In Gambit, Rex Stout’s 1962 mystery novel, the quirky and housebound detective Nero Wolfe sits before a fireplace on a too-small chair, “tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged.” Why? “He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language.” Able to cite “a thousand examples of its crimes,” including using infer and imply interchangeably, the detective calls it “a deliberate attempt to murder” the language.

Nero Wolfe’s lexicographical auto-da-fé reveals he’s an eccentric, but Stout was far from alone in fantasizing about committing Webster’s Third to the flames. The dictionary was positively scandalous when it appeared in September 1961: Critics said it had abandoned all standards and forfeited its role as a guardian of the English language. The battle over high standards versus relativist chaos was played out against the background of the Cold War: For some, the permissive dictionary was a Bolshevik document, its publication tantamount to passing the nuclear launch codes to Nikita Khrushchev.