Behind the Scenes

Editor’s Note: My brain is weird. I love it so much.

Today, I was going to deconstruct the Trolley Problem. See, I hate the Trolley Problem. There are different versions of it, and each time I hear it, it’s told a different way to make the proposed problem sound like it is constructed in such a way that you could literally find yourself in a scenario in which you must pick between two choices, each of which will kill someone but you have to decide who.

The gist: you find yourself at the switch of a trolley that is both a) incapable of stopping and b) headed toward a group of people who for some reason can’t avoid the trolley unless you pull the switch that would divert the trolley to the other track upon which only one person is inexplicably affixed, adhered, tied, or otherwise irreversibly located.

It’s so stupid. Why must we decide to intervene only at the last possible point? Why aren’t we checking the brakes more consistently or clearing the tracks or keeping an eye out for psychopathic scenario constructers or checking in on our psychopathic scenario-constructing neighbors to see why they’re fantasizing about tying people to trolley tracks? And why are we respecting the authority of the creators of these scenarios or the fictional ones in charge of these fictional setups? I find it mildly entertaining from a moral conjecture standpoint but wildly irritating from a practical one. Make the situation better earlier than this, dammit! (Which is wild for me, a chronic procrastinator and Hamlet-level moral paralysis sufferer to think.)

So, in researching this, I stumbled upon the Merriam-Webster entry about the Trolley Problem. It’s delightful and rich, and I highly recommend reading it for an overview of said problematic trolley.

So then I got to thinking of how I could introduce this post with a focus on how much I love M-W.com and all their social media accounts and features and insight and the wonder they bring to something as seemingly boring as a dictionary.

So then I got to thinking about this Paul Harvey, The Rest of the Story, episode about Noah Webster completing his dictionary. I was pretty young, I think, when I heard it. I’ve never heard it again.

So then I got to thinking I could probably find a recording of that episode somewhere online because the Internet is everything. I did not find it. The Internet sucks.

So . . . yeah, then I got to thinking I should just look up the story of how Noah Webster published his dictionary. And then the Internet came through for me in a big way . . . in the form of a journal entry. A hardcore, academic journal, showing up on my screen like I’m reading a microfiche. The kind of journal where the footnotes take up as much space on the page with citations as the main copy above it.

It was a beautiful article about how wildly and widely Americans hated the fact Noah Webster was setting out to create a dictionary of the American language, and the volume of vitriol published in American newspapers (the social media of their age . . . it’s really fun to read) about it.

The story of Noah Webster is amazing. His career had two bookends. The first was in 1783 when he published his Grammatical Institute, of the English Language . . . Part I, which would later become popularly (and more palatably) known as the American Spelling Book. To call the book popular is to call the sky large. It sold one million copies in just two decades (when the total US population was 6 million). By the time it faded from popularity (at the next turn of the century) it had sold an estimated 70 million copies. It was a classroom standard. But America seemed to find his influence threatening, because when, in 1801, he announced that he was commencing work on what would become the second popular bookend to his career, A Dictionary of the American Language (a two-volume work which would be published at long last in 1828), his critics went bonkers. Here’s one of my favorite critiques of his boisterous plans to differentiate the American language from her British mother:

People accused Webster of vulgar perversions, horrible irregularity, subtle poison, and illiterate and pernicious intentions. How astonishing that the bedrock work of the American vernacular as we know it was fought tooth and nail by a public who clung to the roots of their language even after spilling their blood to free themselves from its homeland. They opposed the adoption and recognition of regional dialects and lexicons. This was a time when conservative Americans used the word innovation as a slur in much the same way their stodgy descendants use woke. And, I kid you not, they even derided Webster for his of pronouns.

(The details of the above narrative were taken from: Tim Cassedy. “‘A Dictionary Which We Do Not Want’: Defining America against Noah, 1783–1810.” The William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2014): 229–54. https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.71.2.0229.)

I was so struck by the sensitivity surrounding linguistics and the importance inherent in language during that era. It’s also just kind of hilarious that editorials and letters to the editor look so much like social media commentary today. Everything old is new again.

So . . . THEN I got to thinking about how my brain threw the switch on the Trolley Problem problem, sending today’s edition careening over the helpless topic to save the published lives of the eight other ideas my brain wanted to survive.

Goodbye, Trolley Problem deconstructive discourse. You died a hero.