Books: Surveying The State of the Lingo THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

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The tidal shifts in public attitudes that have taken place in the 21 years between the two Random House editions have left their mark. Novels, films and even White House tapes have brought expletives into more common currency, so that terms are now used at cocktail parties that once might have shocked a longshoreman. RHD-I listed only the lesser of the two most familiar four- letter words. RHD-II adds the ultimate one. At the same time, RHD-II is, compared with its predecessor, a monument to feminist consciousness-raising. Mankind never appears in its definitions where people is meant, nor is anyone of unknown gender ever a he. Its manual of style, at the back, exhorts the reader to "use gender-neutral terms wherever possible."

RHD-I happened to debut in the midst of the fiercest lexicographical debate of the century. Webster's third edition had appeared five years earlier and howls of protest were still resounding. Webster's editors, in the name of scientific objectivity, had largely abandoned the role assumed by dictionary makers since Dr. Johnson's day: serving as a guide to usage and attaching warning labels such as colloquial, erroneous and illiterate to words that deserve inclusion but not endorsement. To Philip Gove, Webster's then editor in chief, such discriminations were "artificial notions of correctness or superiority," and he wanted no part of them. A dictionary, he wrote, "must be descriptive and not prescriptive." In this he spoke for the dominant school of modern linguistics, which abhors the very idea of setting standards as snobbish, authoritarian and downright undemocratic. Gove's approach led, in one notorious example, to Webster's assuring readers that ain't was "used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers."

One immediate appeal of RHD-I was that it aimed at what its editor in chief, Jess Stein, described as "a linguistically sound middle course." It too was descriptive, but one of the things it took care to describe was "the attitudes of society toward particular words or expressions." Ain't, in the dictionary's no-nonsense view, was to be "shunned by all who prefer to avoid being considered illiterate."

With RHD-II, unfortunately, that middle course appears to be swerving back toward Webster's. The new dictionary sees words against the background of "standard English," but its definition of standard is governed by majority rule. It acknowledges disputes where they exist, but it refuses to legislate usage. Hence where RHD-I drew a distinction between disinterested (impartial) and uninterested (indifferent), RHD-II smudges the line: "many object," it concedes, but the use of disinterested to cover both meanings is "well established." Similarly, RHD-II is more lax than its forerunner in allowing such dubious usages as transpire to mean occur (rather than emit), and fortuitous to mean happening by lucky chance (rather than at random). Only when an embattled meaning has enough vociferous supporters does RHD-II back off, as in the case of infer. It accepts the word both in its regular meaning (draw a conclusion) and as a synonym for imply (suggest), but also grants that the distinction between the two words "is widely observed."