The Nationalist Roots of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary / Jess McHugh in: The Paris Review

Amid the rancorous screaming matches of political discourse in 2016, a tempering voice emerged from an unlikely source: the dictionary. During the presidential election and its aftermath, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary mobilized its large social-media following to fact-check political figures who treated all language like fiction. From explaining the meaning of fact to differentiating between bigly and big league, the dictionary served as a biting challenge to the new regime, winning praise for its pithy critiques.
Merriam-Webster’s resistance to an administration steeped in nativism, however, is complicated by the dictionary’s original goal to create and preserve a monolithic American culture. Noah Webster Jr., the dictionary’s founding author, was one of the first American nationalists, and he wrote his reference books with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English—one that often existed at the expense of regional and cultural variation of any kind. ... [mehr] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/30/noah-websters-american-english/