![]() Throughout the twentieth century, as authors such as John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston made dialect into the fodder for literature, the dictionary reflected the blurring of the lines between high and low culture. To display the seventeen-pound tome in one’s home was in and of itself a type of cultural cachet.Īs time went on, the dictionary came to more closely capture language as it was spoken. The dictionary functioned as a vehicle for literacy and cultivation-as well as the social mobility that those things could bring to the reader. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, dictionaries continued to serve as a prime tool for education, including encyclopedic information that extended far beyond word definitions. It referred to itself as a “supreme authority” and as such took on the same kind of haughty tone. The 1934 edition was more than eight times as big as Webster’s first unabridged dictionary, clocking in at six hundred thousand entries and weighing seventeen pounds. For example, the 1934 Webster’s Dictionary defined the word “Apache” as “nomads, of warlike disposition and relatively low culture.” The dictionary did not just define things as they were it defined them as how a ruling faction of Americans felt about them or understood them to be. Where Webster had drawn on his Christian and nationalist leanings to pass judgment on words surrounding God and government, the authors of the subsequent dictionaries continued to shape the American psyche with definitions that were less than objective. ![]() Over the years that followed, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary continued to serve as a text that both invented and reinforced American cultural beliefs and norms. But more than even the writings of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, Noah Webster’s ideas were made accessible to the public at large, put in the hands of nearly every young American in the nineteenth century to be read and reread until they were committed to memory. The lexicographer was of course not the only one to maintain and express these principles. The idea that America was a new experiment capable of surpassing Europe, the notion of a nationalism based on uniformity, the belief that the United States was a sort of country on a hill-Webster cemented and spread these ideas through the building blocks of language itself. He shaped the underpinnings not only of American education and language standardization but also of the nation as a whole. Even those Americans who have never read his work or heard his name are still bearers of his legacy. Noah Webster’s influence reached far beyond the pages of the dictionary or the speller.
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