The Dictionary Wars! with Gabe Henry

Remember being a teen and coming up with “cool” ways of spelling common words? Well, just like the teenager it was, the United States in the 18th century was annoying their mom, England, with the hip words that were being edited and added to their lexicon. The antagonistic pair of nations on the brink of the Revolutionary War were always competing to prove their superiority and independence in small cultural battles, and words themselves were no different. 
Fellow word-nerd Gabe Henry, author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, joins Sarah as they chummily pun their way through the story of the 18th century Dictionary Wars, the story of the publishing battles fought between a handful of eccentric word-lovers in The US and England, all vying for the future supremacy of their own spellings. Digressions include crop circles from Unsolved Mysteries, dishonest detergent marketing, and old fashioned sock puppet accounts.

More Gabe Henry:

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Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell

Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler

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Transcript

YWA - The Dictionary Wars

Sarah: That sounds like a country song, doesn't it? “I ain't yet quite right for your orthography.”

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we talk about all of our favorite words. And with me today is our guest du jour, Gabe Henry, who is here to talk about the dictionary wars, which are not as violent as they might sound, but very petty, which is better. 

Gabe has a book out now called, Enough Is Enuf. That second enough is spelled E-N-U-F. You'll know why soon. The subtitle is, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, and this is a book that recently made me chortle in an IKEA food court, where I like to go to relax. 

As you know, or maybe you don't know, I have another show coming out right now from CBC podcasts. It's a miniseries called, The Devil You Know. It's about, what else? The Satanic Panic. And episode four is out this week. I really hope you check it out. I hope that you can find some comfort in history, and in learning about the courageous people who have been living through moral panics a long time before this current one, and I'm so happy to get to share this show with you.

Speaking of things I'm excited to share with you, we also have a fabulous bonus episode on the word origins of ‘bimbos’. See, we're getting really wordy this month with our favorite bimbologist and our favorite podcaster, Jamie Loftus. And coming up, we have the first of our survivalism Q&A episodes with our survival correspondent, the amazing Blair Braverman. And this is the show where we had people on Patreon ask their burning questions about how to survive in every connotation of the word. And yes, we are going to talk about whether you can drink your own pee. 

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for journeying with us into the holidays. Here's your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where, in my opinion, you can just do the best job you can spelling your own name and then try again with a different spelling next time, because that's what Shakespeare did. And with me today is Gabe Henry. Gabe, how are you? 

Gabe: I'm doing great. How are you, Sarah? 

Sarah: I’m, you know, just slip sliding into the fall. They're about to take all of our daylight away. 

Gabe: Now, I wanted to note that we are recording this a few days after Noah Webster's birthday, which is National Dictionary Day. So I know this is belated, but I just wanted to wish you a very happy National Dictionary Day. 

Sarah: Thank you. I don't have a single dictionary in this house, but I do have a thesaurus, which I think is pretty good.

Gabe: That's close enough. 

Sarah: Yeah. I'm working my way up to a dictionary. And you have a new book out. Tell us about that. 

Gabe: My book is called, Enough Is Enuf - Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. And when you see the title, you'll see the second enough is spelled ENUF. And it's about the long, strange, little known history of something called the “Simplified Spelling Movement”, which was this effort over hundreds of years to shorten and streamline how we spell words like spelling Laugh, LAF or love, LUV. And this movement has been supported by people like Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Charles Darwin, all in this effort to make our spelling a little bit more logical. 

Sarah: Do you feel differently about the practicality of this idea than he did when he started? Like where are you on the spectrum of enthusiast to no? 

Gabe: I've become a little bit more enthusiastic about it. Maybe enthusiastic is too strong of a word, but I think where I land is I think spelling should be simpler. I think that it's a little absurd that we have eight different ways of pronouncing OUGH. Mm-hmm. You know, through the tough cough. 

Sarah: That's too many ways.

Gabe: It's too many. I think two is too many. If you look at some more phonetic languages like Spanish or German, most of them are very phonetic. But where I land on the actual reform part of it all is, I don't think it's really practical for us to go in and kind of artificially tweak the language in this conscious way. I don't think we can really push the language forward into the future, just like I don't really think it's practical to try to pull it back into the past. I think you just kind of let it evolve how it's supposed to evolve. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the way language evolves is so fascinating. And anyone who tries to, I don't know, police correctness in the English language. There's a spectral kind of irony to that, which your book certainly illustrates about just the idea that, I mean, how would you describe it? You know, you got into so much in your book, but maybe a little briefly to start us off, where did we get this language? We are speaking from where did we get this language in which we are speaking? I'm avoiding any with a preposition, which nobody does, which starts us off well.

Gabe: I guess a simple answer is, from everywhere. 

Sarah: Wherever we could get it. 

Gabe: Wherever we could. We were eating at the buffet of global languages. Really, a lot has to do with England's history. For hundreds of years, it was pummeled by invaders from all over. The Romans who spoke Latin, the Vikings who spoke Norse, which is similar to Danish, the Germans, the French, and then over time, all these languages merged and mingled into this very messy thing that we call English. And I think a lot of people think of English as this singular language, but I tend to think of it more as like eight languages in a trench coat.

Sarah: Yeah. And sometimes we fight under the trench coat, that's what creates interesting lumps or whatever. 

Gabe: Yeah. There's a big Tasmanian devil whirlwind going on under there. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, I don't know, there's something about the history of language, specifically, that I just find to be, I don't know, because it oozes into all other history into such a way, or I guess oozes out of it, I guess.

Maybe it's oozing in some kind of direction. It's an omnidirectional ooze, and I feel like the path that that takes you on, I don't know, just are fantastic and very fun to me. And so our topic today is the Dictionary Wars, which is an amazing title. And I want to just have you take us to the Dictionary Wars, please.

Gabe: I'd be happy to. I wanted to start by just reading you a quote, and I just want to hear your first organic reaction to it. Okay? Does that make sense? So for some context, this quote is from 1787. It comes from a London magazine, and the quote is in reference to Thomas Jefferson. Here it is…

“Belittle. What an expression. This word may be an elegant one in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible, but for our part, all we can do is guess at its meaning. Belittle? For shame. Mr. Jefferson. Why, after trampling upon the honor of our country and representing it as little better than a land of barbarism, why we say perpetually trample also upon our language? Oh, spare. We beseech you, our mother tongue.” 

Sarah: I love how people criticized Thomas Jefferson back in the day, but almost never for the things he should have gotten criticized for. That's so funny to me because I feel like ‘belittle’, like when you put it like that, it is kind of like a Simpsons word, like you can hear the sort of newness of it, maybe, if you tune your ear to the 1700’s.

But it feels like a college word now. It's like the kind of thing that you would hear in a political debate. And so the idea, it just makes me think that a piece of junk only has to hang around for a few decades to become a mid-century modern classic and for me to pay too much for it, it feels like that kind of thing. 

Gabe: ‘Belittle’ has definitely reached its vintage era now. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. It's tasty. 

Gabe: And it's kind of one of these words that I guess around the time it's an adjective little that's being turned into a verb. And it's one of many words that are being verb-ified. So there's words like ‘interview’, which is a noun. But around this time it's being used as a verb for the first time. 

Sarah: Oh man, these kids.

Gabe: Or the word ‘process’ is being used as a verb, or ‘notice’. So when this quote comes out in 1787, the word ‘belittle’ is considered a kind of unsophisticated, uncouth word. It's a new word coming out of America, and it's frowned upon by the British elite who don't believe it to be part of true English. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like this is not quite the right comparison. Because when people do this now, I feel like they're trying to pander to the youth in a way that I find mortifying, as someone who definitely also does that. But it feels like maybe if Thomas Jefferson is talking about “rizz”. 

Gabe: You know, I think that's a great comparison. I mean, every slang is laughable in its first iteration. 

Sarah: I mean, I think it sounds right when it's used correctly. But as someone who is never going to use it quite right, I, as a 37-year-old, I just need to concentrate on Murder, She Wrote.

Gabe: But I think the thing about a word like ‘rizz’ or ‘belittle’, is we don't really know how it will be accepted in the future. 

You know, ‘belittle’ is considered part of traditional English now. It's part of high-class thesaurus dictionary, English authoritative usage. And ‘rizz’ in 40 years might be the same. We really don't know the path it's going to take. Or, it could drop off and become some kind of laughable, nostalgic slang that we pretend we never said but we all know we did. 

Sarah: Yep. We did a bonus episode last month with the irreplaceable Jamie Loftus, and talked about the derivation of the word ‘bimbo’. Because that one is interesting to me because it doesn't seem to have any one derivation. 

It seems to have sort of wandered in through the windows of American culture through a few different ways. Like it exists as a last name and, you know, Italian for baby. But to have just bounced around being applied to kind of everybody for a while until it made its way to hot women. And I don't know, I like that one too, where it's like people are like, we just know we love saying it. We're just not sure what we want to mainly be saying it about, so we're going to take some time to decide 

Gabe: The way a word feels coming out of your mouth, or the way it sounds coming into your ears, could have a lot to do with whether it catches on. ‘Belittle’ is a fun word to say. So is bimbo. 

Sarah: It is. Yes. And yet, belittling bimbos is a terrible thing to do. 

Gabe: So this word ‘belittle’ is just one of many new words and slangs that are bubbling up in America at the time, which the British are dismissing as Americanisms. And I have a short list here of a few other Americanisms that the British are railing against.

So words like ‘skunk’ and ‘canoe’, which are indigenous words, and therefore considered uncultured and uncivilized abridged words like ‘gents’ instead of ‘gentlemen’, and ‘pants’ instead of ‘pantaloons’. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Sorry. That was amazing. 

Gabe: I agree. Also, compound words like ‘eggnog’, which comes from an English slang word ‘grogg’, meaning rum, and ‘noggin’, which means a wooden cup.

Sarah: We could be calling it ‘groin’. I just don't know. 

Gabe: Groin, groin nogging, rock. I think the British would've had a hard time with any of those. But I think there's some rizz in calling it ‘groggy’. 

Sarah: It is funny to me that it feels like this interesting kind of proprietary jealousy of like, they're not using the language, right. We're using it right. And it's like, well, you're using it for your needs, and they're British needs. 

Gabe: Exactly. Another word that's starting to become popular in America is the word ‘cookie’, which derives from a Dutch word. And you know, you've really offended the British when you start saying ‘cookie’ instead of biscuit.

Sarah: Oh yeah. That is probably when culturally we became a different country. 

Gabe: Exactly. So these are just some of the hundreds of new Americanized words that the British are taking offense to. They're not just taking offense to the words themselves, but to what the words represent. 

You know, they represent that America is growing away from England. They represent that the English language is separating from its roots and, and it's seen as a threat to England. 

Sarah: Mm-hmm. It's almost like the language is going through an adolescent rebellion in a way. 

Gabe: Yeah. Just like politically they were seeing America go through an adolescent rebellion, too. 

Sarah: Yeah, that too. 

Gabe: Exactly. They wanted their political independence as much as their linguistic independence. 

So this kind of Americanized English, or many were calling it barbaric English, it had been growing and spreading for much of the 1700’s. And back in 1746, this is 30 years before the American Revolution, a British poet named Samuel Johnson decides that he wants to actually do something about it, to actually fight back against this American influence on English.

So in 1746, Samuel Johnson is 37 years old, as you are. As I am.  

Sarah: I’m 37. Oh my God. We're going to choose some weird life plans this year, I bet. I can't wait. 

Gabe: Yeah, just like Samuel Johnson did. So Samuel Johnson, he's 37, he's living in England. He's restless, he's underworked, he's trying to make a name for himself as a poet. He's picking up whatever teaching and tutoring jobs he can find. You know, it's a pain that all my fellow freelancers probably know very well. 

And he's also a staunch Tory, which means he's politically conservative. He loves tradition and authority, and he's distrustful of reformers and radicals of any kind. But especially Americans. In fact, he actively hates Americans. 

Sarah: Fair enough. But not for the right reasons. 

Gabe: I have a quote here from Johnson. He says, “I'm willing to love all mankind, except an American.” He also called them, quote, “a race of convicts who ought to be thankful for anything we allow them, short of hanging.”

Sarah: Hey, that's Australia. 

Gabe: So clearly, there are many things at play here with him and his disgust for America. And what it represents, runs very deep. To him, proper English is a mark of civilization and order, and every new Americanism threatens to unravel it. So, oh boy, he takes up this mission to save English, to preserve it from American decay.

And his plan is to compile a huge authoritative English dictionary. And he hopes this will both standardize the English language and also defend it against America's influence. He kind of sees himself as this guardian of the language, and he wants to draw a clear line between England and America. So in 1746, he begins this monumental task of creating a dictionary, and it ends up taking the next nine years of his life.

Sarah: Which is honestly an impressively short amount of time to write a dictionary in, you know? Especially the first. 

And there's also, I'm having two thoughts. A) that it's very charming to me to believe you can change the world by writing a book. And B) that in the mid to late 18th century, that probably is about as true as it's ever going to be. I mean, is that correct in your opinion?

Gabe: I think so. There were some dictionaries around, none of them were thorough, comprehensive, authoritative dictionaries of the language. So in a time before there was these thousand page dictionaries, it was actually practical and right sensible to think that you could change the language, or change the world, or change your national identity by creating a dictionary.

Sarah: And to be fair, that did happen. You know, because now we spell things a certain way. 

Gabe: Absolutely. And I don't know how many people alive today, if any, will ever truly understand what it must have been like to compile a dictionary, by yourself, from scratch, before the existence of a true authoritative dictionary.

Sarah: Yeah. What was it like? 

Gabe: It required years and years of working, essentially alone. You know, maybe you're lucky to have the help of some assistants, but it's slow, tedious work. I mean, if you finish two entries a day, that's probably a really good day. And I actually have some information on what Samuel Johnson's process was like.

Sarah: Oh, boy. 

Gabe: This is his process. He starts working in 1746. He starts by taking a book off his shelf, and he underlines all the words and quotations that he wants to include in his dictionary. Then he passes the book to an assistant to transcribe his selections onto paper cards, which Johnson later alphabetizes and then defines.

Then he continues onto another book, and another, eventually he runs out of books. So he starts borrowing books from friends. In fact, some friends later report that when the books are finally returned to them, they'd been so heavily marked and underlined as to be quote, “so defaced as to be scarce worth owning”. And he did this for nine years. It's also, I guess, interesting to note the temperament of some of these early lexicographers. 

A lot of them have been diagnosed posthumously by historians as having OCD, they’re obsessive compulsive. When Samuel Johnson was anxious or bored, he would obsessively count lines of Latin poetry, just a very, rote, repetitive, pedantic little hobby he would do.

Peter Mark Roge, who wrote Rojas, so he would obsessively count his steps to school every day when he was a kid. And Noah Webster, who published Webster's Dictionary, and we'll get to him soon, he would obsessively count the houses of every new city that he visited. 

I actually have a tally here during one of his lecture tours in 1785. He counted that Salem had 730 houses, New York had 3,340, and Philadelphia had around 4,500. 

Sarah: Man. It's funny, it's charming to think that the human desire to quantify information has been with us, probably since we've been around. And that I don't know that we're surrounded by so much sinister information technology that it's nice to remember that some of us built it because we just wanted to count all the houses in Philadelphia. Which is harder to do now. 

Gabe: There's not many things you can count that haven't already been counted. There's no novel counting projects you can pick up right now, let's say. 

Sarah: It is fun to count steps though, I got to say. 

Gabe: Well, we have technology that does that for us. I don't think anyone's counting their 10,000 steps by hand.  

Sarah: Well, look, sometimes you leave your phone at home, and you can't let it be for nothing. 

Gabe: It’s true. It's also interesting to note that when Samuel Johnson is doing this, this is the scientific revolution, and there's this push among many industries to count, and quantify, and classify a lot of things.

So while Johnson is cataloging English, this man Carl Linus is in Sweden. He's a Swedish botanist, and he's writing his first major catalog of plants. The first major work to catalog them according to binomial nomenclature. And so both of these writers, both of these minds are right in the middle of the scientific revolution, and they're trying to classify and organize the world around them to bring about more scientific understanding. I think it was a trend or an interest among many people to want to quantify their world. 

Sarah: And then of course there's the desire held by some to quantify the world in a way that proves that white men are superior to everybody else, inevitably. But it's just, I don't know, it feels like information. It's like the myth of Prometheus. Like you want to offer a flame to the people and some of them will use it for warmth and to heat up their hot pockets and some of them will use it for racism. And that's information baby. 

Gabe: That's information baby. Well, as long as we're quantifying things, let me give you a few numbers on Samuel Johnson's dictionary when it finally comes out in 1755.

So this thing is massive. It has more than 40,000 entries. It spans more than 2,000 pages, and the two volumes of it together weigh about 20 pounds. Which just to give a real-world point of reference, 20 pounds is about as much as a car tire.  So what we're dealing with. 

Sarah: So once he's written it, he can flip it over to do one of those NFL exercises.

Gabe: Yeah. It was the first weightlifting machine also, not just the first dictionary. He was jacked. 

Sarah: You have to assume. Yeah. What a thing to have produced. 

Gabe: Yeah. And just as he planned, his dictionary does become this symbol of English nationalistic pride. It serves as a wall against the new world. And it promotes England's superiority over not just America, but also England's neighbors like Scotland and France. 

Actually, a lot of his entries are full of these political biases. I have a few here. He famously defines the word ‘oats’ as a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. 

Sarah: Burn. Insult them for being thrifty, they'll hate that. It's not like they take pride in it. 

Gabe: And he frequently degrades Americans as a , crude people. Usually, he's degrading them in his example sentences. So, for example, for the word ‘fertile’, he posits that 10 acres of land in England are about as fertile as a thousand acres in the uncultivated waste of America.

Sarah: Oh! 

Gabe: For the term ‘endwise’, which means to set something upright, as when you hammer a pole into the ground, Johnson references the “wooden sticks of teepees”, which you would find in the quote, “rude and unpolished America, people with slothful and naked Indians”. And for the term ‘lizard’, he provides this annotation, “There are several sorts of lizards, some in Arabia of a qubit long, in America, they eat lizards.” 

So everything in reference to America is kind of to cast them as this primitive, barbaric, ignorant, uncivilized people. Everything in reference to England is refined and civilized. 

Sarah: And to imply that European settlers are taking their cultural cues from indigenous people, which could not be farther from the truth, unfortunately.

Gabe: Not at all. Linguistically, the languages are emerging in America, they're trading some words, they're shared. 

Sarah: But did we took the word ‘squash’ too, didn't we? 

Gabe: Yep. Squash, canoe, tomahawk. Bluff, in the sense of a cliff. I think squirrel. Maybe chowder. Yeah. There are quite a few. 

Sarah: Wow. When you're feeling cozy during having your squash chowder and your canoe this fall, just remember that language is also a thief.

Gabe: Also, if you don't mind a brief tangent here.

Sarah: I never mind a brief tangent. 

Gabe: Johnson's dictionary was also known for containing some really wonderfully bizarre entries and definitions. So can I read you a few of these? 

Sarah: Yes. Oh my gosh, please. 

Gabe: All right. “Tarantula, an insect whose bite is said to be only cured by music”. “Lunch, as much food as one's hand can hold.”

Sarah: I really like that. That's not that much lunch!

Gabe: Only one hand? 

Sarah: That's like a large pear. I guess that's why we invented the Caesar salad wrap, because of how Johnson's dictionary defined lunch. You have to fit a whole salad in your hand. 

Gabe: And I wonder if he's writing before the invention of the cafeteria tray. Because clearly, you can hold a lot more food in one hand on that. 

Sarah: Right. You have to balance it. We've circumvented that one. 

Gabe: Here's one, ‘mouth friend’, which is word he might've coined. A mouth friend is “one who professes friendship without intending it.”

Sarah: That's when he surprised his mother and his tutor once, and she said, “Oh, don’t worry Samuel, we're only mouth friends.” And he was like, no. 

Gabe: Oh boy. And then I have one more. I think this one is the best. This word is ‘belly’. He defines it as, “A glutton one who makes a God of his belly.” 

Sarah: Yes. Belly God. Oh, that's good. 

Gabe: I need that on a t-shirt. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's like there's a charming amount of voice in it, but it's just like, it's interesting to be like, I don't know, there's this pure quest for information that seems like it's made possible by the sheer power of spite. 

Gabe: That's why it's the dictionary wars. 

Sarah: It's not the dictionary picnic. 

Gabe: It's the dictionary mouth friends.

So I mean, there's a lot of political biases that are going into these early grammar books, schoolbooks, textbooks, dictionaries. Because when it's a novel creation, when you don't have centuries of these books already, you can move the needle quite a bit in the direction of your country over another if you get there first.

Sarah: Yeah. And it's kind of the same principle that like if you decide what goes in school textbooks in the United States or any other country, but you know, as a belittle saying American, that's what I know. If you control what goes in textbooks, you control what people believe to be true and what they perceive in the world as it is policed and created.

So, I mean, there's such an interesting tension generally, and it feels like we're in this period of the standardization of knowledge that's making it true in a deeper way than it has been before. Maybe that there's the power of learning and discovering new information, and then the power of what you relay to the people, and that those can be different things and that it can be different because you have an agenda. It can just be different because. every person is imperfect as a vessel for the things that they're trying to understand. And sometimes, I really hate Scottish people. 

Gabe: And I guess if history is written by the winners, then the lexicon is written also by the winners or by just the people who get to that finish line first.

Sarah: Right. The language we write the books in. 

Gabe: Exactly. So Johnson publishes the dictionary in 1755, and it immediately becomes the gold standard of dictionaries. Again, it's technically not the first English dictionary, but it's definitely the longest and the most meticulous and exhaustive. And as Johnson hoped, it kind of draws this line in the sand between British English and American English, and it enshrines British English as just the default standard. 

Sarah: I was just watching, as I do, last night an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, where they were talking about the crop circles around Stonehenge, which are a newer phenomenon that I think we tend to think… I don't know, I should do an episode on that one day, get to talk about signs.

But it was like a lot of British men with, to me as an American, very fancy sounding accents. And that as an American, you tend to think, like even now, right? You know an Oxbridge type of an English accent, and you're like, well, that guy knows what he is talking about. And then he is talking about crop circles and you're like, no, maybe he doesn't know.

Gabe: I think, I mean, Samuel Johnson was probably onto something in that the Oxford British accent really is the best vehicle to convey any kind of information and have it believed by the most number of people. 

Sarah: Even if it's just so, you know how in Unsolved Mysteries they do the update, you know, they're like, “who could ever solve this unsolved mystery?” And then it's a guy being like, “There's simply no way it could just be two gents from the pub.” Right? And then they're like, “Update. It was two guys from the pub.” And you're like, well, sometimes it's two guys from the pub. 

Gabe: Yeah. That should be the name of a collection of unsolved mysteries, or just the title of the next biography of American Histories. It was just two guys at the pub after all. 

Sarah: It so often is. Yeah. 

Gabe: So this book comes out. And then fast forward of few decades to the late 1700’s. The American colonies have won their independence. The Revolutionary War is over. And now there's this question that hangs over America. What will its identity be? What will this new American culture look like? 

And it's at this time that America starts rejecting anything and everything British. Not just its government, not just its kings, but also its culture and its language. 

Sarah: Yeah. Which is tough to do. Because we do speak it. 

Gabe: Yes, exactly. Put yourself in their shoes. Here they are. They adjust one independence from England, and yet they're still speaking English, the language of their former oppressors. 

So for a brief period during this wave of anti-British sentiment, America considers replacing English with an entirely different language. There's a few people that nominate Greek as a replacement. Others suggest French. There's even this brief campaign to have Hebrew substituted for English, kind of as a way to symbolically unite Americans as a chosen people. 

Sarah: And then we realized that it's really, really hard to learn to speak Hebrew. And also, a modern version of it won't be created for 200 years. And we're like, no. 

Gabe: And also, that whole right to left thing. 

Sarah: Does anyone suggest Dutch? Because that seems somewhat reasonable.

Gabe: Many languages are floated. And Dutch would be reasonable. It is a German language, like English. 

Sarah: We like to say ‘cookie’. We can just start with that and work our way out in concentric circles.

Gabe: Listen, if you give a language a cookie. 

Sarah: They'll ask for a cup of tea. 

Gabe: So it's around this time that this man, Noah Webster, comes in. So Noah Webster, he's this young, 25-year-old Connecticut school teacher, and he's just starting to gain notoriety for a schoolbook he's published earlier that year titled, The American Spelling Book. It quickly becomes this popular textbook in American schools, and it gives Webster a bit of an ego. He starts thinking of himself not only as a language authority, but also as a language savior, someone who's going to save English while also making it something wholly American. 

And he comes up with this idea that instead of replacing English entirely with French or Greek or Hebrew, he develops a plan for an American spelling. So he spells laugh as LAF, he respells tough as TUF, and Tongue as TUNG, and women as W-I-M-M-E-N. And. He goes through the English language, removing silent E letters and superfluous letters everywhere he can. And he publishes this proposal in 1789 in a piece titled, An Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling. And needless to say, no one really takes Webster's new spelling seriously. 

It looks silly. It looks dumb. One reviewer writes, “we are sorry to observe this very peculiar and unsightly mode of spelling.” Webster's own friend, a man named Ezra Styles, writes to him saying, “I suspect you have put in the pruning knife too freely.”

Even Webster's brother-in-law can't get on board. He writes to Webster saying, “I ain't yet quite right for your orthography.” So no one really, no one's buying this simplified short spelling. 

Sarah: That sounds like a country song, doesn't it? I ain't yet quite right for your orthography. 

Gabe: Yeah, I could see Willie Nelson singing that.

Sarah: Exactly. Yeah. 

Gabe: So he can't get support for these spellings. They look uneducated, uncivilized, and childlike. And some historians have suspected that there's another reason Webster can't really get anyone on board. And that is, most of his peers don't like him. Yeah, that's hard. It's true. Webster could be pompous, and arrogant, and condescending. And he just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. 

In fact, I have a list here of some of the things that his contemporaries called him during his lifetime. Are you ready for this? 

Sarah: Oh yeah. 

Gabe: A half begotten, self-dubbed patriot. A great fool and a barefaced liar. A deceitful news monger. A spiteful viper, a maniacal pennant, a dunghill cock of faction. Oh, don't ask me what that is. An incurable lunatic, and a prostitute wretch. 

Sarah: Well, you know, in this economy we're all flirting with that. But I can't get over “half begotten”, where it sounds like he didn't finish getting born. He’s like, he's only birthed up to the waist. 

This all makes me think of, there is a New Yorker article about the Kushner family shortly before the 2016 election, I think. Where someone who knew Jared Kushner at Harvard called him a “snakey motherfucker”. And I think that every time I see him and have for nine years. 

Gabe: Unlike Webster, Kushner is a fully formed snakey motherfucker, not a half-formed. 

Sarah: Yeah. He managed to slither all the way out. Which is, you know, good for him. 

Gabe: That dunghill cock of faction.

Sarah: Because I do think that the insults were quite good in the 18th century, you know? It's like what tourists said about New York in the nineties. It's like great century, but I wouldn't want to live there. Like, I don't want to get the pox, I don't want to deal with the lack of painkillers. Don't get me wrong, but the insults, the coffee shops, the bead work, you know, there's appealing stuff.

Gabe: Yeah. I think you could probably put together a colonial insult dictionary composed entirely of what people called Noah Webster. 

Sarah: You can have a supplement, a sequel book to this book, that's just called, “What People Called Noah Webster”. 

Gabe: Yeah. So about a decade after trying to push America to adopt these simpler spellings, Webster basically gives up. And in 1800, he announces his new project, an authoritative American dictionary. He figures if he can't persuade Americans to spell differently, he can at least elevate American English in another way. So he can create this dictionary that will give credence to all those Americanisms and slang that Samuel Johnson had railed against, all those indigenous words like tomahawk, and moose, and squash, all those words like eggnog. 

Sarah: I don't know. I like this. I also, I feel like we need to hear more when we are growing up about the extremely bad ideas of people whose good ideas we hear about. Because it makes it seem like history is just a long procession of people having one good idea and then dying. When in fact, the bad ideas that brought them to the good ones are kind of the most interesting.

Gabe: Yeah. I hate to plug my book, it's called, Enough Is Enuf - Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, and it's available everywhere, but it really is a biography of failures. It's a biography of all these people whose names we know in these elevated senses, whose names we know on statues like Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. But it's talking about periods of their lives where they failed and they had really preposterous ideas that didn't catch on, and they were humiliated in many ways. 

And I think I'm really drawn to that side of history. The side of history that doesn't come through in the bullet pointed textbooks, but the kind that's like, Charles Darwin would've preferred that he didn't know this part about his life. 

Sarah: Right. Or the idea that like, I don't know, the sort of the dream that I understand why some people hold it, because we're all so embarrassing as human beings, and it's hard to deal with that sometimes. But what if I have good ideas and I contribute to society and that no one ever talks about my sex life. And it's like, oh no, we're going to, and we probably have to. So, yeah. 

Gabe: Yeah. I mean, in the future, all our biographies will be researched by our search history, and that scares me. 

Sarah: Oh God. That's, you know, there is a lot of information there. You know, it can't be denied. Yeah. Okay. So Noah Webster kind of, and I agree by the way, with his critics at the time where, and you get into the reasons why this wouldn't work in your book. But what I recall and what sticks out to me is that it would actually take a really long time to teach people to spell this way. And so it seems like, do you think that he's giving into the more practical objections, or is he just kind of like, ugh, whatever, I'll do this new thing. 

Gabe: He does give into the practical objections. He realizes that his radical spelling reform is too much, too fast.  People don't like changing their language all at once, being forced to do it by some authority. People really tie their language to tradition and identity, and these are things that people just don't like changing. So any kind of big, radical reform wasn't going to work. But he does have some ideas later on of how to slip these simplifications into the lexicon. Anyway, and I'll get to that.

So he announces this big dictionary project in 1800, and he starts working alphabetically from A to Z. And just to give you a sense of how long and cumbersome this project is, it takes Webster six years just to reach the letter C. It takes him seven more years to reach H, another two years to reach R. And at last, he finishes in 1825, after 25 years working on the project. 

Sarah: My God. 

Gabe: His final word that he works on is ‘zymome’. And he later described the feeling of finishing the project. He writes, “When I had come to the last word, I was seized with a trembling, which made it somewhat difficult to hold my pen steady for the writing, but I summoned strength to finish the last word. And then walking about the room a few minutes, I recovered.”

Sarah: How does that compare in your experience to finishing writing a book? Although, one that doesn’t take as long.

Gabe: Similar. I've never worked on a book for 25 years, but it's very similar. There is a feeling of unsteady hand, a feeling of your heart beating, your heart racing, you feel a little flushed maybe, and a great joy.

And I'm sorry to say, it doesn't last that long. Because the nature of certain writers and artists is that you're looking for the next thing pretty quickly after.  

Sarah: Like with slot machines, 

Gabe: Like with slot machines, you can't get off the cycle. But there is a moment, and it's a really beautiful moment.

And I guess when you're a book author and you only have a few books that you write in your lifetime, that you only experience that joy a few times. So it's very precious. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like it's also like, I've never finished a book that went on to be published, but in my youth, I had a lot of projects that will never see the sun. And two of them were finished, book length manuscripts. And I remember the feeling of finishing, but it was like, I remember that feeling now in combination with all of the kind of the things that I loved about the whole project over time, and the feeling of ending the day and starting the next day with the feeling of an idea still to be expressed and sort of taking shape.

And I feel like there is this kind of, not that making something or researching or just, you know, work generally on any kind of large project. Like, it's obviously very difficult at times and there are times that you don't want to be doing it. Like nothing worth doing can be fun all the time, I think. But it feels like, to me, the joy of finishing is so much smaller than the joy of doing something, if you're doing the thing that you need to be doing. 

Gabe: I started to feel the same way recently. The joy of being in the process of knowing what you're doing every morning. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Gabe: Having a goal, often a singular goal, just one project, one intention, and living in that day to day, waking up and knowing what you're going to do. That is a more subtle joy, but a more enduring joy than that dopamine rush of finishing it. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Gabe: So I've tried to teach myself, tried to learn how to settle into that joy a little bit more. 

Sarah: Yeah. I love that. All right. Noah Webster, what’s next for you? 

Gabe: So this book is published three years later in 1828 as an American dictionary of the English language. And this is nearly twice as big as Samuel Johnson's. Whereas Johnson's had around 40,000 entries, Webster's dictionary contains around 70,000 

Sarah: Honey. 

Gabe: Yep. It includes indigenous words like ‘skunk’ and ‘canoe’. It introduces some distinctly American food staples such as ‘applesauce’ and ‘squash’. 

Sarah: What were they feeding babies in England, I ask you? Just more gruel. And opium, of course. 

Gabe: And his book also includes some new hyphenated words that are cropping up in America. Words like ‘savings bank’ and ‘reorganize’.

Sarah: The most American word of all, ‘compound interest’. 

Gabe: So as inclusive as this book was with all these new Americanisms, it's also noted for what it doesn't include. And it doesn't include the ‘u’ in ‘color’ and ‘honor’. It doesn't include the final ‘k’ at the end of ‘public’ and ‘picnic’, which was very typical in English back then.

And Webster, in fact, cuts out dozens of silent letters and Latin suffixes and superfluous vowels. You know, these changes that he had tried to implement decades earlier in his spelling reform, but which never caught on. And because he's slipping them in as part of this much larger lexicon of 70,000 entries, they don't set off alarm bells. They don't really get noticed, and therefore he is able to smuggle them into American English quietly. 

Sarah: Oh, wow. It's like when the White House releases 70,000 pages of documents, and it takes a while to realize how much they're spending on pens. 

Gabe: Yeah. It's like a big bill designed to create new housing, but it ends up taking away healthcare and food from everybody. 

Sarah: Quietly. Just quietly. Yeah. 

Gabe: So here's just a short list of some of Webster's simplified spellings that were in his dictionary and have since been adopted in American English. 

We have ‘theater’ and ‘center’ ending ER rather than RE. Of course we have ‘honor’, ‘color’, ‘neighbor,’ ‘favorite', without the U.

We have ‘program’ with one M, ‘wagon’ with one G. We have ‘plow’ spelled P-L-O-W rather than P-L-O-U-G-H. And we have ‘draft’ spelled D-R-A-F-T rather than D-R-A-U-G-H-T. 

Sarah: It's so funny, because so many of these spellings kind of still exist, right? Where you're like, come with me to the theater. I love theater and seeing it in the theater. You know when they have like a theater downtown that they still spell ‘re’. So you're like seeing live theater in the theatre. 

Gabe: Or in a mom and pop gift shop called, Ye Olde Shoppe, and it's ‘old’ with an E at the end, and ‘shop’ with two Ps. It's like this indication that you're somehow genuine or nostalgic about an earlier, simpler time. 

Sarah: It's like, well look, this saltwater taffy store on the Oregon coast has been here since before Noah Webster's dictionary, honey.

Gabe: And I think spelling ‘theatre’ ending in ‘re’ has that same effect on the American psyche as hearing a British accent try to explain something to you. 

Sarah: That's true. It really does. 

Gabe: It automatically comes with more authority. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It couldn't just be two guys from the pub. 

Gabe: So I have a couple examples of words that he spelled in his dictionary that didn't catch on spelling. Tongue, T-U-N-G. 

Sarah: I do like that spelling. 

Gabe: I do, too. Then also the word ‘ache’ spelled A-K-E. 

Sarah: That's cute. It's so funny the stuff that works and that doesn't, but that apparently we were like, yeah, we don't need you and stuff. A lot of us weren't even doing that anyway, to be honest. So yeah. 

Gabe: I have a few other fun and bizarre definitions, kind of like Johnsons.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. 

Gabe: In Webster's dictionary, he includes the term ‘kissing crust’. 

Sarah: Oh. 

Gabe: Do you want to guess what that means? 

Sarah: Oh my God. All I can think of is when you're kissing someone and their lips have a crust. What is it? 

Gabe: So it's actually the crust of a loaf that touches another. 

Sarah: Oh, that's so cute. 

Gabe: So when you're baking loaves of bread in the oven, or cookies, or muffins, and they expand so much that they touch, that is the kissing crust.

Sarah: And when cookies do it, it's the cookie crust. Oh no, it's still the kissing crust, but I wanted to get the word ‘cookie’ in there to honor the Dutch. 

Gabe: We can call it the cookie crust. 

Sarah: The cookies kissing crust. 

Gabe: And then we have the word ‘vernate’, which means to become young again. And it's derived from the Latin word for spring.

Sarah: Incredible. Yeah. This is so good. I also feel like if you can't keep up with today's slang, don't try. Just get old fashioned and make up your own weird words, and then say it with conviction. 

Do you remember this was kind of a popular book in the late nineties. There was a children's book called, Frindle. Do you remember this? 

Gabe: Yeah, I do. Yeah. 

Sarah: Where a kid decided to start calling pens, ‘frindles”, and then it caught on, and adults tried to suppress it, but it didn't work. And then at the end of the book, ‘frindle’ is in the dictionary. That was a good book. 

Gabe: Well, I think this should be your next big project then. You know, you're 37, the same age as Samuel Johnson. You start a nine-year project of just words that you make up that have very believable definitions. 

Sarah: Well, you know, this is also the age at which Julia Child learned how to cook. Which is kind of an example of like, you know how, I don't know. I think maybe this is kind of an American thing, too. Like we want to call it on our lives as early as possible, like we want to be 25 in this country and be like, “I know what the whole rest of my life is going to look like based on what the first part has looked like.” It's like, clearly we have no idea. Because if you asked Julia Child at 36, they would be like, “How much cooking have you done?” And she'd be like, “Oh my God. Like none.” I don't imagine that's going to come up later, but she would be incorrect. 

Gabe: Yeah. I actually have a couple friends that wrote a book, I'll give them a little plug. They wrote a book called, The Swayze Year. And it's basically about people who hit their peak or got their break later in life. Patrick Swayze got his big break in Dirty Dancing at the age of 35. 

Sarah: Right. Far too old to be surviving on Jujubes.

Gabe: So Samuel Johnson, he's the language authority in England. Webster, he's now the language authority in America. And this is where these dictionary wars start to take a turn. 

Sarah: Yeah. Rock’em, Sock’em impedance. 

Gabe: So what began is these grand nation building projects, two lexicographers trying to establish their country's identity and culture. It starts becoming a little bit more like high school drama. And that's where this guy Joseph Worcester comes in. 

Sarah: Oh boy. 

Gabe: So Joseph Worcester, he's a teacher from New Hampshire, he's in his forties, and he specializes in writing school textbooks. He's written a few on geography, a couple on history, and in 1828, he's hired to work on an abridged edition of Webster's Dictionary.

While he's working on this abridgement, Worcester is also putting together his own American dictionary, a competitor to Webster's. He's literally editing one dictionary and writing another simultaneously. 

Sarah: And do you spell his name, Worcester, like Worcestershire sauce, or like the College of Worcester in Ohio? Because I feel like that would place him on a certain side. 

Gabe: Like Worcestershire sauce, W-O-R-C-E-S-T-E-R. 

Sarah: Yep. I don't know. I love that. Even his name is like, you know, in America, we could take some of those letters out for you. 

Gabe: And maybe that accounts for a little bit of the feud that does arise between him and Webster.

So the thing about Worcester is he's more of a Samuel Johnson guy. He likes Johnson's British spellings. He believes British English is the true and proper English, and he thinks Webster has been a little too reckless with his spellings and his Americanisms. 

So this abridged Webster's dictionary comes out in 1829. Worcester's dictionary comes out in 1830. And even though Worcester has taken this more traditional British approach, critics start accusing him of plagiarizing Webster. A Massachusetts newspaper called, The Palladium, prints an anonymous letter that reads, quote, “A gross plagiarism has been committed by Mr. Worcester on the literary property of Noah Webster. Mr. Worcester, having become acquainted with Mr. Webster's plan, immediately set about appropriating to his benefit the valuable labors, acquisitions, and productions of Mr. Webster. Mr. Worcester has pilfered the products of the mind as readily as the common thief.”

And it sparks some controversy. Everyone starts pointing their fingers at Worcester. But here's the thing about the letter. Although it can't be proven, it's entirely possible that the anonymous author is Noah Webster himself.

Gabe: Noah Webster was known to publish rave reviews of his own work under anonymous authorship.

Sarah: No, I don't do that. So basically back in the day, if you needed a sock puppet, you would just go to your friend's printing press or something, I guess. 

Gabe: Yeah. You know, Walt Whitman, when Leaves of Grass came out, he actually published this rave anonymous review of the book. He used such larger-than-life language to describe himself, he says of himself, “finally, an American barred at last.”

And it wasn't until many years later that people started to realize, looking through this letter and seeing all the earmarks of his rhythm and his language. And I think it was very common then to publish rave reviews of yourself anonymously and also rave criticisms of others anonymously.

Sarah: Naturally, I mean, it was life before the alt news groups. To be fair, Walt Whitman did warn us that he contained multitudes. He just didn't say that one of those multitudes like to give him rave reviews. 

Gabe: You know, everyone has an inner critic. Some people also have that outer critic that just is biased toward themselves. 

Sarah: I saw like a TikTok or something once where somebody was talking about trying to learn to make their inner voice sound like NBA player post-game interviews or to respond to it that way. You know, where it's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why'd you do that? And you're like, “You know, I just tried to get out there and do my best, play my best for my team.” 

Gabe: I think at the end of a writing day now, I'm going to do a little personal press conference for myself. I'm going to turn on the selfie camera, look in, sit at a desk and say, “Hey, we tried our best. You know, at the end of the day, we all play as a team and we'll get 'em tomorrow.” 

Sarah: And you know what, Houston's got a good , too. Sometimes that's the way it goes. 

Gabe: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. 

Sarah: Some are born to sing the blues. 

Gabe: So anyway. 

Sarah: Okay, so Webster's, I guess if you've got such a strong dictionary writing hand, the bad reviews of others just fly off the page.

Gabe: And the thing is, now that this controversy is out in public, Webster publishes another letter under his own name in The Palladium, the same Massachusetts newspaper. 

Sarah: He's like, I agree! 

Gabe: Exactly. He endorses this theory that Worcester has stolen his words and his definitions.  

Sarah: Oh my God. He actually does an up carrot and says, “^ this”.

Gabe: And he actually specifies exactly 121 entries from Worcester's book that he claims can't be found in any other dictionary except his own. 

Sarah: Oh.  

Gabe: And he challenges Worcester to prove him wrong. So Worcester does prove him wrong. He publishes a letter in The Palladium citing other dictionaries that do include these 121 words. So Webster publishes another letter in The Palladium, alleging various other breaches and violations. Worcester replies, and this letter war goes on for a year. Petty accusations, public takedowns, lexical snobbery. It's just the dictionary wars are in full swing now. 

Sarah: Don't you think, we are where we are. We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but it does feel like the speed that things happen at… I just think that most human beings are better equipped to be in this kind of debate, like over the course of a year, you write something and then you put it in an envelope and then you seal it with wax, and then you give it to a guy on a horse, and then eventually it gets to the right person. 

As opposed to just like going back and forth in an online comment section over the course of like an hour while you're making dinner. And then just going through so many, like going through the number of emotions that you would normally get to spin out for like weeks or months. And also, just having no time to make sure you understand something correctly. I don't know, I just, again, I don't want to go back to the past, but the timeframe seemed kind of nice, right?

Gabe: Literary feud back then took time. You had to put effort into it. You had to sleep on it. You had to write the letter and then write the rest tomorrow. You had to use a thesaurus. 

Sarah: You had to sharpen your quill.

Gabe: You had to sharpen your quill. You know, it was padded out. So it was spread out. I think what Twitter has done is expedited our literary feuds. All our feuds in general. 

Sarah: Yeah.  

Gabe: And condense them from a year into three minutes. 

Sarah: The feuds are too fast now. I mean, even in the nineties, Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia had to wait to both get on TV to talk about how much they hated each other.

Gabe: Yeah. Maybe that was a fun one. Maybe the problem is not that we feud, but that feuds are too fast. 

Sarah: Yeah. Let's romanticize our feuds. 

Gabe: I mean, feuds are as American as skunk and canoe. 

Sarah: There you go. 

Gabe: So these dictionary wars are continuing. These petty feuds in this newspaper. Then in 1843 Webster dies, and his estate sells his dictionary rights to two siblings, Charles and George Miriam, who print and sell books in Massachusetts. And the Miriams not only carry on the Webster name, they also carry on Webster's feud with Worcester.  

So three years after Webster dies in 1846, Worcester publishes a new, more comprehensive dictionary titled, A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language, which contains around 83,000 words. So about 10,000 more than Websters. And the Miriams scour this new dictionary for examples of plagiarism, which they don't find. 

So they ask a friend, a man named Noah Porter, to write a negative review of Worcester's book, basically a hit piece, and it gets published in this journal, American Review. And it accuses Worcester of including tens of thousands of absurd and extraneous words just to inflate his total entry count. Because in those days, a big selling point for a dictionary was the number of entries included. The more, the better. 

Sarah: Now with 20% more words. Don't you love it when you're buying detergent and they're like, “now with 10% more detergent”? But that doesn't say then before, it just says ‘more’. And you're like, you didn't say what it was more than. I feel like you're lying to me. But anyway, it's just an issue I have. 

Gabe: You also didn't mention that the inflation rate of detergent quantity is lower than the inflation rate of the detergent price. 

Sarah: Exactly. Right. Yeah. Shrink inflation is a concern. Another great, new, made-up word that feels like it has to be American. Because boy, do we do a lot of that here.

Gabe: Yes, very true. Again, I think you should put together your own lexicon. 

Sarah: Yeah, I'm right on the cusp. Okay, so he is accused of putting linguistic sawdust in his dictionary. 

Gabe: Exactly. The previous accusations of plagiarism are still hounding him, and his name is being sullied. 

And now at this point, I want to point out that Worcester has done nothing provably wrong. There's no evidence that he plagiarized Webster or inflated his book’s pages to help market it. He's kind of the victim of this PR hit campaign waged by Webster and his estate. 

In fact, Worcester is generally considered to be a very kind and gentle guy. He's shy and quiet and a little socially awkward, but he's not pompous and arrogant like Webster. One contemporary said that in social situations, Worcester was quote, “want to sit silent, literally by the hour, a slumbering volcano of facts and statistics while others talked. He would join the conversation occasionally, but then he would go back to being quiet.” So he was the opposite of Webster in a lot of ways. It's kind of unfair that he gets his name dragged through the mud like this. 

Sarah: Well, he dared to be second. And, you know, sometimes that doesn't go so well if the first guy is still around. 

I also love that like the Merriam's, rather than returning the unused portion of the feud, decided to just keep running with it. I mean, I guess it's like if you are the owner of the legacy or the steward of the legacy, then it sort of makes sense to have more of an interest in doing that. But I don't know. It's just very charmingly petty. 

I mean, I don't think that we produce more or better information if everyone is fighting the whole time. But I just like that it took this long for two guys to hate each other back then that it passed on to inheritors. 

Gabe: When you're talking about your typical novel or your typical nonfiction book, there's plenty of room in the world for books that overlap with that subject. But I guess in this world of early dictionaries, there really is only room for one authoritative version of something. 

The American dictionary, the English dictionary. And I think the Miriams really see that it's important that they stomp out Worcester, right. And they raise up the Webster name and they continue to do this.

Sarah: It's like the restaurants in LA that are all competing to have invented the French Dip, as if anyone cares. I care a little, but come on. 

Gabe: No, it's exactly the same thing. So a few years after Worcester publishes his Universal and Critical Dictionary, a publisher in London puts out an unauthorized edition of it that essentially lists Worcester and Webster as co-authors.

Sarah: Oh no. 

Gabe: It's unclear why, but Worcester likely suspects that the Miriams have something to do with it. So Worcester publishes a pamphlet titled, A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed, relating to the publication of Worcester's dictionary in London. Which blames the London publisher and other unspecified parties for conspiring to lower Worcester’s standing.

So what do the Miriams do? They publish a pamphlet with the exact same title, A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed, relating to the publication of Worcester's dictionary in London. But this one is in defense of Webster, and its effect is essentially to sully the waters. Because now no one will know which pamphlet is Worcester's, which one is the Miriams, and who to trust at all.

Sarah: Well, that was pretty sneaky. 

Gabe: He’s pretty smart. So Worcester, no matter what he does, he's just always under this shadow of suspicion that he's at worst, a plagiarist. Or at best, a knockoff Noah Webster 

Sarah: Man. 

Gabe: And this goes on for years and years. The Miriam's continue to publish pieces against Worcester, degrading his scholarship boosting Webster's name. And at one point in the 1850s, the Miriam's hear through the grapevine that Worcester is planning to publish an illustrated dictionary, which was kind of a novel thing then. So the Miriams rush out a hastily published illustrated Webster's dictionary just to beat Worcester to market. It's all petty as fuck.

Sarah: Oh my God. And is there, like, is there big dictionary money to fight over? Or is this more personal? 

Gabe: There's a lot of dictionary money. 

Sarah: Okay. 

Gabe: I think it's estimated that in the 1800’s, Webster's dictionary sells tens of millions of copies. And especially if you're considered the one true, authoritative version of something, then you're going to be in every school classroom. You're going to be in every desk. You're going to be in every home.

So yeah, there is a lot of money in this. And I think Webster's original dictionary in 1828 sells for $20, which is a huge price back then. So, yeah, they’re raking in the money. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Gabe: So the Merriam's, they finally win this fight in 1865 when Worcester dies, and at last, they’re free to market Webster's dictionary without any competition. In the end, I guess Webster not only wins these wars, but he obliterates all competition. He obliterates Worcester. He obliterates Johnson. And it eventually reaches the point that today the name Webster is practically synonymous with the word dictionary. You know, no one says, yeah, look it up in Worcester's, or look it up in Johnson's. But most people wouldn't know what I meant if I said, look it up in Webster's. 

Sarah: But the joke is on him, because he's dead by the time he wins that one. 

Gabe: So there's a little addendum to all this. And it's that in 1889, the Merriam brothers lose their copyright on the Webster name. And a surge of knockoff Webster dictionaries pollute the market, to the point where Merriam-Webster, which is still considered the official Websters, is eventually forced to come up with a tagline to distinguish themselves. So their tagline that they still use today is, “Not just Webster. Miriam-Webster.”

Sarah: That's a terrible tagline. 

Gabe: And yet this is what they have had to resort to. And interestingly today, the term ‘Webster's dictionary’ is considered a genericized trademark. Which means it's still not protected by copyright. So technically, anyone can publish their own dictionary and call it Websters.

Sarah: No. 

Gabe: Which again brings me to the reason I'm here today, Sarah. I think that you need to publish Sarah Marshall's Webster's dictionary of Meetup words. And I think it should take you nine . 

Sarah: And 18th century insults. Yeah. And then after nine years, I'll emerge and spend my menopause having a feud. But I'm going to insist that it happen longhand. And that'll be fun, too. Yeah. 

Gabe: Longhand and in print media. Definitely not online. So you're going to have to buy some stamps, buy some envelopes, and pick your feuding partner early. 

Sarah: Because it's a commitment, you know. I mean, a feud is not to be entered into lightly, really. You're going to grow old together, 

Gabe: Nor do you need two parties to agree to a feud, really just one party. 

Sarah: What was it like for you to both spend the time writing this book, and now to finish it and to be kind of now looking for the next thing, but how has it been for you to spend time with all of these feuding, sometimes extremely unpleasant, 18th sanctuary guys? Do you miss them? 

Gabe: I truly fell in love with all of these characters. Some of them are so eccentric, and some of them were brilliant eccentrics. Noah Webster, certainly Benjamin Franklin. And then there were some who were clearly out of their minds. But I do love them all. 

And I really like obsessive people. Maybe not in the room with me, but looking back historically, I like people who get very pedantically obsessed with one tiny little thing for long periods of their life, and they see it as something that's going to improve the world or create a utopia. 

You know, Noah Webster with his simplified spelling, or any number of these really obsessive hobbyists who really had a lot of time in their hands and could devote decades to a single project. And in the end, a lot of these projects didn't work. And I also love the futility of it. I think there's just something poetic and beautiful looking back on it, the futility of being really in love with a project that doesn't work out. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then maybe the phenomenon where the project is the thing in a way where, especially in our culture, very results oriented perhaps, because we don't even have time to put the ‘u’ in color, so why on earth would we savor the moment. 

But you look at somebody who had this grand dream that didn't work out or that sort of, they remained in obscurity at least during their lifetime. And you think, well, that might have been just fine. If the project is enough to give your life shape and meaning, then maybe it's in a way better to not become successful and then end up having some kind of weird feud that lasts beyond your own death. 

Gabe: I mean, that's true. The moment you become public, you become maybe a target for people who are jealous, like a Noah Webster type. Or you become a target for people who really just want to take you down a notch. Or a target for a mouth friend, someone who pretends to be your friend, but really isn't. 

Sarah: Oh my God. I also just love the failed slang. I do just love the way certain language feels, just to say and to read. It's kind of like old baseball names. Like, just give me a list of old baseball names, I'll be happy. 

Gabe: Shoeless Joe Belly God mouth friend. 

Sarah: Shoeless Joe Belly God.  

Gabe: Yeah. 

Sarah: From the Akron Kissing Crusts. Well, okay, we've survived the dictionary wars. Thank you for taking us safely through this battlefield. 

Gabe: Thank you for indulging me. I know this is a subject that, from afar, it can look dusty and old. But at its heart, really language is about so many things that have to do with our culture, and it's about access and literacy and identity and communication. 

I think I always feel closely attached to this subject when I'm writing about it, when I'm reading about it. It really does make up so much of the ether of our life, and I think it's invisible to a lot of us.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And then it is, you know, like so many things, once you start paying attention to it, it really rewards the attention that you give. And there's just so much joy in language. I love getting to encounter this history and seeing how language always has been in one place or another, in one way or another, used as a tool of control and oppression. And yet that doesn't define it. 

And the sort of weirdness of it and the history that gets picked up by it and, you know, the way that people every day are finding new ways to use language just makes me happy. Thank you so much for taking us on this trip. 

Gabe: Thank you, Sarah. 

Sarah: Tell us again what your book is. Where can people find it? Would it make a good stocking stuffer? 

Gabe: I really think it would make a fantastic stocking stuffer. It's actually in the shape of a stocking, which means the shape of a foot. 

Sarah: You got to kind of wrestle it in, actually. But once it's in there, it looks good. 

Gabe: So the book is Enough is Enuf. The second enough is spelled ENUF. Subtitle, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. My name is Gabe Henry. You can find me on Instagram at @GabeHenry. And, yeah I'd love to talk more about this book with anyone who's interested in talking about it. 

Sarah: And if you got any letters written by a quill, then perhaps that's from a listener. I certainly hope it is. 

Gabe: I hope so, too.

Sarah: And that is our episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Gabe Henry, our wonderful guest. You can find Gabe's book, Enough is Enuf, and more about his work linked in the show notes. 

Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing and producing. We have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple+. Check out The Devil You Know, and take good care of yourself.