SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — E. Ward Gilman, a bespectacled bear of a man who has devoted 35 years to the scholarly art of writing dictionaries, recently found himself being coached in the crasser craft of peddling them.
Use your hands, the consultant exhorted Gilman and seven other lexicographers about to begin the most ambitious book tour ever mobilized to promote a dictionary. Smile! Project! Sit up straight! Be enthusiastic! Be yourselves! And get the title right.
"Whether I'll remember everything they told me to do, I don't know," mused Gilman, director of defining for the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which is being launched this month. "Like today--I forgot to wear a necktie."
Dictionaries--those secular bibles, those gray-flannel guides to the language that defines us as human--are being mass-marketed like beer, with the help of everything from inflatable mascots to sweepstakes to sponsorships of TV quiz shows (major league sports for the pointy-headed).
Merriam-Webster approached the National Aeronautics and Space Administration about putting a dictionary in space and briefly considered having its book be the first to go bungee jumping. Rival Houghton Mifflin Co. sent a swarm of librarians, clutching its new American Heritage Dictionary, thundering up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the theme from "Rocky."
It is all part of a battle among the country's four major dictionary publishers. Their business has grown more fiercely competitive in recent years as big office supply and bookstore chains have swallowed up smaller independents and put the squeeze on publishers.
"People say: 'It seems like such a polite business,' " said Susan Leslie, who promoted everything from lipstick to Lawn Doctor before becoming marketing director at Merriam-Webster. "I say: 'Yeah, it's polite editorially, but we're rather impolite--or have been forced to become so--in a sales and marketing sense.' "
Lexicography itself is still a gentlemanly business. Dictionary editors pass their days in hushed offices that resemble university libraries. Useful job qualifications include patience, a linguistics degree and something known in German as \o7 Sprachgefuhl--\f7 a natural sensitivity for what is linguistically correct.
The work is consuming. One pronunciation editor used to plan his vacations around places whose names he did not know how to pronounce. Andy Sparks, a senior editor at Webster's New World Dictionary, counts himself among the hardy few who have read every word printed in the New Yorker for 30 years.
