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[T]he furor over Webster’s Third also marked the end of an era. It’s a safe bet that no new dictionary will ever incite a similar uproar, whatever it contains. The dictionary simply doesn’t have the symbolic importance it did a half-­century ago, when critics saw the Third as a capitulation to the despised culture of middlebrow, what Dwight Macdonald called the “tepid ooze of Midcult.” That was probably the last great eructation of cultural snobbery in American public life. Today’s defenders of Western culture sound their alarms just as clamorously, but they wouldn’t be so uncool as to object when a dictionary draws its words from hip-hop or the Internet: now all is legitimated under the rubric of pop culture.