There are many bitter feuds and rivalries in history: Hatfields and McCoys, Yankees and Red Sox, Playstation vs Xbox vs Nintendo, Taylor Swift and Kanye. All of these are playground squabblings compared to the holy war between lexicographic prescriptivists, who believe a dictionary should describe how one should write, and lexicographic descriptivists, who believe that a dictionary should catalog how people actually use words. Perhaps the bitterest battle in this war is the 1961 Webster's Third New International Dictionary. David Foster Wallace decried the slipshod mediocrity of the Third in one of his essays written 40 years after the thing was published. Supreme Court Justice Antonio Scalia's official portrait has him resting his hand on the Second Edition, before the philistines ruined English.

The Story of Ain't is a cultural history of Webster's Third. "Ain't" was one word to get a definition, and served as the first shot fired over the role of the new dictionary. I get the sense of publisher muddling in the title. To tell the story, Skinner loops through the whole early 20th century culture of letters, as America shook off the lingering vestiges of an anglophile and Classics oriented sensibility towards words, and found a new jazzy vernacular, rooted in new media like radio and TV, and the new sciences and technologies of the transformative period bookended by the Jazz Age and the Space Age.

Skinner's book wanders at the start, eventually finding a protagonist in Webster editor Philip Gove, and antagonist in literary critic Dwight MacDonald. Along the way is the emergence of linguistics as a field, educational reform, political movements, the Second World War, and an attempted corporate take-over. The book is a little scattershot, but manages to make this story almost thrilling.