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Under
Guralnik's editorial leadership, Webster's New World dictionaries
were among the first to include colloquial usages, idioms,
and pronunciations unique to the U.S. Ultimately, these distinctly
American dictionaries achieved such widespread acceptance
and popularity that by the year 2000 more than 80 million
people were using the college edition alone. It could be said
of Guralnik, therefore, that few other individuals have had
so profound an influence on the quotidian language of the
nation. And all this from a man who, when he started working
as a lexicographer, did not even own a dictionary.
The
day after he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English
from Adelbert College (now Case Western Reserve University)
in 1941, Guralnik was hired by Cleveland's World Publishing
Company to work as a summer editorial assistant on a simple
revision of one of the firm's inexpensive dictionaries. Although
he planned to return to the university's graduate English
program in the fall to earn a master's degree, Guralnik was
persuaded to stay at World and continue working on the revision.
After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he returned
to World Publishing, where he was asked to finish the job
of creating the company's first college edition of the dictionary.
Pursuing his M.A. even as he worked full time, he was named
dictionary editor in 1948.
Guralnik
did not accept the widely held conviction that his job as
a lexicographer required him to entomb a given era's English
in a protective block of amber. He believed in the mutability
of language, and he saw his role as a chronicler of the changes
that occurred naturally in language over time-he would describe,
not prescribe. Thus, if the World staff and its legion of
outside “readers” noted enough citations of a particular
new word, usage, meaning, or spelling in contemporary journalism,
literature, or popular culture, the new material would be
included in the next revision of the dictionaries. In addition,
World publications always included what are generally considered
to be the most detailed etymologies used in any American dictionary.
Guralnik
retired in December 1985 as vice president and dictionary
editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, Inc., which had purchased
World Publishing in 1980. Even in retirement he continued
to explore language, producing a weekly segment on Yiddish
for The Jewish Scene, a cultural program on Cleveland
radio.
Guralnik
was a longtime Fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America
and served as its president for many years. He remained editor
of Webster's New World dictionaries until his death at age
79, in May 2000. But his judgment, taste, and wisdom will
continue to have an impact on the written and spoken English
of Americans for generations to come.
text
by
Mark
Gottlieb
Fall 2002
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We
had determined that our word-stock would comprise more
than the usual dictionary entries. We would devote particular
care to the important idiomatic phrases that are such
a vital part of English and that had largely been neglected
by preceding dictionaries. Thus, under the entry for
mind, where one popular dictionary had entered no phrases
and where another had only put in mind, we entered
bear in mind, be in one's right mind, be of one mind,
be of two minds, be out of one's mind, call to mind, change
one's mind, give a person a piece of one's mind, have
a (good or great) mind to, have half a mind to, have in
mind, keep in mind, keep one's mind on, know one's mind,
make up one's mind, meeting of minds, never mind, on one's
mind, set one's mind on, speak one's mind, take one's
mind off, to one's mind. We also planned to enter with
a fullness hitherto unknown colloquialisms and slang,
the informal and vulgate words that are so rich and characteristic
a feature of American English. Thus, in addition to the
well-established entries, such as dead beat, double
cross, flophouse, sob sister, and vamp, we would
include a large number of widely used terms that had been
overlooked by our predecessors, such as fungo, cover
girl, jerk, double take, big time, Hooper rating, sixty-four
dollar question, and cousin in the very special
slang sense that indicates the relationship born by the
Detroit Tigers to our own Indians this past season.
We
were determined . . . to avoid at all costs creating
the impression (first perpetrated by Johnson and continued
by most of his successors) that we are authoritarians
laying down the law about usage. We would rather play
the role of a guide, pointing out what the accepted
usage actually is.
Corpus
delicti [L., lit., body of
the crime], 1. the facts constituting or proving a crime:
the corpus delecti
in a murder case is not the body of the victim, but
the fact that death has occurred and that it is the
result of murder. 2. loosely, the body of the victim
in a murder case.
You
will note that even though we carefully explain the
legal meaning of the term, we recognize the popular
“erroneous” use in our second sense.
Our
approach to language in general and to grammar in particular
was to be built in the light of contemporary linguistics,
from the scientific point of view of a descriptive,
rather than a proscriptive, grammar . . . . Our treatment
of the word ain't may well illustrate this point
of view. We say for ain't:
[early
assimilation, with lengthened and raised vowel, of amn't,
contr. of am not; later confused with a'nt
(are not), i'nt (is not), ha'nt (has not,
have not)], [Colloq.], am not: also a dialectical
or substandard contraction for is not, has
not, and have not: ain't was formerly
standard for am not and is still defended by
some authorities as a proper contraction for am not
in interrogative constructions: as, I'm going
too,
ain't I?
—Excerpts
from “The Making of a New Dictionary,” by
David B. Guralnik, a paper read before the Rowfant Club
of Cleveland, November 30, 1951
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