"The Story of Ain't," by David Skinner Illustration by Rex Bonomelli Dictionary making has always been a much misunderstood art. The lexicographer's job is to capture the language as people use it and understand it. But most people who go to a dictionary don't care about common usage. They want to know what's right. This conflict is at the heart of "The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published." David Skinner, the editor of Humanities magazine, revisits the brouhaha that greeted the most misunderstood dictionary of all time, Webster's Third New International. The year was 1961, and the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Mass., long a symbol of donnish respectability, had just announced a successor to the celebrated but rapidly aging dictionary popularly known as Webster's Second, a 17-pound behemoth first published in 1934. It was about time. A lot had happened to English since the early "30s, including a world war and most of the New Deal. Also television, the civil rights movement, super­highways, Dr. Spock, rock "n" roll, the Bomb, rocket science, the cold war, Superman and the Kinsey reports. New words - and new meanings of old ones - were everywhere, like "astronaut," "beatnik," "den mother" and "satellite." Into Webster's Third they went. New editions were nothing out of the ordinary. Merriam had been regularly overhauling its big "unabridged" dictionaries since the 19th century. But the response to Webster's Third was like nothing the publisher had ever seen. The press more or less ripped it to shreds. News articles, reviews and editorials excoriated the dictionary and heaped abuse on its editor in chief, Philip Gove. Even the literati piled on, elevating the old Webster's Second to sainthood. Why the uproar? This book's title hints at one of the reasons. Merriam hired a public relations firm to make sure the new dictionary got the attention it deserved. Well, attention it got. A tone-deaf and error-riddled press release breathlessly announced that " "ain't" gets official recognition at last." This was a colossal blunder. Far from endorsing "ain't," Webster's Third said it was "disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech." And the word was not new to lexicography, as the press release implied. It had appeared in many dictionaries before, including Webster's Second. But the damage was done. "By blurring the distinction between a word's appearance in the dictionary and its status as standard English," Skinner writes, "the press release invited critics to blame Webster's Third for "recognizing" every last silly, awkward, dialectal, jargonish or slang word it provided an entry for." Webster's Third did have admirers in the popular press, in scholarly journals and in British newspapers. But the critics - notably Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker and an apoplectic Wilson Follett in The Atlantic - simply outshouted the defense. Skinner ably dissects the criticism to reveal a long litany of mistakes. Journalists combed the dictionary for hot-button words to savage, but many of the offenders (like "orientate," "finalize," "irregardless" and "normalcy") weren't new. The critics, including some from this newspaper, could have found them in their beloved Webster's Second if they'd bothered to look. Instead, they wailed that the fortress had fallen to the barbarians. Often, writers "simply failed to examine the entries they had complained about," Skinner says. For example, Webster's Third, like Webster's Second, used cross-references, printed in small capital letters, for purposes of comparison. So the entry for "infer" said "compare IMPLY." But critics misinterpreted these cross-­references as meaning that pairs like "imply" and "infer," "enormity" and "enormousness" were now synonyms. Patricia T. O'Conner's books on language include "Woe Is I" and, most recently, "Origins of the Specious," written with Stewart Kellerman. They blog about language at Grammarphobia.com.