Surveying The State of the Lingo

By Christopher Porterfield

Hopefully, you no longer object to sentences that begin with the modifier hopefully. If you do, forget it; the battle is lost. On the other hand, if you still insist that infer and imply mean two different things, hang tough, despite accusations of being a word prig; this is one the word prigs could win. As for the plural-singular identity crises suffered by words like data and media, stand by; they could go either way.

Such are some of the bulletins to be gleaned from the second edition of the unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language. "A storehouse and mirror of the language," is how Editor in Chief Stuart Berg Flexner describes the new dictionary, and with its 315,000 entries, the twelve-pound volume amply lives up to the billing. Along with the publication, between 1972 and 1986, of four fat folios supplementing the Oxford English Dictionary, this is the most important dictionary venture since 1966, when Random House's first edition appeared.

The present volume (destined, according to its own news releases, to be called RHD-II) is not so comprehensive as the dominant publication in the unabridged category, Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), which has more than 450,000 entries and is generally more thorough and dense with examples. But RHD-II is an eminently practical, everyday reference: it is typographically crisp, its definitions are clear and brief (sometimes to the point of spareness), and it offers some features that Webster's lacks, including the dates when words entered the language and pronunciation and etymological guides at the foot of its pages. Above all, it is up to date. Placed side by side with its progenitor, RHD-I, it provides the best opportunity in a generation to survey the state of the lingo and to chart its recent changes.

The most prominent change: explosive growth. RHD-II contains 50,000 new entries, most of them words that have come into use since 1966. The field of business and finance has contributed its share (greenmail, golden parachute), as have science and technology (string theory, user friendly), government (disinformation, -gate as an all-purpose suffix for scandals), social trends (yuppie, underclass) and relations between the sexes (significant other, palimony).

Many other additions are the result of old words taking on altered meanings. RHD-II includes 75,000 new definitions reflecting this process. Where a mole . in 1966 was mainly an animal, now it is also, thanks to John le Carre, a spy who burrows into the enemy's bureaucracy. A window is not only something to gaze out but also an interval during which rockets can be launched or any opportunity seized. And in addition to all its other 1966 meanings, like has become an interjection, breaking out like acne all over adolescent speech, as in, "It's, like, ubiquitous."

The tidal shifts in public attitudes that have taken place in the 21 years between the two Random House editions have left their mark. Novels, films and even White House tapes have brought expletives into more common currency, so that terms are now used at cocktail parties that once might have shocked a longshoreman. RHD-I listed only the lesser of the two most familiar four- letter words. RHD-II adds the ultimate one. At the same time, RHD-II is, compared with its predecessor, a monument to feminist consciousness-raising. Mankind never appears in its definitions where people is meant, nor is anyone of unknown gender ever a he. Its manual of style, at the back, exhorts the reader to "use gender-neutral terms wherever possible."

RHD-I happened to debut in the midst of the fiercest lexicographical debate of the century. Webster's third edition had appeared five years earlier and howls of protest were still resounding. Webster's editors, in the name of scientific objectivity, had largely abandoned the role assumed by dictionary makers since Dr. Johnson's day: serving as a guide to usage and attaching warning labels such as colloquial, erroneous and illiterate to words that deserve inclusion but not endorsement. To Philip Gove, Webster's then editor in chief, such discriminations were "artificial notions of correctness or superiority," and he wanted no part of them. A dictionary, he wrote, "must be descriptive and not prescriptive." In this he spoke for the dominant school of modern linguistics, which abhors the very idea of setting standards as snobbish, authoritarian and downright undemocratic. Gove's approach led, in one notorious example, to Webster's assuring readers that ain't was "used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers."

One immediate appeal of RHD-I was that it aimed at what its editor in chief, Jess Stein, described as "a linguistically sound middle course." It too was descriptive, but one of the things it took care to describe was "the attitudes of society toward particular words or expressions." Ain't, in the dictionary's no-nonsense view, was to be "shunned by all who prefer to avoid being considered illiterate."

With RHD-II, unfortunately, that middle course appears to be swerving back toward Webster's. The new dictionary sees words against the background of "standard English," but its definition of standard is governed by majority rule. It acknowledges disputes where they exist, but it refuses to legislate usage. Hence where RHD-I drew a distinction between disinterested (impartial) and uninterested (indifferent), RHD-II smudges the line: "many object," it concedes, but the use of disinterested to cover both meanings is "well established." Similarly, RHD-II is more lax than its forerunner in allowing such dubious usages as transpire to mean occur (rather than emit), and fortuitous to mean happening by lucky chance (rather than at random). Only when an embattled meaning has enough vociferous supporters does RHD-II back off, as in the case of infer. It accepts the word both in its regular meaning (draw a conclusion) and as a synonym for imply (suggest), but also grants that the distinction between the two words "is widely observed."

In matters of grammar, everyone can now do their own thing -- or so RHD-II argues in a note that endorses using their with a singular antecedent like everyone, something that was "nonstandard" in RHD-I. Hopefully seems a hopeless cause, a butterfly of an adverb that has turned into the caterpillar it-is-to-be-hoped, which RHD-II proclaims "fully standard." And because many people wrongly consider the past tense of sneak to be snuck (instead of sneaked), the word has been promoted from "chiefly dialect" in RHD-I to full respectability here.

Data and media were plurals pure and simple in RHD-I; the new edition advises that data can be either singular or plural, and media as a singular has become common in, of all places, the media. Another favorite media word, kudos, has undergone an even more perplexing transformation. Originally a singular meaning praise or glory, it has been misconstrued so often as a plural that, by a process lexicographers call back-formation, it has spawned a synthetic singular. Sure enough, here it is with its own entry in RHD-II: kudo. What next? Will a single instance of pathos be called a patho?

In the end, of course, all these matters will be settled by the heedless masses of people who rarely look at dictionaries, much less write them; that is the way of linguistic evolution. So is there any point in resisting changes that may be inevitable? Yes, indeed, as the late poet and translator John Ciardi eloquently argued. "Those who care," Ciardi wrote, "have a duty to resist. Changes that occur against such resistance are tested changes. The language is the better for them -- and for the resistance." It is regrettable that RHD-II resists so little. But it is admirable that it erects such a splendid arena in which to carry on the struggle.