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I confess my intolerance for dichotomous thinking. When it comes to red state vs. blue state politics, I'm a little bit purple. When the phonics zealots wage war against the "whole language" hordes, I stand on the 50-yard line and shake my head. In a country vs rock debate, call me rockabilly. I'm more of a Neapolitan ice cream kind of guy: give me a little vanilla, a little chocolate, a little strawberry. And when the antagonists between descriptive and prescriptive grammar stand nose to nose, I grab the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) off my shelf and hug it like a security blanket.

The AHD offers the perfect reconciliation between "you must" and "you can" thanks to a feature called the Usage Panel, a group of 200 professional users of language, who are consulted to discover their language opinions, which, of course, change over time. In simple terms, the editors of the AHD poll the panel of critics to get a sense of their preferences. Writers can then make informed judgments about choosing one word over another.

Let's take one of the battleground words between the describers and prescribers: hopefully.

No one objects to the word when it is used as a standard adverb modifying a verb: "He marched hopefully across the stage to receive his diploma." The intended meaning is "He marched with hope." But hopefully is now more often used as something called a "sentence adverb." In this function, the speaker or writer might say, "Hopefully, he marched across the stage. ..," meaning "I hope he marched across the stage." Given that possibility, it now appears that last sentence is ambiguous. We can't tell whether the student or the parent had the hope. So should you ever use hopefully as a sentence adverb? Not according to a majority of the Usage Panel:

"It might have been expected ... that the initial flurry of objections to hopefully would have subsided once the usage became well established. Instead, critics appear to have become more adamant in their opposition. In the 1969 Usage Panel survey, 44 percent of the Panel approved the usage, but this dropped to 27 percent in our 1986 survey." On the other hand, 60 percent of that panel approved the use of mercifully as a sentence adverb in: "Mercifully, the game ended before Notre Dame could add another touchdown to the lopsided score."

Guided by the Usage Panel, I find mercifully in play, but hopefully out.

In 1969, the first year of the AHD, the primary meaning for gay was still "merry" or "cheerful," and we could still sing "don we now our gay apparel" without smirking. The word as a synonym for homosexual was labeled as "slang." Behold the most recent judgment: "The word gay is now standard in its use to refer to homosexuals, in large part because it is the term that most gay people prefer in referring to themselves. Gay is distinguished from homosexual primarily by the emphasis it places on the cultural and social aspects of homosexuality as opposed to sexual practice."

I still sometimes confuse "different than" and "different from." The Usage Panel comes to the rescue: "Different from and different than are both common in British and American English ... Since the 18th century, language critics have singled out different than as incorrect, though it is well attested in the works of reputable writers. According to the traditional guidelines, from is used when the comparison is between two persons or things: My book is different from yours. Different than is more acceptably used ... where the object of comparison is expressed by a full clause: The campus is different than it was 20 years ago."

Who knew you could "vote" on grammar and usage? But that is exactly how the Usage Panel reaches a decision, a process that makes transparent the quirky human path to conventional usage.

The AHD includes several other distinctive features that make it complementary to the OED:

1. It includes marginal photos and other pictorial images that help you learn, remember and visualize a word. To test this, I opened the AHD at random to page 853, which defines words from howler to Hubel. In the right margin is a single illustration of a pair of huarache sandals: "A flat-heeled sandal with an upper of woven leather straps." This turns out to be a stroke of luck, because this Southern California footwear is one of the cool details in my favorite Beach Boys song, "Surfin' USA": "You'd seem 'em wearing their baggies, huarache sandals too, a bushy bushy blonde hairdo, Surfin' USA."

2. It includes most of the obscene words omitted by that most proper and Victorian Oxford English Dictionary. Test out the AHD by looking up your favorite naughty bits. One of mine would be booty, which appears as two separate words with different meanings and histories. Derived from a German word for "exchange," booty refers to "plunder taken from an enemy in time of war"; "goods or property seized by force or piracy"; and "a valuable prize, award, or gain." A different word derives from African American vernacular slang, probably an old version of "body": slang for "buttocks." This new knowledge may complicate forever our understanding of a "pirate's booty."

3. It includes the names of noteworthy people and places, giving it a bit of an encyclopedic feel. Just flipping through the R's, I find citations for radial symmetry, rainbow trout, Sir Walter Raleigh, artist Raphael, Rasputin, the razor-billed auk, Ronald Reagan, Red Cloud, Vanessa Redgrave, refracting telescope, Rembrandt, Renaissance, Janet Reno, the respiratory system, Paul Revere, the rhinoceros beetle, Richelieu, astronaut Sally Ride and many more.

4. It contains occasional explanatory blocks that describe interesting word histories. I have many friends from Indiana who will be interested in this one-paragraph dissertation on the mysterious origins of "Hoosier":

"We know where Hoosiers come from: Indiana. But where does the name Hoosier come from? That is less easy to answer. The origins of Hoosier are rather obscure, but the most likely possibility is that the term is an alteration of hoozer, an English dialect word recorded in ... the late 19th century and used to refer to anything unusually large ... As a nickname, Hoosier was but one of a variety of disparaging terms for the inhabitants of particular states arising in the early 19th century. Texans were called Beetheads, for example; Alabamans were Lizards; Nebraskans were Bugeaters; South Carolinians were Weasels, and Pennsylvanians were Leatherheads. People in Missouri might have had it worst of all -- they were called Pukes."

5. AHD helps writers distinguish shades of meaning among synonyms. Consider these glosses on the synonyms for the noun "effect": "An effect is produced by the action of an agent or a cause and follows it in time ... A consequence has a less sharply definable relationship to its cause ... A result is viewed as the end product of the operation of the cause ... An outcome more strongly implies finality and may suggest the operation of a cause over a relatively long period ... An upshot is a decisive result, often of the nature of a climax ... A sequel is a consequence that ensues after a lapse of time." Borrowing a strategy from the venerable OED, the AHD offers historical passages that illustrate each synonym. Cool -- and helpful.

Exercise: Using the AHD, find the answers to the following questions:

1. The word "hooker," meaning "prostitute," derives from the Civil War general Joseph Hooker, whose wild troops were known to visit brothels when they were on leave. True or false?

2. The word "host," used as a verb, goes back to Shakespeare. In 1968 only 18 percent of the Usage Panel approved of "She hosted the city's best parties," but now 53 percent think such usage is OK. True or false?

3. The Usage Panel cannot make up its collective mind on whether it is correct to begin a sentence with the word "however." True or false?

4. If you look up the term "pop art" in the AHD it will show you the image of Andy Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup Can. True or false?

 

Coming next -- Spellbound: The most embarrassing spelling mistake in journalism history.