To the modern ear, this sounds like elitism, but at the time the critics of Webster's Third included not only writers such as Dwight Macdonald and Wilson Follett, but also the popular novelist Rex Stout (of Nero Wolfe fame), who had the detective feed his Third to the fire a page at a time while declaring it 'subversive and intolerably offensive.' As Nunberg points out, it is hard to imagine a ne