`Homemade Dictionary'

I woke Sunday morning to an e-mail from Josh Wallaert, of Minnesota, the proprietor of Webster’s Daily, a blog of found poetry drawn from the first edition of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. As a tease, Wallaert included in his note one of Webster’s definitions:

“Hope [n.] A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.]”

Language, Emerson said, is fossil poetry. In another age, he might have called it DNA poetry – a metaphor geneticists started using a long time ago. Simply by changing its context, Wallaert redefines Webster’s definition, and our understanding of “hope” is changed a little.

Guy Davenport, in his essay “More Genteel Than God,” describes Webster’s dictionary as “the Republic’s absolute arbiter of spelling and usage” -- a notion unimaginable today when the typical e-mail (not Wallaert’s, certainly, but his is far from typical) is a working definition of illiteracy. Davenport’s piece, a putative review of Richard M. Rollins’ The Long Journey of Noah Webster, is collected in Every Force Evolves a Form. Davenport makes clear that Webster, while quintessentially American in his self-reliance and choice of projects, was a crank, a religious fanatic and a thoroughly unpleasant human being, and that these qualities are reflected in his lexicography. Davenport says Rollins was surprised to find Webster “so curmudgeonly a reactionary, so sanctimonious a fundamentalist, or so smug a pessimist.” He continues:

“It was typically American, this homemade dictionary. Like Franklin in science and Fenimore Cooper in the novel, Webster drew on a heroic New World virtu, and was given credit for this prodigious work here and abroad as an achievement of universal erudition and the purest of morals. He himself thought of it as a conservative bulwark against the tide of Jacobinism, vulgarity, and ungodliness which he felt was washing away the foundations of the young republic. Something had to hold fast. He chose to defend, purify, and set in order the one common social bond, language. If enough people wrote and spoke with a nice regard for the accurate meanings of words, all might not be lost. Webster felt that truth was in words – is not language a divine gift? – and that we owe them reverence. He hoped to lead us away from the mischief of cant and the sloth of vagueness. Not law, religion, or literature can speak meaningfully with imprecise words.”

I don’t think Davenport is denigrating these ambitions. As a writer, he is always precise, a scourge of cant and vagueness. Rather, Davenport objects to Webster turning lexicography into a hypocritical holy war: “Such a homely and useful word as piss, which was good enough for the King James Bible and Dr. Johnson, was cast by Webster into outer dark, along with other `low’ words known to everybody but henceforth banned by moral arrogance.” Here, by the way, is Johnson’s definition of the verb “to piss”: “To make water.” And the noun: “Urine; animal water.”

On my desk is the copy-- broken-spined, dog-eared, coffee-stained -- of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged I received as a gift in 1973. It contains “piss,” as well as “pissant,” “piss away,” “pissed” (“angry, disgusted,” “drunk”) and “pissed off” – in other words, Webster’s lexical progeny bowed to common sense and common usage. I still find, however, a conspicuous lacuna between “fuchsite” and “fucoid.” (After all these years, isn’t that still the first word you look up in a new dictionary?)

Despite Davenport’s misgivings about Noah Webster as man and lexicographer (“I still can see him only as Uriah Heep sniffing out naughty words in the Bible, deleting them, and congratulating himself on being more genteel than God.”), visit Josh Wallaert’s blog and enjoy these emphatically hopeful treasures:

“Crowd, n.: An instrument of music with six strings; a kind of violin.”

“Growl, n.: The murmur of a cross dog.”

“Holloa, exclam.: A word used in calling. Among seamen, it is the answer to one that hails, equivalent to I hear, and am ready.”