Usage in This Dictionary

In the treatment of usage, the editors of this Dictionary have been mindful of the dictum of the linguist Antoine Meillet: "Every word has its story." We do not believe that all usage questions can be evaluated by recourse to any single criterion or principle, whether of "use" or "tradition," without vitiating their interest and importance. Rather, we have tried to set up the Usage Notes as miniature critical exercises and to provide, as space allows, the kinds of information that readers will require to resolve questions to their own satisfaction. 11 Naturally the Notes vary greatly in both content and length according to the point at issue. Some provide no more than brief comments on relatively technical points—the difference between flotsam and jetsam, for example. At the other end of the spectrum, several Notes take up the better part of a column and are far longer than the discussions of usage in any other dictionary. The longer Notes deal primarily with complex grammatical questions (e.g., I, if, that) or with questions of particular social or critical interest (e.g., man, he1, hopefully). In these cases we have begun the Note with a brief summary for the reader who has only a cursory interest in the issue. 12 The material provided in the Usage Notes falls into three broad categories: information about use, summaries and analyses of critical arguments, and observations about the opinions of writers and critics. Speaking very broadly, all questions of usage involve one or more of these considerations. 13 Use The doctrine that correctness rests on use is hardly an invention of modern linguistics. Horace insisted that the laws of speech are fixed by custom, "whose arbitrary sway/Words and the forms of language must obey," a dictum quoted with approval by the grammarians of every succeeding era. It is as close to a timeless truth as anything ever said about language. But like all timeless truths, it is largely an empty frame that every age shapes to fit its own worldview. Of course the rules of the language are determined by use, but whose? Where use is uniform, the question does not arise. 14 Unfortunately, usage is often divided, sometimes unaccountably, but more often according to social or geographical differences. And in these cases Horace’s dictum offers little in the way of helpful advice, as Noah Webster observed with some impatience: "But what kind of custom did Horace design to lay down as the standard of speaking? Was it a local custom? . . . Is it the practice of a court, or a few eminent scholars, that he designed to constitute a standard?" 15 Webster’s questions have no general answer. It depends on the word. Sometimes local custom is the only determinant, and we find as many standards as there are speech communities. But in other cases people do insist that there must be one general standard, usually the one determined by the practice of educated middle-class speakers. This Dictionary records facts about the use of items like these either with usage labels such as Nonstandard (see the Guide to the Dictionary) or, in particularly complicated cases, in the Usage Notes. Take the past tense forms of sneak. The form snuck originated as a nonstandard regional variant for sneaked, and there is still some lingering prejudice against it: in a 1988 survey, 67 percent of the Usage Panel disapproved of the form. But in recent years snuck has become increasingly frequent in reputable writing (the Dictionary’s files contain citations from publications such as The New Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as from writers like Anne Tyler and Garrison Keillor). And while sneaked is still more prevalent in edited prose by a factor of about 3 to 1, the use of snuck is 20 percent more common now than it was in 1985. Clearly it is no longer possible to apply the label Nonstandard to snuck. When we are dealing with something so straightforward as a past tense form, where no logical or semantic subtleties arise, acceptability depends on nothing more than widespread educated use. 16 But while the practice of the educated middle class generally determines what counts as Standard English, it does not have the last word in all matters of divided usage. Not even the most assiduously descriptivist dictionary would think of basing its definitions of annuity or gumbo simply on the way the words are used by educated speakers in general. Here readers do not expect to find a mirror of their own practice; they want to know how the words are used by experts in finance or Creole cooking, as the case may be. Of course these are specialists’ terms, but the point applies to many words in the general vocabulary as well. A great many educated speakers use ironic to mean simply "coincidental," as in It’s ironic that he was also using a borrowed bat when he hit a grand slam last week against the Dodgers. This use, then, is unquestionably Standard English, and it is certainly the responsibility of a dictionary to record it. But the meaning of ironic is not at the disposition of the general public in quite the same way the past tense of sneak is. Ironic is still a literary sort of word, and it is likely that a good many of the people who have used it to mean "coincidental" were reaching for a literary effect at the time. So long as literary folk continue to use ironic in a narrower sense—and what is no less important, so long as a large proportion of the general public continues to think of the word as literary—a dictionary also has a responsibility to note that in this case the general use is sometimes at odds with the use of the writers and critics who have particular authority about the notion in question. 17 It is never easy to say which group has authority over any given usage, of course. Who owns disinterested? Is the word kudos by now a common or garden-variety English plural like peas, or is it still an elegant borrowing that should be regarded as singular in light of its origin as a singular Greek word? Of course we want to take the facts of use into consideration when we approach such questions, but it is the height of scientistic self-deception to suppose that use provides an objective criterion for resolving them. Whatever lexicographers may say they are doing, they invariably deal in critical evaluations of the raw facts of use. And where the verdict of use is equivocal, a dictionary should give readers the wherewithal to make up their own minds. 18 Criticism Custom fixes the rules of language, but it does not justify them. Even complete uniformity of use doesn’t make a practice exempt from critical review. After all, custom is partly determined by our beliefs about the world and society, and in these we might all be wrong. There was a time when everybody used fish to refer to whales, but the practice was abandoned in light of new zoological evidence. And until quite recently, everybody used the words man and men to refer to all humans, but many people have abandoned that practice in the light of new conceptions of gender equality. 19 The prescriptive tradition had its origins in the Age of Criticism as a method no different in kind from the criticism of artistic works or of civil society in general. Eighteenth-century writers established the battery of principles to which usage might be held accountable—the familiar arguments from analogy, logic, etymology, and meaning, among others. Granted, they often applied these principles with the overzealous love of rules and systems that they brought to all their critical enterprises, so that we may sometimes feel, as Leslie Stephen put it, that they "sanctioned the attempt to do by rule and compasses what ought to be done by the eye." And much of the "logic" that they invoked was derived either from speculative philosophy or from inappropriate parallels to Latin grammar, with the result that their arguments often turn out to be of dubious relevance to the facts of English. It is fair to criticize the double negative in a sentence like I didn’t see nothing on the grounds that it is associated with nonstandard varieties of English, but one cannot fault the construction on logical grounds without also being prepared to assert the illogicality of standard French and Italian as well. 20 Linguists of a generation or so ago were fond of citing examples like these in an effort to undermine the entire prescriptive program, and some of them went on to argue that the rules of language are simply immune from criticism because they answer to natural laws inaccessible to cursory reflection. But the fact that particular prescriptive arguments are sometimes unsound does not vitiate the case for criticism in general. And if modern linguistics teaches us that the logic of language structure is a good deal more subtle and elusive than traditional grammarians supposed, it does not follow that the grammar of every variety has achieved complete consistency or functional perfection—particularly with regard to the relatively "unnatural" requirements of written public communication. 21 In fact, there is no reason why the methods of scientific linguistics and of traditional criticism should be regarded as incompatible. Modern syntax and semantics have developed an impressive array of analytical tools that often make it possible to capture distinctions and subtleties that elude the sometimes coarse apparatus of traditional, Latin-based school grammar. These techniques can be as useful in analyzing prescriptive rules as in describing the facts of actual speech, and we have appealed to them here in analyzing a number of traditional questions, as well as some of the grammatical complications raised by new concerns about matters of gender (see, for example, the entries at dare, different, each other, myself, plus, and than, and at he1 and man). We have avoided the use of unfamiliar technical terminology, since we are interested in providing a critical method, not in communicating a body of scientific results. But we believe, along with an increasing number of linguists, that there is an important place for a "critical linguistics" in the study of usage. 22 Opinion: The Role of the Usage Panel Custom can provide precedents and criticism can provide principles, but each has to be evaluated at the bar of opinion. Dictionaries register received opinion at every turn—on what other grounds would one label a usage Vulgar or Offensive? But it is often useful to have a more explicit way of gauging the opinions of people with a critical interest in the language. This is the role of the Dictionary’s Usage Panel, a group of some 200 well-known writers, critics, and scholars (see the list of Panel members). Panel members are regularly surveyed on a broad range of usage questions, from the distinction between each other and one another to the status of innovations like lifestyle or the use of demagogue as a verb. The results of these surveys are included in many of the Usage Notes. 23 The Usage Panel should not be thought of as an academy empowered to rule on all questions of disputed usage. That is an expedient that the English-speaking world has rejected since the 18th century, when proposals by Defoe and Swift to establish an academy were roundly rebuffed as "unsuitable to the genius of a free nation," as Joseph Priestly put it. And in a world where English is established as the language of a heterogeneous international community, the idea that any group or individual might arrogate the authority to fix standards seems not only illiberal but absurd. 24 Indeed, the Panel is rarely in a position to "rule" on disputes, since its opinions are often divided. Sometimes, it is true, the Panelists seem to speak with a single voice. In earlier surveys, for example, 99 percent rejected between you and I and ain’t I in formal writing. But the Panel’s judgment on questions like these merely reflects the predominant practices of Standard English. The survey results are far more interesting when they involve questions that are matters of dispute among educated speakers. In a recent survey, for example, 49 percent of the Panelists accepted the use of alternative to refer to one of three or more choices, as in Of the three alternatives, the first is the least distasteful. 25 Faced with this sort of disagreement, readers who are interested merely in knowing which usage is "correct" may be perplexed: if there is no agreement among so august a group as this, what hope is there of fixing standards? But this question misses the point. In the first place, the variation may itself be instructive. In a recent survey, for example, we included several questions about words of uncertain pronunciation, such as banal, err, harass, and hegemony. We were not surprised to find a lack of consensus—the Panel was split exactly 50-50 on which syllable takes the emphasis in harass, for example—but these results did serve to make the no-less-useful point that on these matters, at least, there is no agreed-upon standard. 26 No less important, the Panel’s divided responses can provide a rough indication of just how broadly various critical concerns are shared by educated speakers. For instance, if you read what some critics have had to say about new forms like the words lifestyle and factoid or the use of demagogue and dialogue as verbs, you may be led to believe that they are all examples of egregious New Age jargon. But collectively the Panel was more discriminating. Fully 98 percent of the Panelists rejected the sentence Critics have charged that the department was remiss in not trying to dialogue with representatives of the community, and 94 percent rejected The President will demagogue Medicare. By contrast, 43 percent of the Panel accepted factoid in the sentence Each issue of the magazine begins with a list of factoids, like how many pounds of hamburger were consumed in Texas last month. And lifestyle is acceptable to a large majority of the Panel, 70 percent, in the sentence Salaries in the Bay Area may be higher, but it may cost employees as much as 30 percent more to maintain their lifestyles. Readers will want to make up their own minds about each of these usages, but the opinions of the Panel may have some weight, especially when taken together with the critical discussions in the Usage Notes. Perhaps lifestyle is not so heinous as one had supposed; perhaps it would be safer to avoid using demagogue as a verb, at least until the smoke clears. 27

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