realizing that the film was recently restored and must have been in a zillion queues. The film (which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture) was worth the wait: Wings holds up very well.

Here is a triple-bill for some theater of the imagination: Wings, Design for Living (dir. Errnst Lubitsch, 1933), and Jules et Jim (dir. François Truffaut, 1962). Triangles, triangles, triangles.

Block that metaphor

John Boehner: “With the American economy on the brink of the fiscal cliff, we don’t have time for the president to continue shifting the goal posts.”

A related post
Avoiding and averting

Dave Brubeck (1920–2012)

Sad news:

Dave Brubeck, a pianist and composer whose distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility made him one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died Wednesday morning in Norwalk, Conn. He would have turned 92 on Thursday. . . .

In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck helped repopularize jazz at a time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. His quartet’s 1959 recording of “Take Five” was the first jazz single to sell a million copies.

Dave Brubeck, Who Helped Put Jazz Back in Vogue, Dies at 91 (New York Times)

It’s difficult to think of anyone who did more to bring jazz to new audiences. Here, courtesy of YouTube, are five versions of my favorite Brubeck composition, “The Duke,” four by Brubeck, and one by Miles Davis and Gil Evans: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Stapler contest continues on

Would you like to win a Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature staples? Enter today.

[Yes, continues on is redundant.]

Overheard

“Who gets the Early Grey?”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Griffith Observatory doors

“As seen in Los Angeles.”

Stapler contest continues

The contest that began yesterday continues. What did one stapler say to the other? Fill in the blank and win a Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature staples. Enter today.

Followers

Blogger tells me that I have 390 “followers.” I think that this label is deeply weird, even if it is everywhere in so-called social media. To my mind, the word “follower” suggests an obedient devotee awaiting the instructions of a master. I don’t think though that anyone who reads Orange Crate Art is awaiting my instructions. But just in case you are: send me two million dollars at once, in small bills. Thank you.

There is another kind of follower on the Internets: the major-league blogger who posts — with nothing added and often with no acknowledgement of sources — the same items other major-league bloggers have posted earlier the same day. It’s no fun reading in an echo chamber, or a recycling bin.

A passage from The Elements of Style, near the end of E. B. White’s chapter “An Approach to Style,” offers still-timely advice:

Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

Today’s Trend Machine is beyond anything White could have imagined: we even speak of what’s “trending.” To write, though, is not to sniff for what’s popular but to keep one’s nose to the ground — and to follow wherever it leads.