Travellers observed not only the words unique to America, but also an American style of speech. In 1796 Thomas Twining noted that ‘An American speaks English with the volubility of a Frenchman’.9 British visitors frequently remarked on the strange accents and surfeit of profanity they heard there. Mencken notes that bloody and bugger have not in America been the indecent terms that they long were in Britain, and quotes Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman writing home from Maryland in 1759, who observed that visitors were forced ‘to hear obscene conceits and broad expressions, and from this there are times w[he]n no sex, no rank, no conduct can exempt you’.10 Then again, the reverse applied; prosperous Americans visiting Britain were alarmed by the noxious vulgarism of working-class Londoners and bemused by the clipped diction of their social betters.
Conscious of the potential for a fragmented America, Benjamin Franklin saw mass education as the key to achieving what he called ‘the happiness both of private families and of commonwealths’ – a united community. Beginning in the 1730s, he addressed this by developing subscription libraries, improving news services, exhorting his countrymen to build academies, suggesting social innovations such as the idea of ‘generalized reciprocity’ (summed up in the expression ‘pay it forward’), and popularizing science. Language was important in all of this: America was to be Eden, not Babel.
The early American settlers had used in the classroom textbooks published in England. Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue (1740) was, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the most widely used spelling book on both sides of the Atlantic. Its first American printing was by Franklin, and more than a hundred editions printed before 1800 have survived. The temper of Dilworth’s book is careful and boring, and generations of schoolchildren defaced the frontispiece portrait of him – a phenomenon to which Dickens alludes in Sketches by Boz. Dilworth included sentences to be transcribed by young students, and these were decidedly moralistic: ‘It is a commendable Thing for a Boy to apply his Mind to the Study of good Letters’, ‘Pride is a very remarkable Sin’, ‘Personal Merit is all a Man can call his own’, ‘Riches are like Dung, which stink in an Heap; but being spread abroad, make the Earth fruitful’.11
In time, it became clear that imported models such as Dilworth’s were inadequate. A home-grown scheme of education in English was needed. Perhaps, indeed, the very fabric of the language needed refashioning. In 1780 John Adams argued before Congress that an institution be set up ‘for refining, improving, and ascertaining the English language’. Two of the three verbs were Swift’s from nearly seventy years before; Adams pictured an American Academy. A Congressional commission scotched the idea – surely it was not the job of politicians to mandate people’s choice of language? – but the debate continued. Crucially, there was disagreement about where the national standard should be sought. In one camp were those, like Adams, who emphasized the need for linguistic independence from Britain; Adams even went so far as to suggest that a special tax be imposed on British dictionaries. In the other camp were figures such as John Pickering, who argued that English in America should be protected in order to stop it diverging from the norms of British usage.
The status of English as the language of the emergent nation was not assured. At the time of the revolution, English was the first language of rather less than half its people. Spanish and French were in wide use. In Pennsylvania the majority spoke German. Today the only speakers of Pennsylvania German are small communities of Amish and Old Order Mennonites, numbering perhaps 80,000. In the 1750s, though, Benjamin Franklin noted with alarm that English-speakers were outnumbered in that state. Unsure of the country’s linguistic future, Thomas Jefferson advised his daughters to become skilled in languages besides English. Benjamin Rush, like Jefferson and Adams a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, urged a full embrace of multilingualism. Politicians stressed the importance of liberty: to insist on the primacy of English was exactly the kind of monarchical attitude that the revolutionaries had fought to shrug off. Beginning in the 1790s, America’s silver coins bore the motto ‘E pluribus unum’ – ‘Out of many, one’ – which suggested political unity while also acknowledging the diversity of the elements from which this unity was being assembled.
In practice, that diversity was often treated in cavalier fashion. The nineteenth-century expansion of the United States was achieved through land purchases but also through war. It is easy to speak briskly of the purchase of the Louisiana territory from the French and much later of Alaska from the Russian Empire, the incursions into Florida, the cascade of westward settlement into Oregon, the annexing of Texas, and the acquisition of land from Mexico, without considering the impact of such events on the people whose homes lay in these territories. Easy, furthermore, to acknowledge but not scrutinize the agonies involved in the seizure of Indian lands and the large-scale importation of slaves. Tellingly, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was from 1824 to 1849 part of the government’s Department of War, and Andrew Jackson, the seventh President, in 1830 began a policy known as ‘Indian removal’. The term ‘Manifest Destiny’, coined by John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review in 1845, memorably suggests the expansionists’ sense of entitlement. The article that announced it spoke of Mexico as an ‘imbecile’, and triumphantly declared that annexing Texas and California was the fulfilment of a grand scheme to ‘overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. Victory was inevitable: ‘The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle.’12
Amid the expansion of the Union, English was never accorded official status. Instead it fell to individuals to reinforce its position. The most significant player was Noah Webster, an indefatigable campaigner for a national language – an American English that would exemplify American independence. For Webster, a man as patriotic as he was bookish, the canonization of American English also promised to recapture the spirit of excellence that he felt English had lost during the previous century or so of fashion and foppery.
Webster was a descendant of William Bradford, who had governed the Plymouth Colony from 1621 to 1651, and of John Webster, who had briefly governed Connecticut in the 1650s. Nonetheless, he saw himself as an example of the pious striver who rises to fame despite humble beginnings. This was not grossly inaccurate – for instance, his father had needed to mortgage the family farm to pay for him to be prepared by a tutor for his entrance to Yale – but Webster cultivated fine myths about himself. A committed Anglophobe, he insisted that his main intention was to promote the honour of his own country. His writings suggest that he was at least as eager to promote himself. In March 1784 he wrote to Samuel Adams, then recognized as one of America’s chief political visionaries, opening his letter with the words: ‘The importance of this communication will, I flatter myself, be sufficient apology for the freedom I take of writing to a gentleman with whom I have not the honor of an acquaintance’.13
The desire to outstrip other language experts galvanized Webster. He wanted to improve on the efforts of Samuel Johnson, Lindley Murray and Thomas Dilworth. Murray above all was a goad: Webster’s contempt for him and conviction that Murray was forever stealing his ideas inspired him to ever more fastidious exertions, which bordered on the paranoid. He published essays and pamphlets denouncing Murray – some of them pseudonymous, and repetitive – as well as placing advertisements in newspapers to promote his own efforts, giving his books to schools, using agents to act for him, and energetically delivering public lectures in his apparently squeaky voice.14
But first Webster smacked down Dilworth. Although his A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783–5) was little more than a reworking of Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue, Webster made a point of trashing Dilworth’s book, damning it as ‘most imperfect’ and full of ‘monstrous absurdities’. Dilworth’s
exposition of grammar, he claimed, was ‘worse than none’ and ‘calculated to lead into errour’. ‘The only circumstance that renders it tolerably harmless, is that it is very little used and still less understood.’ Dilworth’s vice is to found his grammar ‘entirely upon the principles of the Latin language’.15
In his numerous subsequent publications Webster rammed home what he considered his revolutionary credentials. His Dissertations on the English Language, published in the year of the French Revolution and dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, was a collection of the lectures he gave during a thirteen-month tour of his country in 1785 and ’86. Earnest and occasionally amusing, it reflected his wide knowledge of existing theories and his capacity for pugnacious controversy. Webster trumpeted his democratic philosophy, declaring that ‘The general practice of a nation is the rule of propriety’.16 He cast himself as a heroic figure, a defender of his people’s rights, massively different from the British philologists who doled out laws in the manner of tyrants. ‘The people are right,’ he averred, and ‘common practice is generally defensible’.17 Yet Webster was no meek describer of American usage; he had his own clear ideas, coloured by his New England background, of how it should be codified.
Webster was deeply concerned with spelling. He set out the basics in A Grammatical Institute, the first part of which was issued in a revised edition, with the catchier title The American Spelling Book, in 1787. This became known as the ‘Blue-Backed Speller’, on account of its blue cover. Over the next forty years, roughly ten million copies of it were printed; only the Bible sold in comparable quantities, and eventually its sales totalled 100 million. Webster presented his ideas for reform in an appendix to his Dissertations, proposing to do away with superfluous or silent letters – the a in bread, the i in friend – and amend spellings to clarify pronunciation – key becoming kee, believe becoming beleev, and arkitecture superseding architecture, for example. He preferred laf to laugh, tuf to tough, and blud to blood. Words derived from French should lose their French look: oblique, for instance, should be obleek, and machine should be masheen.18 Later, he suggested other revised spellings, including ieland instead of island (the latter was ‘an absurd compound … found only in books’) and bridegoom, which was preferable to bridegroom (‘a gross corruption or blunder’) on the grounds that the Saxon root was brydguma, a compound of the words for ‘bride’ and ‘man’.
Many of Webster’s other modifications were taken up. He was unhappy to see English words ‘clothed with the French livery’ and defiled with superfluous letters. It is thanks to Webster that users of English no longer write public with a k at the end, are consistent in ending ‘agent substantives’ such as tailor, conqueror, donor or censor with -or rather than -our (exceptions are saviour and the comparatively little-used paviour), write cider rather than cyder, and tend to prefer connection to connexion. Among the spellings he introduced that have not caught on outside North America but have become standard there are ax, jewelry and theater. He can also be credited with the well-known American preference for color, odor, humor and labor. His quirkier ideas notwithstanding, Webster has to rank as one of the most successful reformers of spelling.
Webster spent most of his adult life studying language and preaching about it. The culmination of this was his two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. Building on the earlier A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), in which he had recorded 5,000 words undocumented in existing dictionaries, his American Dictionary cemented his reformed spellings. It also represented his attempt once and for all to supersede the authority of Dr Johnson. The Englishman’s writings, and his Dictionary especially, were ubiquitous in America by the end of the eighteenth century, and doubtless quite a few of those who consulted the Dictionary noticed the absence of the words America and American. Whereas Webster held Murray and Dilworth in contempt, he had respect for Johnson. But he was at pains to replace Johnson’s vision of English with his own American vision.
Achieving this was less a matter of eradicating all trace of Johnson than of amending and expanding his efforts. So, Webster offered detailed definitions, but some of these were lifted straight from Johnson, and, although a smattering of his illustrative quotations came from books by American authors, he mainly followed Johnson’s selection of authors. Like Johnson, he imbued his dictionary with morality. His particular brand of Christianity was strongly in evidence, as it was five years later when he published a translation of the Bible, principally notable because of his decision to expunge ‘vulgarities’: he removed the words ‘womb’ and ‘teat’, altered ‘fornication’ to ‘lewdness’, and replaced ‘give suck’ with ‘nourish’.
An American Dictionary of the English Language was not an immediate success. At $20 it was beyond the reach of many who would have liked to own it. Soon, too, there came a rival publication. This was the work of Joseph Worcester, a native of New Hampshire who had assisted with the production of Webster’s dictionary and had gone on to publish an abridgement of it, before in 1830 producing his own A Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language. Aimed mainly at schoolchildren, it was notable for its careful guide to how words should be sounded; unlike Webster, who simply favoured the prevailing style of New England, Worcester recognized variations in pronunciation. He had many supporters, because he was less preoccupied with etymology, provided nicely condensed definitions, and seemed more moderate and less prescriptive. Improved versions of the 1830 dictionary followed in 1846 and 1860. The former defined over 83,000 words, which was 13,000 more than Webster; the 1860 dictionary defined 104,000. Moreover, Worcester was scrupulous about acknowledging his debts to the many lexicographers who had preceded him. Others were more relaxed about such matters: one devious London publisher, Henry Bohn, went so far as to publish Worcester’s dictionary while presenting it on the title page as ‘compiled from the materials of Noah Webster’ and printing on the spine both names – with Webster’s first.
When Noah Webster died in 1843, the Springfield firm of George and Charles Merriam took over the Webster brand, determined to keep it alive. The success of Worcester inspired them to bring out updated versions of An American Dictionary of the English Language. The competition was good for the public: better dictionaries were produced. In 1864 an extensively revised edition of Webster by a German philologist, Carl Mahn, included 3,000 pictorial illustrations. By then Worcester was eighty: there was little chance of his trumping this new work, and when he died the following year the victory for Webster’s camp was sealed. The Webster dictionary of 1864 was very different from the one presented in 1828. But it preserved his name, while Worcester’s faded into obscurity.
Although An American Dictionary of the English Language ranks as Webster’s most impressive achievement, his key statements regarding his mission were made early in his career. In A Grammatical Institute he declared, ‘This country must in some future time, be as distinguished by the superiority of her literary improvements, as she is already by the liberality of her civil and ecclesiastical constitutions.’ He condemned Europe as ‘grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny’, and argued that ‘It is the business of Americans to select the wisdom of all nations, as the basis of her constitutions … [and] to diffuse an uniformity and purity of language, – to add superiour dignity to this infant Empire and to human nature.’19 In the Dissertations Webster stated, ‘As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.’20 This image of a parent-child relationship was an important part of the rhetoric of the American revolution: the child was acting to throw off the control of a despotic parent, but, once this was achieved, the self-styled Sons of Liberty recast themselves as Founding Fathers.
In his dictionary Webster defines Americanism as
‘an American idiom’. Before that, though, he identifies what he takes to be its primary sense: ‘The love which American citizens have to their own country, or the preference of its interests.’ Webster’s most enduring achievement was to tighten the connection between the English language and ‘American-ness’. He stimulated visions of this connection, too. Emily Dickinson claimed that her copy of An American Dictionary of the English Language was for a long time her only companion, and was impressed by the idea that the words she found there were bundles of energy, as well as by Webster’s sense that verbs were the great drivers of self-expression. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Webster’s dictionary is rather differently treated. It is described as an ‘ark’, but the narrator states that when it has been necessary to consult a dictionary ‘I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.’
The Language Wars Page 14