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...meeting last night, it was definitely announced that Webster's White Devil and Ibsen's Romersholm will take the October and December Loeb slots, respectively. Ronder had received permission to fill the November slot last spring, but he did not at that time announce the play he would...
...heirs sold the rights to Printers George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, Mass., but the Merriams failed to get sole right to Webster's name, which is now in the public domain -hence the modern multiplicity of "Webster's" dictionaries...
Nonetheless, from A to zyzzogeton (a genus of South American leaf hoppers), Merriam-Webster's Third Edition is lighter and brighter than its immediate predecessor. It weighs 13½ v. 16½ Ibs., has 2,662 v. 3,194 pages, contains 450,000 v. 600,000 entries. Gone are the gazetteer, the biographical dictionary, and 100,000 obsolete or nonlexical terms, such as the names of characters in Dickens. In are 100,000 brand-new terms, from astronaut, beatnik, boo-boo, countdown, den mother and drip-dry, to footsie, hard sell, mccarthyism, no-show, schlemiel, sit-in, wage dividend...
That Old Sprachgefühl. The result may pain purists, who will even find four-letter words ("usu. considered vulgar") in the new lexicon. They appear now because the most cultured (urbane, polished) Americans are used to earthier speech in fiction and drama. According to Merriam-Webster, even ain't is "used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers." Nor could the editors fail to dig cool cats who make stacked chicks flip. Without drips and pads and junkies, who bug victims for bread to buy horse for a fix, the dictionary of 1961 would...
Headed by scholarly Philip B. Gove. 59, a onetime English teacher at New York University, Merriam-Webster's Ph.D.-proud editors toil in a Georgian edifice in Springfield, Mass., that looks more like a college library than a company HQ. They began collecting a new batch of commonly used words before their last edition came out (complete with a misspelling-Brünnehilde...