When I asked Ammon Shea, the man who read the O.E.D., if he wanted to play a game of Dictionary sometime, he did me the favor of pretending I was sane.
“Do you have a specific dictionary in mind?” he wondered. “I would prefer Webster’s Third, if only because of all the bad blood between that edition and The Times.”
Bad blood?
It turns out that in 1961, when Webster’s Third was published, this newspaper ran a scathing editorial about it. “A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass.,” it began, “have been confabbing and yakking for twenty-seven years — which is not intended to infer that they have not been doing plenty work — and now they have finalized Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, a new edition of that swell and esteemed word book.”
Then it twisted the dagger: “Those who regard the foregoing paragraph as acceptable English will find the new Webster’s is just the dictionary for them.”
