945. What was the famous Usage Panel from the American Heritage Dictionary and how did the panel's opinions influence dictionary entries? Steve Kleinedler, who managed the Usage Panel for many years, joins us this week with all kinds of fascinating inside-the-dictionary stories.
945. What was the famous Usage Panel from the American Heritage Dictionary and how did the panel's opinions influence dictionary entries? Steve Kleinedler, who managed the Usage Panel for many years, joins us this week with all kinds of fascinating inside-the-dictionary stories.
David Skinner article about the history of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel
David Skinner's book "The Story of Ain't"
American Heritage Dictionary Old Tumblr
Steve Kleinedler's book "Is English Changing?"
Steve Kleinedler on Twitter
Kory Stamper's book "Word by Word"
Grammar Girl interview with Kory Stamper
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/steve-kleinedler/transcript
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Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm here today with Steve Kleinedler, author of Is English Changing an Introductory Linguistics Textbook. For many years, Steve was the executive editor in the reference group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, where he was responsible for the American Heritage Dictionary as well as managing the panel of usage experts the dictionary polled and the kinds of topics we talk about all the time on the podcast — like is it okay to use "anxious" to mean "eager," and whether there's something wrong with that "10 items or less" sign at the grocery store?
Hi Steve. Thanks so much for being here with me today.
Steve: Thank you, Mignon. It's really a pleasure to be speaking with you.
Mignon: Well, I just find the work you have done fascinating, and I can't wait to hear more about it. Let's just start with the usage panel — the entries in the American Heritage Dictionary that show how usage experts … what they think about common usage problems. You were in charge of that and I just, I would love to hear at first, how it all got started.
Steve: Great. Well, thank you. Yeah. The usage panel has been an integral part of the American Heritage Dictionary from its conception up to the end of the publication of the dictionary in 2018. In the 1960s when the first edition was still being prepared, it was an interesting time in the American publishing world because dictionaries were a very easy way for publishers to make money.
So a lot of publishing companies would produce their own dictionary. So one of the more well-known ones, of course, was Merriam-Webster and their third edition came out in 1961, and at the time it came out, it was seen to be unusually permissive. Uh, it really wasn't. But there were pundits who really ran with that idea.
And your listenership might be interested in a book by David Skinner called The Story of Ain't, which describes that whole era and everything about the publication of Webster's third in great depth.
Mignon: Right, because the dictionary included “ain't” in a way that people didn't like.
Steve: Yep. And that was a huge thing, and there was a publisher who saw a way to counteract that and proposed a dictionary that would be more prescriptive than descriptive.
I'm sure that your viewers are familiar with the whole prescriptive descriptive debate. The truth of the matter is most dictionaries are actually very descriptive, and the American Heritage Dictionary is as well, even though it had a reputation of being prescriptive that came out from this period in the sixties because it was originally conceived as an antidote, if you will, to Merriam-Webster’s permissiveness.
And as part of that the publishing plan was … we're going to have this usage panel of a couple hundred linguists and people who used English in their everyday life. You know, poets, writers, journalists, that kind of thing. And the intent was that these usage notes would help the dictionary decry all the permissive things that Merriam-Webster had put out.
However, as it turns out, um, especially the linguists who are on the panel, not to mention the actual lexicographers themselves who were brought on staff to write and compiled the dictionary throughout the sixties, um, they being, you know, principled lexicographers, they themselves were very descriptive and how the project ended up was very different than the way it was initially conceived by the initial publisher.
There was a six-year, seven-year period where the usage panelists were being polled three or four times a year, 20 or 30 questions at a time. Starting with the letter A, somewhere around 1963 and 1964, leading up till about a year before publication in 1969. And those several hundred usage notes became the initial block of notes that appeared in the dictionary.
And it was very successful. And, they got … the dictionary got a lot of publicity mileage out of that, and continued to do so throughout the next five editions.
Mignon: One thing that people often ask is, you know, who is this panel and what makes them qualified to determine what's right and what's wrong? I mean, they're experts. They're experts in writing. But still, like, how were these particular experts chosen?
Steve: I can't speak to the sixties because I wasn't there. But at that time, of course, the publishing world was very based in New York. So, you see a lot of New York literary figures. And I would imagine that the linguists were somehow associated with people who are working on the dictionary. By the nineties, the aughts, the editorial staff made a point of like, getting much more regional diversity so that you had people from all parts of the country, not just the coasts.
And looking for different type of linguistic specialists, reaching out, branching out to different types of poetry, different mechanisms of expressing the written word, including people who wrote graphic novels like Allison Bechtel, as opposed to just people who are doing strict prose. Visual artists who used words in their medium, Pulitzer Prize winners, that sort of thing to really expand the pool.
Mignon: Nice. Nice. Who were some other people that were on the panel that the listeners might recognize?
Steve: Oh, there were plenty. And I'm going to grab the book myself so I can, uh, and your listeners … even though the dictionary ceased publication in 2018, the website still works. So, listeners can go there and check it out and then the usage panel list is included there too. And that website is AHdictionary.com.
Mignon: Yeah, I still go there probably at least once a week.
Steve: Yeah, so do I. Just looking at the list down here. So, there were close to 200 linguists and writers. Writers ranging from Pulitzer Prize winners like Suzan-Lori Parks. We have Robert Reich who was once the U.S. Secretary of Labor. People like David Skinner, the author I mentioned of The Story of Ain't. Linguistic Professors like Deborah Tannen.
Other writers like Amy Tan and Fay Weldon, there's a full list in the book or on the website. It's a really nice variety of people and opinions who have, you know, the authority to speak on the language.
Mignon: Nice. And Andy Hollenbeck asked me if there were any sticklers who always, you know, chose the most prescriptive way, or always voted against changes or did anyone, you know, quit in protest over the results? Like, were there any people who were like that?
Steve: During my tenure, no. I was there for 22 years, executive editor as seven years. But worked on the, with the panel results for all 22 years. People were very generally good natured about it. They, in fact, a lot of them found it to be fun. Like sometimes in the beginning when we were still using paper ballots, some people would always return it right away, and then you'd get the next clump, you know, right before the deadline.
Starting in the mid aughts, we went to an electronic format, which was a lot easier to collate the information and everything. People usually filled it out pretty enthusiastically. And yes, some people were stricter and others were less so. But, sometimes you'll find quotations from certain people, anonymized, saying why they may or may not have liked certain things. Also, on the website, AHdictionary.com, at the bottom you'll find a link to the Dictionary's Tumblr site that was active about 8 to 10 years ago. Within that there are a lot of essays that I and some of the other editors wrote, and there were a few that talked about the panelists.
There was one of the last panelists that was still around from the very beginning. I'm gonna get his name right. I think it was Howard. Um, I'm sorry, it was not Howard, it was William, William Zinsser, who was one of the original panelists. One of his relatives wrote in with some of his papers.
And there's a really nice article about some of his viewpoints in the sixties versus later on. There are, you know, there's only a couple dozen Tumblr entries, but I think some of your diehard fans would really enjoy going through that and seeing, you know, some of the essays we have about it.
Mignon: I'll put it in the show notes so people can find it. Another question someone had is, “Did the editors ever overrule the panel?”
Steve: The short answer is no, but it also depends on how you define overrule. Usually we'd use all the material except when we realized when getting the results back that there was a problem with the way that we worded the question where there was this ambiguity.
And, you know, if it was like a yes/no question, you know, would you use this in your edited prose? It was hard to determine whether or not they were going after the thing we were testing, or if there was a different problem with the sentence that we hadn't realized. In those cases, we would ask an analogous question the following year, you know, fixing it so there would be no ambiguity. Aside from that because we were using, uh, often percentages or a yes/no thing, we could almost always find a way to include the information we needed in the definition, and if there was some outcry against it, that would be covered in the note.
We, as the editorial staff, didn't really have a need to say, well, the usage panel felt this, but we're like, do what you want. You know, we could, again, we could let the notes speak for itself. Right? And as a general rule, the panel was pretty perceptive of being able to distinguish, you know, if you say this thing, people will misconstrue you. It's wrong because if you use this, people won't know what you're saying. And on the other end, yeah, go ahead. The ship has sailed. And then of course, everything in between.
Mignon: Right, right. Well, that reminds me of one question. So, I've been doing usage polls on Facebook for a month or so now, and one problem I've really struggled with is how to define the circumstances under which people think a usage is acceptable and like, how did you phrase it? How did the dictionary define what acceptable usage you were trying to poll the panel about?
Steve: Right. In the questionnaire that we sent to the usage panel, unless there were specific things to a particular question that we were going for, the general rule was, would you use this word or phrase in edited prose? So, it was less about, you know, are you gonna use this in casual speech with your friend, you know, in front of the grocery store versus you are, you know, working at a newspaper. Is this usage going to make the cut if one of your writers uses it in an article?
For your listenership, who has a print copy of the American Heritage Dictionary, if you go to the front matter of the dictionary, there are some essays and instructive matter that talk about the methodology as it were, that is sometimes of interest.
As a general rule though, what we were looking for is whether or not it would be used in what we called edited prose. Occasionally we would ask questions that were a little more fine grained. It's like, you know, would you use this in casual speech? Would you use this in formal speech?
But generally, we were going for edited prose.
Mignon: That's great. And you may have just answered this question, but Aaron Howard asked, what do you think is the most underused portion of the dictionary? Is it the front matter?
Steve: Definitely the front matter, and it's an important part. You need it there, and people do refer to it, but not as often as you'd like. And certainly, in this day and age of digital dictionaries, chances of front matter getting used are very slim. But the, I mean, in the fifth edition, the front matter goes … I'm gonna check right here, something like 28 pages.
There's a lot of information there about how to use the dictionary and lexicographers are aware of the fact that not everyone is using it. So, we keep that in mind when writing definitions or knowing that like, okay, if you run into a label in a dictionary, the difference between "obsolete" and "archaic," for example, rather than trying to guess what we might mean, those labels are explained in the front of a dictionary.
A lot of time is actually spent on creating it. And we know it's for a very small percentage of the people who actually avail themselves to it.
Mignon: What is the difference between "obsolete" and "archaic"?
Steve: That's a very good question. In the American Heritage Dictionary in the fifth edition, "archaic" is applied to words and senses that have largely fallen out of use since around 1950, or associated with an earlier era. Have seen some use in texts printed after 1755, 1755 being the year that Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English language was published.
"Obsolete" means you can find it in literary texts, but it really has fell out of use before 1755.
Mignon: Ah, so it's really like a cutoff of a date. That’s interesting. Cool.
Steve: Yes.
Mignon: So, you know, I think one thing I love about the usage notes, and I feel like maybe I ascribe too much importance to it, is the numerical value, you know, 67% of the usage panel thought this one year, and then 47% thought that 20 years later.
And do you feel like the quantifications are valid? I mean, obviously they're valid, but how much should I be reading into those quantifications?
Steve: That's also a good question. The answer in terms of a question that's only been asked once. I think it's interesting if something's 50/50 or like all or nothing. You know, the difference between an 86% approval and a 74% approval, not statistically valid. Something that's really like close on the edge versus unanimous, that's an interesting thing.
Where I find it really interesting to look at the percentages is looking at words that we polled over several decades. So if a word was polled in the sixties and again in the eighties, and again in the aughts, uh, seeing the shift in acceptability, keeping in mind that it's not the exact same people who are being asked each time, because, you know, the people who are on the panel in the sixties, by the time the aughts came around, many of them had retired or passed away, what have you.
So, the panel’s always reconstituting, but as a general number, it's an interesting thing to track. One note I find fascinating, because I never knew it was a problem, is the verb "contact," which in the 1960s was considered an abomination by many.
Mignon: Like to say, "contact me later" or …?
Steve: Yep. Or, you know, one of the directives was instead of using "contact" as a verb, which is an abomination you should use "telegram" or "send a letter" or "call by telephone" or, you know, use the verb of the method that you are making for the contact.
"Contact" was seen as a noun, and so in 1969, only 34% of the panel accepted the use of "contact" as a verb. By 1988, it was up to 65%, and in 2004, 94% approved of it.
Mignon: I've never heard of that objection.
Steve: Neither had I. I really had not. It was a real surprise to me when I started working there in 1997 and came across this note.
But, I think the percentages really paint an interesting story when you can track something over 40 or 50 years and see how it's changed.
Mignon: Yeah, when, when people ask me about prescriptivism versus descriptivism, and you know, I've become less stringent over the years and, you know, how or why, and my answer is always when you find out what people objected to 50 or 100 years ago and, and how ridiculous a lot of it sounds. Now you realize a lot of the things that people are getting upset about today are gonna seem just as ridiculous 50 or 100 years from now. It's really hard to get so worked up about things when you look at what people were worked up about a while ago.
Steve: It's funny. And by the same token, there are a few lexical items that are so entrenched as quote unquote wrong. They will probably never change. I don't know if you've talked to our colleague Kory Stamper on your —
Mignon: Yeah. She's been a guest.
Steve: Yeah. So, I'm sure the two of you spoke about the word "irregardless" at some point.
Mignon: I’m not sure she did, cause she was on my Words of the Year show, so we were kind of limited in topic.
Steve: Well, I'm guessing most of your listeners have read Kory's book Word by Word, and if they haven't, they should.
Mignon: I’ll put the link in the show notes.
Steve: Yes, thank you. And, she devotes a whole chapter to the word "irregardless" and how it just gets people worked up. It always has. And it doesn't seem like that prescription is going away anytime soon because it's one of those words people are very passionate about.
Mignon: That's a que … actually, a couple of listeners had questions around the topic of, you know, what is the difference between a changing usage and something that's just wrong? You know, like, is "a lot" ever gonna become one word because people spell it as one word? Like we consider, we definitely, we consider that an absolute error today.
"A lot" is not one word, it's two words. So many people do it, like is it gonna become okay?
Steve: It possibly might. I have a feeling it might not, because I think "a lot" is one of those, um, words that are so ingrained. You know, like my 10th grade teacher told me not to say this. If I say this, I'm a morally suspect person. You know the word "tomorrow," which used to have like a hyphen in it, "to-morrow," you know?
Changes like that happen over the decades all the time. I think "a lot" is one of those "irregardless" words where people rail against it so hard that it might be a long time before it becomes accepted. Who knows? I mean, it could be. It's just on enough people's radar that I think people, you know, there's enough purists who flip out every time they see it. I know there was a teacher in my high school who had no, um, posters or anything in his classroom except, one cardboard thing that had the word “A” on it and another one that had “lot” on it, and "A" was in one corner of the classroom and "lot" was in the other corner of the classroom.
Mignon: So, it's just more a matter of, like, how hard we've been taught that it's wrong.
Steve: I think that has a lot to do with it. I really do.
Mignon: That actually reminds me of one fascinating fact that I love about English is, um, so verbs are irregular and then they…there were a lot more irregular verbs a long time ago, and they become regular. But the more commonly we use a verb, the less likely it is to become regular because we're using it all the time and so we just keep using it the way we're using it. But something like the verb to “chide” used to be “to chode,” but then like we almost never, you know, almost never used that verb. So, like, it just … suddenly everyone started saying, “'Chided'; I guess that's what it is."
Steve: I think the past tense is “chid” or “chided.” The past participle is “chidden.”
Mignon: Yeah.
Steve: You're well chiddin? No. Um, it's funny, in the nineties when I started, it was right around the time people were uncertain. I remember in the nineties when I started working at the American Heritage Dictionary, there was a lot of discourse, whether the past tense of "dive" was "dove" or "dived."
And there's a couple other verbs that kind of were going through a transition at that time. Um, I can't remember one for the life of me, it was one of those "-ed" versus the past tense, having "u" in the middle, whatever. But those, those not as often, but you do see change in those over time.
Mignon: Yeah, that was a question. Aaron Howard had too is, you know, were there cases that caused a lot of consternation among the staff? You know, maybe, depending on what the usage panel said, or just that were tricky in general.
Steve: The staff usually didn't evince much consternation. I mean, when a “bad usage,” I'm putting in quotes, comes to light, it's something that we document and talk about rather than being aghast that, oh no, it's, you know, lexicographers are not defenders of the quote unquote “purity” of the language.
We're there to document what people are using. I think one of the benefits of electronic dictionaries is when you're not limited by space, you can put a lot more in. So that's one benefit of the move towards electronic lexicons.
Mignon: Yeah. The other nice thing is it can be updated more than once every five years.
Steve: And you can add far more information, you know, more supportive quotations. I mean one thing that the American Heritage Dictionary was especially known for was its etymology program where, you know, words, the histories of words, we would take back to Proto-Indo-European, if they were Indo-European words.
Our final etymologist, Patrick Taylor was an amazing polyglot, and did a lot of word histories going back to Proto-Semitic roots. Because he knew Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic and could, you know, reconstruct things backwards based on work he had done and work of other linguists.
And same thing with a lot of Proto-Chinese forms for a lot of East Asian words that came into the dictionary. It’s fascinating and in the teens, we were able to give more space to that, which was a really amazing thing.
Mignon: Yeah, I've never really thought about it this way before, but it's kind of tragic because as the dictionaries being online gave more space to include more and more and better information, but it also is what has hobbled the business models of all the dictionaries and made it harder to put them out.
Steve: Yeah. I mean, I used to joke, I mean, even 20 years ago when people asked me what I did, I'd say I'm a buggy whip manufacturer. And you know, sure enough, it came to pass and there are fewer and fewer dictionaries every year. On one hand, I mean, it is problematic. But on the other hand, the resources that are available to people now, um, and I'm thinking especially of compilers of information for indigenous languages, that previously there was no way to easily compile all this data, have all these tools at their hands. At the last Dictionary Society of North America conference this past spring, about a third of the papers were on indigenous languages of North America and many of them by speakers of indigenous languages. And the scholarship there is fascinating, and I really do think that the future of lexicography is headed in that direction.
Mignon: Oh, that's super interesting. So, yeah, I mean, as you said, the usage panel isn't being surveyed anymore. The results are up there now, as long as they stay there. But, you know, there isn't … I'm not really aware of anything that rivals it except for, you know, Garner's Modern English Usage, of course.
But Amir asked also, do you think the usage panels are relevant today? Like, is it as relevant today as it was 20 or 40 years ago? Or, because, you know, we have so many more dialects and, and just different attitudes toward language. Like, do we need them anymore?
Steve: It is not that there are more dialects now, it's just that there is a greater recognition that dialects have a place in society, and there's not just one way to speak "standard" American English. I think what is interesting to me and what has always been interesting to me is seeing this change in attitude over time.
And when it comes to regionalisms, we really didn't poll our usage panel. On regional English usage in that there's a, you know, a difference between are you using "contact" as a verb and and actual regional items that you would find in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with.
Mignon: So, like you wouldn't ask about, you know, in Ohio they say "the car needs washed." That’s not the kind of thing you would ask about.
Steve: No, we wouldn't because I mean, we would have a note about that. But that would, to talk about the linguistic reality of that regionalism of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Where, you know, "the car needs washed" is a perfectly grammatical, syntactically, well-formed sentence in that variety of English.
So, we would discuss that, but we wouldn't put it up to a vote because it's not really a vote-worthy thing. I mean, it's like we're not gonna…the panel wasn't set up to, you know, judge that sort of regionalism. You know, it's funny because I remember the part of the country I'm from — I grew up in Michigan — I have a past participle for the word "buy" is "boughten." You have store boughten bread, for example. I had no idea that that was considered non-standard until, you know, I started up at the dictionary. I remember going through that section of the B's and seeing that. I'm like, what do you mean? This is how people speak.
But it turns out it's just how people from my region speak. So it's always an interesting thing to see what's … and to tie it back to your original question, I think what's considered acceptable has broadened, and I don't think that's a bad thing. The goal of language is to communicate.
And if your communication is going through to your audience, you have successfully communicated. What that means to various periodicals, you know, what is your audience? You wanna speak to your audience. You wanna make sure you are clearly understood by your audience, which is why I think in-house style manuals, as any editor will tell you, are really important so that you make sure that you are speaking to your audience.
Mignon: Yeah. If you were doing the usage panel and the usage notes today, is there anything that you would do differently now?
Steve: I think the focus would continue being on … because we would have had, at this point, 55 years of data really drilling down and, and looking into the differences between then and now. In the teens, you know, we would do that with each ballot. Ask a couple questions that harken back to previous ones, and I think that would be a really interesting topic to mine. Just how attitudes have shifted over time when it comes to various locations.
Mignon: Yeah. What do you think the usage panel or the American Heritage Dictionary did especially well? Like what are you most proud of from your work there?
Steve: I really, I mentioned this earlier, I think the etymologies are second to none. The staff who worked on it over the decades were … really spent a lot of time drilling down and going way far back. So, one thing some dictionaries do that we didn't, and it's totally fine, they'd, you know, put the date of first attestation, and they would always be looking for quotations that go earlier, back in time.
And that's a great thing, and I have nothing against it. It's something that, you know, we didn't do. But what we were able to do instead was go back linguistically as far as we could, uh, to if it was a Proto-European word, how far back into Proto-European could we take it? I think our etymology program is fantastic.
I have a lot of pride in, you know, just the definitional work that we did. And I think especially as we got into the teens where a lot of dictionary companies were just pushing new, new, new, new, new words, new words, new words, new words. We were able to also supplement that with a great deal of revision to existing terminology.
For better or for worse, there were never any ads on our website, so we didn't have to, even though of course we wanted clicks and wanted people to use the website, we weren't forced to draw people to the website for the sole purpose of monetizing it. And because of that, I feel like we didn't have to focus exclusively on new words to the extent that some of our competitors did, which allowed us to, you know, spend more time working on already established terminology and refining it and bringing it up to date.
Mignon: Yeah. Now today you'd be working on games, on word games for the website.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. It's a changed landscape. I've been out of the business for five years now. A lot of my colleagues, many of whom are close friends, are still in the business and their work is amazing, and they're doing a lot of work with far smaller staffs than there used to be, and they're putting out really good work under conditions that are really tough to do. So, and I, and you know, I'm glad that they're able to do it, and it'll be interesting to see what happens 10, 20 years down the line.
Mignon: Yeah, for sure. So where can people find you online if they wanna, you know, follow you and keep up with what you're doing?
Steve: Well, um, on Twitter, X, whatever we're calling it now. I'm at @SKleinedler, s k l e i n e d l e r. I'm not on it as much as I used to be, but I'm still there somewhat. And occasionally I will chip in on linguistic and dictionary related conversations. And until the site completely explodes, I'll probably maintain a presence there.
Mignon: Okay. All right, well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes too, along with the link to David Skinner's book and the American Heritage Dictionary Tumblr account. Thank you so much, Steve, for being here today. This was really interesting.
Steve: Thank you, Mignon. It was a pleasure to be here.