Recently, while rummaging through The Times as I am wont to do each morning, I came upon the word “flexicon.” It jumped out at me; I liked it. It’s not a word you will find in a dictionary yet, though there are others of its ilk that you will find. “Brunch” is one and “chortle” is another.

            “Flexicon” has not caught on yet. It is a blend, born of joining parts of “flexible” and “lexicon.” Like “hullabalunacy,” which so aptly describes the clamorous noises that advertise the latest Robbins’ novel, Stoppard play, or Mel Brooks’ movie, “flexicon” would fill a void in the language; it is what a good dictionary should be called.

            William Safire used the word in an article describing the latest shenanigans of The Times’ editors as they attempt to maintain their linguistic purity in order to provide us with all the news that’s fit to print. They have a new stylebook – “The New York Times Manual for Style and Usage.”

            One might applaud The Times for recognizing the need to update their handbooks of style and usage, thus allowing their publication to embody the historical changes of the language and truly reflect the history which they record; but that is not the case. Rather than let the language have its head, so to speak, the purpose is to tether the language, to restrain change, to flaunt their better knowledge of how the language should be used. Their stylebook, for example, refused to recognize “Ms.” It also “throws a pox on ‘chairperson’ and ‘chairwoman’ and,” as they say, “much of the other feminist propaganda.”

            The impact of Women’s Lib should be felt in the language, I think. One can ignore their absurd criticism of words that include “man,” and I believe that “Ms.” Will persist as long as feminists belabor it; but it should have its day, if only to allow posterity one day to smile at the quaintness of it.

            The Times thinks of Webster’s Third Unabridged Dictionary (1962) as a “flexicon,” an obscenity which “tossed linguistic standards to the winds and allowed slang to lie down with formal English.” It is tempting to speculate about the potential offspring of such a classless mating, though I’m sure that natural selection would prevail and only the fittest progeny would survive.

            The present shenanigans are reminiscent of 1962 when The Times’ editors chose to all but ignore the New Third Edition of Webster and be guided in matters of English usage by the Second Edition published in 1934; to ignore 28 years of linguistic history; to ignore the fact that the Third based its entries on 6,000,000 citations about how the language is used as compared with 2,615,000 of the Second; to ignore the fact that the Third lists 50,000 new words as well as 50,000 new meanings for words already entered in the Second. The decision was aptly characterized by Bergen Evans when it was made: “Anyone who solemnly announces in 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense.”
          
            It requires a poet like Virginia Woolf to insist on perspective: “Words are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind…. Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them…. They do not like to have their purity or impurity discussed…. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.”

            Yes, all this hullabalunacy about flexicons is a fascinating diversion in the scheme of things.

                                        Bill Reynolds