In a musty, fluorescent-bulb lit school library, impatiently turning the pages of a dictionary, I was doing what third graders have secretly done for decades: looking for the naughty words. Yet on page 285 of the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary, there was no entry for the word “fuck.”

There was no “groovy” either, on page 371. The word had been so popular in the 1960s, why was it and so many others omitted? The answer lies in the front matter of that and every other dictionary, the dozen or so pages most readers pass over. It is where publishers, editors, and lexicographers, the people who write dictionaries, lay out their political linguistic agenda. In the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary, or AHD as it is known in the language world, editor William Morris wrote, “[T]he lexicographer must not, in these permissive times, merely record the language; the dictionary must offer that sensible guidance toward grace and precision which intelligent people seek in a dictionary.” Morris thought dictionaries should guide us not only with usage and etymology, but also by including or excluding the words of questionable social acceptance.

“If you’re bothered by the word “cockring,” or if you can’t say the word ‘nigger’ out loud, then forget it. You can’t be a lexicographer,” said Grant Barrett, project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS, pronounced “H-Dass”).

Barrett, who uses the inclusion of “fuck” as a barometer for deciding if a dictionary is worth buying, is at the center of a controversy among lexicographers. This debate pits two camps against each other: Descriptivists, like Barrett, believe that dictionaries should include all words that people use, even those that most high school English teachers would deem “ungrammatical.” Prescriptivists, on the other hand, want dictionaries to contain only words and definitions that they believe are “proper English.” We can all agree that “fuck” should probably not be used at the dinner table, but does that mean that it is not part of our language?

The history of the HDAS starts with a Ph.D. dissertation of John Lighter in the 1980s. He sold his project to Random House, and Random House published the first two-volume HDAS in 1996. The project editor of that dictionary was Jesse Sheidlower, who came over to Oxford University Press (OUP) when it purchased the dictionary in 2003. Lighter and his wife Jane O’Connor still have final say over the project as editors-in-chief. Barrett’s job since 2003 has been project editor: He is doing Sheidlower’s old job of shepherding the creation of the OUP version of the HDAS, a four-volume comprehensive lexicon of American slang with an expected completion date of 2013. The Random House version (RHDAS) included over 125,000 entries that now comprise the skeleton of OUP’s opus. Barrett will be paging through the entries, tossing the old and adding the new, along with any historical data that has been unearthed since the RHDAS was published.

The Oxford University Press also publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, considered to be the most comprehensive historical dictionary of the English language. With the OUP behind it, this newest version of HDAS promises to be the last word on American slang, that nebulous semantic concept that drives prescriptivists nuts.

Just how grating is slang to a die-hard prescriptivist? Robert Hartwell Fiske, editor of the online prescriptivist magazine The Vocabula Review, was so upset about the inclusion of “alright” in a dictionary that he wrote, “Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary includes alright, but what word was not included…so that an inanity, an illiteracy like alright could be kept in? Boeotian is not defined in Merriam-Webster's; nor is diaskeuast defined; nor logogogue; nor nyctophobia; nor myriadigamous; nor ubiety; nor womanfully; nor hundreds of other words that a college student might find infinitely more useful than the entry, the misspelling and definition of, alright.”

In a telephone interview, Fiske was harsher. “Descriptivists and lexicographers are interfering with our ability to write English beautifully and clearly. They militate against it. There are rules for all things worthwhile in life, and language is no different. The purpose of language is to communicate beautifully and elegantly, and if you follow the rules, that is what happens.”

As enemy No. 1 to the prescriptivists, Grant Barrett sees language rules as more relaxed. “If somebody says “streNNth” and someone else says “strength,” that’s fine with me,” he said. “If somebody begins every sentence with “hopefully,” that’s fine with me. The basic fundamental precept for me is that if message intended equals message received, that’s fine. Now in print, it’s a different standard than the spoken word. Descriptivists have to conflate spoken language with written language in order to make their argument. But essentially, if message intended equals message received, it’s all right with me.”

Day One for the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate occurred in 1961 when Merriam Webster’s Third International Dictionary, the W3, hit the shelves. It is the Abraham of the descriptivist dictionaries; all of them, including the forthcoming HDAS, are descended from it. Instead of polling a handful of academics about the words they use and including only those entries, which is how dictionaries had historically been written, the editors of the W3 turned to popular publications to find out what words people were actually using in writing and in speech. The result was a revolt. Magazines and newspapers called the W3 “monstrous,” “deplorable,” and “a scandal and a disaster.” Out of this debate rose the movement for prescriptivism and, ultimately, the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary, the one that did not include “fuck” or “groovy.” In the front matter, editor Morris claims “a deep sense of responsibility as custodians of the American tradition in language as well as history.” He cited the need to record “with accuracy and authority those elements of our language which are of concern to literate people.”

Should dictionaries include all of the words that society has deemed common, or merely the words that a select group of academics say is acceptable for usage? Linguists, educators and lexicographers from every corner of the English-speaking world debate this issue in journals, newspapers, and, mainly, the Internet.

Barrett lords over this debate from his cubicle, in a room filled with identical cubicles in a steely gray office on Madison Avenue. He stares at a monitor all day long, reading annotations, communicating with the other editors, sifting through etymological data, and reading the emails that engage in this ideological discussion. There is no Round Table of intellectuals trading verbal quips and rants about the worthiness of including eight versus nine usages of “shit”; rather it is a relatively small group of individuals, in other cubicles staring at other monitors all over the world, who trade written articles and diatribes back and forth with one another. It is at once a lonely enterprise and something intensely communal.

On the American Dialect Society (ADS) listserv, more than 200 people come together to debate these and other linguistic issues. Every year at the annual meeting, members of ADS, not just those on the listserv, vote on Word of the Year (WOTY). After the January 2004 meeting, Ed Keer took a small but telling poke at the prescriptivists:

I recently learned of a word that got me thinking of a new WOTY category: Most likely to annoy prescriptivists. Here's the word: Back Facial: A facial treatment for your back. Of course it really doesn't qualify for WOTY since it hasn't gained much prominence. I look forward to the howls from the mavens once it becomes popular!

The source of the most vociferous arguments for prescriptivism is Robert Fiske’s aforementioned Vocabula Review. The motto of Vocabula is “A society is generally as lax as its language.” In this monthly journal, Fiske and other prescriptivists argue that English is in a downward decline. Articles in this publication have titles like “Bad Grammar Isn’t Always What You Think” and “A Litter of Clichés.” Fiske himself has written two treatises on dictionary prescriptivism: “The Decline of the Dictionary” and “The Fiske Rating of College Dictionaries,” where he rated dictionaries based on their propensity to include non-standard words, definitions and pronunciations (the more incidents of the offending lexicography, the lower the ranking of the dictionary). Not surprisingly, the latest incarnation of the American Heritage Dictionary, “America’s Favorite Dictionary,” remains the most prescriptive according to his standards.

Fiske often refers to lexicographers as “laxicographers,” as if to describe dictionary writers as lazy or lenient in their inclusion of what many consider slang. Some of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary makers, according to Fiske the most error-prone of the descriptivists, made many mistakes in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 11th Edition (MW11). They include the pronunciation of the word “nuclear” as both NU-klee-er or NU-kya-ler and the inclusion of the slang word “def.”

In response to “The Fiske Rating of College Dictionaries,” linguist David Wilton wrote a rebuttal. ”The pronunciation of nuclear as [NU-kya-ler]. Three recent presidents, one a nuclear engineer by training (Carter), have made this pronunciation famous. One ought to be careful in declaring this one wrong lest one incur the wrath of millions of Southerners who are proud of their dialect… a similar objection is raised to the inclusion of the slang word def in MW11. But what of the white kid in Iowa who runs across it and wants to know what the word means? Not including the word would be to say that contemporary African-American culture is not worth recording. Nor is the word a passing fad. Def has been a staple of the Hip-Hop scene since at least 1979, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang [the RHDAS] records West Indian use of the word as far back as 1907. The two-line entry in MW11 is appropriate and utilitarian. The problem here is not with the dictionary; it is with Mr. Fiske. His view of what is important and relevant is exceedingly narrow.”

Said Barrett: “I am a free speech, open source, free beer kind of guy. They are all sort of different social and political concepts, but where they intersect describes my socio-political perspective on the world.”

Barrett is tall, a meaty 6’ 2”, and looks like he is a free beer kind of guy: button-down shirts, pressed pants, and an eager handshake. He is knowledgeable about many points of culture both high and low, and can switch, in one elegant move, from talking about etymology to a discourse on the best karaoke in New York. With an affable demeanor, he speaks passionately about a topic that most people do not pause to consider. Who thinks about dictionaries? He does, and he enjoys debating about it, in long, eloquent phrases, both written and verbal, with academics and non-experts alike.

Barrett says that there is an undertone of politics in the ongoing debate. He discussed the American Dialect Society meeting in January, where, as they do every year, they voted on words that entered our vocabulary the preceding year. “One of the things we voted on was the word that is most unnecessary. We voted that it was the substitution of ‘freedom’ for ‘French’ in ‘French fries.’ I got a lot of e-mail about that, and one said, ‘You PC leftist liberal commies should go back to France because we don’t want you here.’ There are certain people that see any kind of acceptance of any kind of nonstandard behavior as being evil. They see you as the enemy. We [the prescriptivist and descriptivist camps] are as divided as we can be.”

Indeed, many of the prescriptivists refer openly in written statements to the liberalism of the descriptivists. Eric Scheske, in an article about how four-letter words have devolved into substitutes for more accurate and descriptive words, writes, “In the past forty years, our culture's language has followed its morality, becoming increasingly loose and lazy, leaving its semantics as vulgarly disposed as Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson during a Superbowl halftime show.”

Barrett admits that he can be conservative about some language issues. “I take a prescriptivist stance on certain things, particularly when it comes to writing. I am perpetually annoyed by people who don’t use the shift key. It’s fundamentally lazy. It’s doesn’t necessarily come out in an English language usage guide, it’s not in a how-to guide to doing email. But, why wouldn’t you use the shift key? It kind of goes against my ‘message received equals message intended’ ideology, but I admit that I am judgmental, even though that sounds so prescriptivist.”

Being judgmental is at the core of prescriptivism. Robert Fiske is very vocal about his dislike of descriptivists. “Descriptivists and laxicographers have really had their day. I really want to upset them. I want them to know that their purpose in life is really questionable,“ Fiske said.

On the Vocabula Review web site, there is a link to a small picture of Robert Fiske. The web page is titled, “Take Revenge on Fiske!” Readers can use their mouse to rollover the image of his face and twist it in every direction until it is unrecognizable. “The descriptivists and lexicographers love to play around with that, because they don’t like me very much. But I don’t really care: They are ruining our language.”

Back to top