The Wonders of Webster's

A writer, momentarily idle in her art, reaches for her most essential tool.  No, it is not a pen or a mouse; rather, it is her Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.*  Named after Noah Webster, it is a published list, in alphabetical order, of the words of the English language--explaining and defining them and providing, among other things, etymologies, illustrations and synonyms.  Her dictionary is, of course, only one of many that have been published throughout the world.  Dictionaries were produced in Chinese, Greek, Islamic, and other advanced, early cultures.  The first modern lexicographer in the West was Nathan Bailey who published the Universal Etymological English Dictionary in 1721 and the Dictionarium Britannicum in 1730, to which Samuel Johnson referred as he prepared his Dictionary of the English Language in the mid-eighteenth century.  Noah Webster (1758--1843) was the first American lexicographer.  A graduate of Yale, he fought in the American Revolution and, after the war, practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut--his birthplace.  Webster was considered the chief American authority on the English language after he had published Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which became a national bestseller.  Webster's Compendious Dictionary was published in 1806, and it was followed by his greatest work, The American Dictionary of the English Language.  It was published in 1828, revised by Webster before his death, and continues to be revised and abridged. 

Webster's legacy lasts with the adoption of his name by various publishing companies.  One such company, Merriam-Webster, is the publisher of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.  The literary tool is much more than  a list of the words of the English language.  It begins with a section of explanatory notes for understanding the style, form and symbols used throughout the lexicon.  There are sections on signs and symbols, on style (that is, correct forms of punctuation), on the documentation of sources, and on forms of address.  Also in this particular edition are a guide to pronunciation, an explanation of the symbols regarding pronunciation, and a list of the abbreviations in the dictionary.  Although frequently overlooked the section on biographical names is an invaluable reference tool.  It contains the names of persons both living and deceased who made notable contributions to human society.  Each entry begins with the name or title by which the person is known, and the person's last name, personal name, birth and death dates, nationality, and occupation or status follow respectively.  The section on geographical places includes limited information on all the countries and their most important regions, cities, and geographical features.  The publishers provide the spelling and pronunciation of the name, the nature of the feature, its location, and, in some cases, statistical data.  The ninth edition also holds a list of the colleges and universities in both the United States and Canada.  Each entry includes the name of the institution, its location, and the date of its founding. 

The most important section is, of course, the lexicon.  For an inexperienced etymologist, searching for a word and interpreting its history, sense and usage may be a daunting task.  Indeed there is an incredible amount of information in a small space, and the way the editors present the information may confuse some.  Thus, it is imperative that the inquisitive writer refers to the explanatory sections when she comes to an entry that contains bewildering material.  For example, on pages 164 and 165 of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, two words are at the top of each page.  Why are they there?  After referring to the explanatory notes, the writer knows they are guidewords, and the entries fall alphabetically between them.  In this case board is the first entry on page 164, and bolero is the last entry on page 165. 

The main entries are in boldface and are flush with the left margin of each column, of which there are two on each page.  The entries follow one another in alphabetical order.  When the word also follows a main entry, such as "Bogomil also Bogomile," the variant spelling after also occurs less frequently than the first and is not preferable.  (165)  But when the word or follows an entry, such as "bodhisattva or boddhisattva," either variant is acceptable.  (164)  Following a main entry, the pronunciation key is between a pair of reversed slashes (\\).  A high-set mark (') indicates the strongest accent, and a low-set mark indicates a medium stress.  For example, the pronunciation key for bock is "\'bak\" (164).  Variances in pronunciation of a word may appear.  An italic label indicating a part of speech follows the pronunciation.  The eight traditional parts of speech and their abbreviations are noun (n), pronoun (pron), adjective (adj), verb (vb), adverb (adv), preposition (prep), conjunction (conj), and interjection (interj).  The abbreviations vt (transitive verb) and vi (intransitive verb) may occur in place of the abbreviation vb.  The etymology is the historical material in square brackets ([]) that precede a definition.  The pre-English source is abbreviated.  OE (Old English), ME (Middle English), E (modern English), F (French), G (German), L (Latin), Gk (Greek), and Scand  (Scandinavian) are the most common abbreviations.  Words of unknown origin are labeled as such.  The date of the earliest use in English of a word is in parentheses and immediately prefaces a definition. 

A boldface colon introduces a definition.  Lowercase letters in boldface separate the subsenses of a word, and numerals in parentheses indicate a further division.  The order of the senses is in a historical hierarchy.  That does not mean the first sense gave rise to the second meaning and so forth.  The entries of plants and animals include both their genera (singular nouns in capital letters) and species.  A verbal illustration after a definition may employ the word in a specific context.  Angle brackets enclose the illustration, and the editor replaces the word with a lightface swung dash (~).  Usage notes that provide supplementary information about a word follow some definitions.  Also, brief paragraphs with synonyms and statements that clarify their senses may come after a definition. 

Comprehensive examples of everything I have been discussing are the entries of boast:
     1boast \'bost\ n [ME boost] (14c)  1: the act or instance of
      boasting: BRAG  2: a cause for pride  - boast-ful \'bost-f l\ adj 
      - boast-ful-ly \-f-le\ adv  - boast-ful-ness n
     2boast vi (14c)  1: to puff oneself up in speech : speak vain
      gloriously  2:archaic: GLORY, EXULT ~  vt  1: to speak of or
      assert with excessive pride
      2 a: to possess and often call attention to (something that is a
      source of pride)  ~s a new sports car  b: HAVE, CONTAIN  a
      room ~ing no more than a desk and a chair - boast-er n
      syn BOAST, BRAG, VAUNT, CROW mean to express pride in
      oneself or one's accomplishments.  BOAST often suggests
      ostentation and exaggeration  ready to boast of every trivial
      success but it may imply a claiming with proper and justifiable
      pride  the town boasts one of the best hospitals in the area
      BRAG suggests crudity and artlessness in glorifying oneself
      boys bragging to each other  VAUNT usu. connotes more pomp
      and bombast than BOAST and less crudity or naivete than
      BRAG  charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up - 1Cor
      13:4(AV)  CROW usu. implies exultant boasting or bragging
      loved to ~ about his ancestors
     3boast vt [origin unknown] (1823): to shape (stone) roughly with
      a broad chisel in sculpture and stonecutting as a preliminary to
      finer work  (164)

Those examples provide only a sampling of the information in the ninth edition.  Lexicography is a comprehensive and involved science.  Some entries in a lexicon may include material I did not discuss, and the information I delineated may be in a different format.  I suggest that as a writer you analyze the various sections that explain the intricacies of your dictionary.  Only then will the wonders of Webster's easily unfold before your eyes.
_______________________________________________________
     *Frederick C. Mish, ed., Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1991).  

Brief History of English and Dictionaries

Introduction

Why should you care about the history of English and dictionaries?  If you know the history of some thing, then you know that thing better.  Think about a friendship you share with a person.  It is more than likely that y'all have a symbiotic relationship because y'all know each other's past, are a part of each other's past.  Apply that to English and dictionaries.  Let them become more a part of your life.

English

Lexicographers (those who compile dictionaries) categorize English as Indo-European, a hypothetical language that originated in central Europe then spread east and west.  English is part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language, which, again, is a hypothetical language.  It was Sir William Jones who devised the theory of the Indo-European language.  He went to India, learned Sanskrit, and noticed it was similar to European languages.  Some regard him as the first linguist (a person who studies the nature, structure and variation of language).

Linguists have created an inexact timeline of the origin of English.  From 500 to 0 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), the Celts, who were Indo-Europeans, settled in Britain (England, Scotland and Ireland).  The Celts spoke Celtic, not English.  From 0 to 400 C.E. (Common Era), the Romanization of Britain occurred.  The Romans spoke Latin.  What survive from Celtic are geographical names such as London and Thames.  What survive from Latin are geographical names with the suffix -castra, such as Dorchester and Lancaster.  When their empire began to collapse, the Romans left Britain.  As a result Britain was attacked frequently, so the Celts invited the Angles, Saxons and Jutes--Germanic tribes from the European continent--to protect them. 

A mix of Celtic and Germanic, Old English (OE) developed between 450 and 1066 C.E.  It is an inflective language with Germanic (Scandinavian) vocabulary.  Vestiges (evidence) of inflection are irregular plurals--feet from foot, for example--and pronouns--I and me, for examples.  Inflection is an alteration of the form of a word by adding affixes--as in dogs from dog--or by changing the form of a base--as in spoke from speak--to indicate grammatical features such as number, person, mood or tense.  Even though only 14% of modern English words are Germanic, they are the 1000 most used words. 

But we must not skip over Middle English (ME), which developed between 1066 and 1500 C.E.  In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, France defeated King Harold Godwineson of England at the Battle of Hastings.  Radical changes in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary occurred under French rule.  Bilingualism developed.  Words such as cow, pig or swine, sheep, chicken, and deer were used by the natives, but words such as beef, pork, mutton, poultry, and venison were used by the French. 

Linguists divide Modern English (E) into two periods.  During the early Modern English period, between 1500 and 1700 C.E., words such as thou, ye and hither were in use.  The King James Bible (1611) influenced the vocabulary of this period, and the British borrowed numerous learned words from Latin.

English as we now know it primarily consists of Germanic (OE), French (ME), and Latin and Greek (E) words.  Everyday words are Germanic, polite words are French, and elevated words are Latin and Greek.  Compare the following synonyms.
      Germanic             French                    Latin

1. ask                    question                  interrogate
2. kill                    destroy                    exterminate
3. guts                   bowels                    intestines
4. time                  age                           epoch
5. begin                 commence             initiate
6. work                  labor                       exertion 
7. goodness           virtue                      probity 

Which diction (choice and use of words) do you want when you speak publicly?  You want mostly Germanic words because they are more concrete (perceptible by the senses) and more emotive (express emotion).  Which diction do you want when you write an academic essay?  French, Latin and Greek words are more suitable for such essays.  Which diction do you want when you write professionally?  You want to use Germanic and French words, depending on your audience and medium--memorandum, e-mail, letter, et cetera.  Which diction do you want when you write creatively?  You may want Germanic, French, Latin and/or Greek diction: it depends on the setting, the character, details, rhythm, et cetera. 

I am not suggesting that you will use only Germanic words when you speak publicly or only Fench, Latin and Greek words when you write academically.  All of the aforementioned communicative situations requires continual consideration of one's audience--the person or persons to whom you are communicating.  In other words, your audience will determine your diction. 

Dictionaries

If one of your goals is to become a better writer, you will want to refer frequently to a dictionary, ensuring one is next to you whenever you read and/or write.  But before we discuss the elements of a typical entry in a dictionary, we need to discuss the evolution of the dictionary. 

A lexicon is a dictionary.  Lexicography is the science of producing dictionaries.  Lexis is the Greek word for word.  The suffix -graphy is from the Latin suffix -graphia, to write.  The history of lexicography in the West begins with the Italian Academy (1612), where scholars worked under the Medici family.  At the French Academy (1694), scholars worked under King Louis XIV (The Sun King).  It supposedly took 40 scholars 40 years to produce the first French dictionary. 

English word-lists were compiled during the Renaissance.  But it was not until Nathan Bailey, the first modern lexicographer, published the Universal Etymological English Dictionary in 1721 that England had its first proper dictionary.  Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) was the work to which Samuel Johnson referred when he prepared his Dictionary of the English Language in the mid-eighteenth century. 

Noah Webster was the first American lexicographer.  He was considered the chief American authority on the English language after he had published Grammatical Institute of the English Language.  His Compendious Dictionary (1806) was followed by his greatest work, The American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), which continues to be revised and abridged. 

Sir James Murray oversaw the creation of the New English Dictionary (NED) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  Over 20 volumes the OED is an historical dictionary in that it attempts to provide the complete history and all senses of a word since the early Renaissance.  Dictionaries are prescriptive (inform people of the proper spellings, pronunciations and uses of words), descriptive (provide information only), or both.  The American Dictionary of the English Language is prescriptive; online dictionaries are descriptive.  Is the tenth edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary prescriptive, descriptive or both?  Refer to "The Wonders of Webster's" to help you decide.

My Initial Experience as an Academic Writer

I always have been a rebel, neither a leader nor a follower.  My rebelliousness affected every aspect of my adolescence to the extent that I nearly was dismissed from a prestigious boarding school in Virginia.  I was not a serious student.  I did not consider education important, until my father, tired from my lack of effort, cut his financial line, forcing me to support myself.  While working in a restaurant, I realized the importance of education, and I enrolled in several courses at Greenville Technical College.

At that time I viewed academic writing as a trap, a continuous line moving slowly across a page and exposing everything I did not know.  I resented and resisted my vulnerability as a writer.  I was aware that I was leaving a trail of errors when I wrote, and I thought of little else when I wrote.  In high school, for every two hundred and fifty words I had written, I had made ten to thirty errors that my teachers regarded as serious mistakes.  In college, inhibited by my fear of error, I either continually tried to begin an essay or, after I had begun, agonizingly produced only a few lines per hour.  The importance of creating an error-free essay was great to the extent that I regarded good writing as correct writing and nothing more.

There were two reasons I was obsessed with correctness.  First, I quickly realized my professors had little tolerance for the kinds of errors I was making.  Second, I deemed it urgent to meet my professors' criteria for success in their courses.  That sense of urgency actually hindered my development as a writer, for I simply focused on my professors' prescriptive comments without consideration of the reasons I had made the mistakes.

When I began to consider the reasons, I discovered that the issue of error was more complex and troublesome.  I could not trace my errors to a particular source, namely my preference of vernacular English over Standard English.  Instead I discovered many interactive influences: my introversion, which made me reluctant to express myself; my encounter with academic language, which contrasted with the speech of my friends and peers; and my engagement in different media, which blend variant forms of English.

The writing that emerged from my experience revealed the different pressures, codes and confusions that I had considered to be English.  The vernacular and standard forms mixed, as though I had half-learned the two systems.  As a result my essays contained hypercorrections, idiosyncratic schemes of spelling and punctuation, evasive circumlocutions, and syntactic derailments--all of which obscured meaning, if any remained after I had struggled simply to write something, anything.

Confusion seemed to paralyze me at this level.  Writers at all levels seek out, either consciously or unconsciously, the fundamental patterns that govern the languages they are learning.  Relatively few writers achieve the status of master wordsmith.  What separates intermediate writers from advanced writers is their experience.  Intermediate writers resign themselves to their confusion--substituting makeshift strategies, private systems, or protective tactics for genuine mastery of writing in any form.  They lose confidence in the very faculties that serve all writers: the ability to distinguish essential and redundant features of a language and the ability to draw analogies between what they know and what they are learning.

There is no quick or easy way to overcome such inabilities.  The absence of errors does not guarantee good writing, but the numerous errors that characterize essays by intermediate writers reflect more difficulty with written English than the term error implies.  Convincing a student that he has no problems will perpetuate his confusion and will deny him the freedom to decide when, where and how to use which language (vernacular and/or standard).  To such a student, error keeps him not only from writing something in Standard English but also from having something to write.

There is another reason professors cannot ignore the phenomenon of error at the intermediate level.  Although speakers and listeners, writers and readers engage in a cooperative effort to understand each other, they also are in a conflict over the amount of effort each will expend on the other.  In other words, the speaker or writer wants to communicate with as little energy as possible, and the listener or reader wants to understand with as little energy as possible.  In a speech situation, a speaker has ways to encourage or to press for more energy than a listener initially may want to expend.  The speaker can make, for examples, gestures or grimaces; the listener, on the other hand, can withhold her nods until she has received the information she wants from the speaker.

Nothing like that occurs in a writing situation.  The writer solely depends upon his words on a page to maintain the reader's attention.  Anything that facilitates the transfer of meaning is important in such a tight economy of energy.  Errors, however, are unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader.  They demand energy without any return, shifting the reader's attention from where she is going (meaning) to how she is getting there (fitfully).

All codes are such via rules of procedure or conduct.  It is not necessarily the logic of the regularities that makes them obligatory; rather, it is the fact that, logical or not, they have become habitual to those who communicate within the code.  The truth is that even slight departures from a code cost the writer something, in whatever medium he is communicating, and considering the bargain he has with his reader, he usually cannot afford many of them.

That is not to say, of course, that the boundaries of error do not shift.  English has been changing for centuries, enriching itself with every language and dialect it has been encountering.  Ironically, the inconsistencies with which I struggled still exist because English speakers have been yielding to those ways of communicating.